The paper introduced the conceptual framework of my PhD and provided an overview of my early empirical findings, arguing that current attempts to green defence in NATO and the EU appear to reproduce assumptions that limit how environmental harm can be understood and addressed, as well as what kinds of action can be considered possible.

The Empirical Puzzle: Integrating Climate Into Defence

There is growing acknowledgement that, as the rest of the world transitions to greener technologies, defence has a carbon problem. However, the environmental harms of defence – its ‘bootprint’ – have gone largely overlooked and have avoided attention in high-level discussions.

The EU has attempted to address this oversight by publishing the Climate Change and Defence Roadmap in 2020, which recommends a series of concrete short-, medium-, and long-term measures to address climate change and the nexus between defence, climate, and security, committing the Union to making military operations greener. Similarly, NATO introduced its Climate Change and Security Action Plan in 2021, which aims to advance the Alliance’s climate agenda around awareness, adaptation, mitigation, and outreach.

These efforts signal a shift toward a more environmentally conscious policy approach and demonstrate a policy-level recognition that defence contributes to environmental harm. However, critics have labelled the integration of climate change into defence as greenwashing, with the defence sector often portraying itself as green while still contributing to environmental damage. This is often linked to the military-industrial complex, the prioritisation of military effectiveness over sustainability, and the way militarised knowledge can act as a barrier to systemic change.

These criticisms also apply to the Roadmap and Action Plan. However, the processes that produced these policy frameworks remain under-researched, and these decision-making processes are where ideas and assumptions about greening defence are perpetuated and institutionalised.

Presenting My Research: Starting to Deconstruct the Roadmap and Action Plan

To examine approaches to policymaking and the emergence of the Roadmap and Action Plan, I analyse three dimensions of the policymaking processes developed from my early empirical research and conceptual framework. I presented these three dimensions at the conference to demonstrate how they can be applied to the Roadmap and Action Plan:

1. Plurality and perspectivity:

To unpack who was involved in developing the Action Plan and Roadmap and assess whether established or dominant understandings of green defence took precedence.

2. Assumptions about predictability and linearity:

To question linear, rationalist approaches that assume political problems, in this case environmental ones, can be known, modelled and managed predictably.

3. The humans-nature relationship:

To analyse whether defence doctrines value ecosystems only insofar as they serve military and operational efficiency.

Presenting this research was a great experience, and I received insightful comments and feedback that will be valuable as I move into the next stage of the research and my PhD.

Overall: A Fantastic Week

The Annual Conference was a wonderful three days of thoughtful academic exchange, building new connections in European studies and, as a PhD researcher, a key opportunity to develop skills important for career development.

In addition to presenting my research, I attended the UACES Graduate Forum Doctoral Training Academy (DTA). The DTA was organised around topics tailored towards PhD researchers and early careers, such as publishing, EDI, leadership in academia, and career development. This was a great experience, where I had the opportunity to engage with experienced academics, meet other PhD researchers, and (most importantly) make new friends! The Graduate Forum also organised evening social events, which encouraged socialising, relaxing after the conference, and exploring Prague.

Overall, I had a fantastic week, and I’m very much looking forward to hopefully attending the UACES Annual Conference again in future!

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This series was made possible by the UACES Microgrant Initiative. You can learn more about the Microgrants here: https://www.uaces.org/funding

I arrived at UACES 2026 after a year of developing new research ideas, applying for postdocs, and generally trying to work out what comes next after the PhD. Wearing several hats at the conference, as a presenter, organiser and convenor, made the experience especially immersive: somehow chaotic, but wonderful. It was a great experience that felt deeply meaningful on so many levels.

This year also marked a big first: we decided to hold our Doctoral Training Academy, an event offering training opportunities for early-career researchers, right before the Annual Conference welcome drinks on Sunday afternoon. With this event, we wanted to give participants the chance to interact with experienced professionals, learn more about publishing, and ask the questions they might not always feel comfortable asking elsewhere. Most importantly, we wanted to foster a sense of community among Graduate Forum members and help them meet and get to know each other before the Annual Conference.

When we started planning our Doctoral Training Academy, we wanted to focus on some of the hardest parts of the academic experience: publishing and networking. Through UACES’s existing network, we brought together a panel representing different sides of academic publishing across European Studies: JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, Contemporary European Politics (CEP), and the Contemporary European Studies book series. Our session started with the question, “What does it take to turn an idea into a publication?” We asked all our editors, and they said there is no single answer. It really depends on a lot of factors: timeliness, coherence, good and (mostly) bad reviewers, and learning that Marketing Studies is not the same as Market Studies. A huge thank you goes to Gabriel Siles-Brügge, Monika Brusenbauch Meislová, and Christopher Huggins for their lovely presentations and for giving us their time.

