This dissertation articulates the Federal Republic of Germany’s critical role in establishing and sustaining the modern multinational European aviation sector. It demonstrates how Bonn employed its 1959 acquisition of the Lockheed F-104G Starfighter combat aircraft to take advantage of the Eisenhower administration’s efforts to reduce the US military presence in Europe and achieve strategic goals of military, political, and economic primacy within NATO through multinational cooperation and consortium building. In fostering the European Starfighter consortiums and their successors, West Germany embraced a leadership role that saw it build one of NATO’s largest air forces and become a primary political and economic driver of the continent’s multinational military-aviation projects. This dissertation is predicated on intensive archival research conducted in Germany, Belgium, and the United States. This work employs economic, political, and military historical lenses of analysis to argue that the Starfighter’s legacy represents a long-term success that allowed the Federal Republic to leverage a role of normalized leadership within a decade of joining NATO, boost its moribund aviation sector, and take a leading role in contemporary multinational aviation concerns such as the Panavia Tornado, Eurofighter Typhoon, and Airbus Space and Defense. / History

Since 1991, NATO has played a prominent role in peacekeeping and peace enforcement in the Balkans and Afghanistan. Despite NATO’s role in peacekeeping, there is little literature that compares the efficacy of NATO and UN peace enforcement operations. However, some existing literature suggests that NATO peacekeepers should be able to use coercion more effectively than UN peacekeepers, whereas UN peacekeepers should be to use inducement and persuasion more effectively than NATO peacekeepers. This paper uses a small-N most similar case design and the process tracing method to investigate how effective NATO peace enforcement is at reducing war intensity compared to UN peace enforcement. This paper also studies how NATO and UN peacekeepers use coercion, inducement and persuasion to reduce war intensity during peace enforcement operations. Based on a case study comparing the NATO IFOR operation in Bosnia to the UN UNOSOM II operation Somalia, this paper finds that NATO peace enforcement operations reduce war intensity to a greater degree than UN peace enforcement operations. Furthermore, this paper also finds that NATO peacekeepers use coercion, inducement and persuasion more effectively than UN peacekeepers.

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Climate change is increasingly recognised as a threat to security by having implications on national defence and human wellbeing. Due to the transnational nature of climate change and its security implications, intergovernmental organisations (IGO:s) have become prominent actors in addressing such risks. However, little is known about the practical management of climate security implications within IGO:s and in particular to what extent policymakers fromdifferent organisations partake in integrated governance. Thus, to contribute to this research gap, my study aims to assess the potential for integrated governance. More specifically, the integration across the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU) is examined, as these are key actors within the international community which have established an agenda addressing climate security risks. The study is a content analysis of policy documents from each IGO. I investigated the potential for integrated governance by using an analytical scheme that examines preconditions, targets of policy actions and efforts of cross community interactions. The results indicate that there is potential for integrated governance between NATO and the EU and that policy makers from these IGO:s acknowledge the importance of one another in the management of climate security risks. Taken together, these results contribute to new insights on climate security governance by examining the current relevance of integration and by identifying areas for further cooperation.

After the Cold War ended, the process of nuclear disarmament began to stagnate and in recent years there are signs of backsliding. Efforts to revive the disarmament regime over decades culminated with the drafting and ratification of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in 2017 and 2021 respectively, much to the dismay of nuclear weapons states. The U.S., Britain, and France have declared their dismissal of the treaty while subscribing to the disarmament regime as established by the Non-proliferation Treaty of 1970.  The Western nuclear powers typically channel their opposition through NATO, and this thesis will first look at NATO’s legal arguments and as the strategy of nuclear deterrence which is fundamental to their defensive strategy. I will then investigate NATO discourse as it pertains to nuclear weapon strategy as a constituent of its subjectivity and intentionality. In other words, what it is like to “be” NATO, and in so doing understand why it acts in opposition to a goal it already pursues.  This is relevant to IR in that it explores an alterative manner in which to understand social structures while adhering to research designs typically ascribes to the “lower” unit of analysis of individuals.

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In many aspects, political theory forms a subjective structure of this abstract science. Perhaps, it is due to the fact that unlike natural sciences or mathematics, social sciences often lack the privilege of testing the theories in absolute and unadulterated conditions. Nonetheless, such nature of the science allows for a certain degree of flexibility, when applying political theories to real-world phenomena. Alliances and coalitions in international relations form the backbone of the theory, concerning IR scholars with two main questions: Why do alliances and coalitions form? And, what keeps alliances and coalitions together? As the core of my research, I examined NATO, as the most prominent and long-lasting alliance of our time, through the prism of alliance formation and cohesion theory introduced by George Liska. In particular, I explored the evolution of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization over the term of its existence, and sought to determine whether Liska's principles still apply to the contemporary situation, and in particular, how may the variables have altered the application of this scholar's theory to our future understanding of alliances. In its essence, this is a comparative study of the same alliance during the different stages of its existence. In particular, the comparison dissects such aspects of alliance theory as alignment, alliance formation, efficacy, and reasons for possible dissolution. As a result, the study led to a conclusion, that despite the permutations around and within NATO, the basic realist principles that may explain the mechanism of this alliance's formation and cohesion still apply to the contemporary organization.

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“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” ― Albert Einstein Today we live in very interesting times for researchers but at the same time very dangerous for the whole human existence and our planet. Today we mostly consume information from big news companies controlled by huge corporations whose actions threaten the population’s misleading due to the simplified and one-sided narratives. Unfortunately, most of them are becoming very mainstream and even propagandistic. Nowadays it can be said not only about traditionally propagandist Russian ones but also about previously rather neutral and quite independent media in the USA, EU, and other Western countries. Today’s mainstream media outlets more and more often provide us (news consumers) with simplified and not objective information which is often based on somebody’s opinion-based evaluations or judgments and less on original data and documents. This extremely dangerous tendency in the modern world should be researched and analyzed to prevent further backsliding into a militaristic and war-oriented agenda and propaganda.  We already live in extremely dangerous times according to the doomsday clock which was established by the father of nuclear weapons Albert Einstein. The world is currently 90 seconds apart from Armageddon. It is the closest it has ever been. To prevent misleading and understand the full complexity of the problems we face today we must investigate the primary sources such as original documents of post-Cold War in order to follow the sequence of events that led us to the new ongoing Cold War 2.0. Only by doing so can it be possible to get a more complex but completer and more logical picture of today’s reality as well as to understand how those reasons, events, and people listed in this thesis led us to the current state of unprecedented crisis. Everything has a reason, thus those prerequisites will be analyzed and discovered with the aim of understanding how the soft, smart, and hard powers with the combination of a realist theory have influenced post-Cold War policies and developments which led humanity to the verge of a nuclear catastrophe once again but with even more dangerous and unpredictable variables than couple decades before. Regardless of all the information presented in this thesis, the Russian war in Ukraine is criminal and has no justification as well as those responsible individuals.

This thesis aims to understand how Sweden managed to renounce its long-held military non-alignment policy and identity to join the military alliance NATO in the aftermath of Russia`s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In order to find out how Sweden achieved this policy shift the thesis builds on social constructivism and studies on ontological security that focuses on the security of identities and adopts the case study method. To answer the research question, the ontological security maximization framework -which presents two complementary strategies that agents must achieve to be able to undertake change-making action- is applied to the selected speeches of Magdalena Andersson, Peter Hultqvist, and Ann Linde, the three leading Swedish politicians that were involved in the decision-making process of the policy change. Regarding the first strategy, the strategy of being, eight distinct identity-signifiers that enhance the Swedish self-esteem and ensure biographical continuity have been identified in the Swedish narrative. When it comes to the second strategy, the strategy of doing, the action “joining NATO” is evaluated positively in three different ways and this was done in a way that consolidates the strategy of being. Furthermore, by addressing the obstacles optimistically- most notably the issue with Türkiye- the three politicians have successfully maximised the Swedish ontological security, thus enabling the initiation of this fundamental policy change.