The second part of the afternoon was dedicated to our Meet the Experts session, where we tried to (and hopefully did) make networking less intimidating and give participants a chance to connect with our UACES experts. We split our participants into small groups and sent them rotating through four conversations on Leadership in Academia, Career Development, Publishing, and Equality, Diversity, Inclusion & Community, hoping that somewhere in the organised chaos people would actually talk to each other, and somehow it worked. The conversations became more informal and flowed much better than anything we could have planned: people asked questions, shared experiences, and discussed things that people sometimes struggle to bring up in a conference room. Even though I was busy keeping time, I enjoyed watching the session turn from an activity into a conversation and seeing how a project that had, for months, been an increasingly terrifying spreadsheet of groups, rotations, and names became something really beautiful. A huge thank you goes to Toni Haastrup, Thomas Hoerber, Tomáš Weiss, Filiz Dogan, Olga Litvyak, Koen Slootmaeckers, Roberta Guerrina, and William T. Daniel.

The DTA was only one of the many events we planned for the Annual Conference, and I often forget that I started planning it months ago as a co-convenor for “Sectoral challenges for the implementation of the green agenda in Europe,” along with Rosa Fernandez Martin and Blanca Marabini San Martín. Being a convenor is an understated role, mostly because it happens behind the scenes, but it is one of the most crucial roles in shaping the conference programme. This year, we saw a wide variety of topics on the green agenda, ranging from the more political aspects to geopolitics and the implications of the European Green Deal beyond EU borders, including questions of securitisation.

Working on the securitisation of green tech myself, I was particularly interested in learning more about how sustainability, resilience, and security intersect beyond the trade and technology dimension. Much of my recent work has focused on resource dependencies through supply chains and how these can become vulnerabilities. Key supply chains linked to the EU’s twin green and digital transition are increasingly showing how the EU’s industrial base is becoming securitised. In areas such as semiconductors, AI, critical technologies, and green supply chains, the securitisation shift is becoming increasingly visible in the language of technological sovereignty, strategic autonomy, and economic security.

This was one of the threads of one of the papers I brought to Prague, “Trade as Crisis Governance: Legal Responses to Strategic Supply Chain Dependencies in the EU”, which I presented in the Trade Policy track. In this paper, I am examining the international dimension of the EU’s response to dependencies through strategic partnerships. The semiconductor sector is probably the clearest example of this securitisation shift. The EU’s attempts to strengthen its own technological capacity are happening alongside deeper cooperation with actors such as Taiwan, showing that resilience does not necessarily mean less interdependence, but often a more selective and politically charged form of it.

What I found really interesting was that both the Green Agenda panels and the Trade Policy panels were sometimes looking at versions of the same issues from different starting points. The securitisation of the EU’s industrial policy is turning sector-specific questions into matters of broader resilience through diversified international partnerships, strategic autonomy, and concerns about the future of European economic governance. This is another of the many things I value about UACES: it made me think less in terms of separate tracks or different policy ‘boxes’ and more about a broader shift in how the EU is governing interdependence.

European Studies cannot be reduced to a checklist of separate approaches; instead, it is made up of the ways trade, sustainability, law, policy, security, and social policy constantly intersect. These different perspectives constitute a community, and together they shape the broader picture of what European Studies is. In a way, our maps at the Graduate Forum booth became a literal representation of this idea when we put up maps of Europe and the world and asked people to stamp where they came from. Over the course of the conference, the maps slowly filled up: people came from different countries, institutions, disciplines, career stages and research areas, but for a few days all of those different points became part of the same picture. It was slightly chaotic, increasingly imprecise, and somehow a very fitting picture of UACES itself.

My presence at the Annual Conference was also made possible by a UACES Microgrant, which was particularly important for me this year, as I do not currently have a full-time position with access to conference funding. After a year spent trying to work out what comes next after the PhD, Prague did not give me one neat answer, but it gave me new ideas, new people to talk to, and a much stronger sense of belonging to a wider European Studies community. Maybe that is also what the increasingly chaotic maps at our Graduate Forum booth came to represent: lots of different people, disciplines and paths, all leaving their mark on the same space.

This is only the first post in our Annual Conference series. Next, we are going to talk a little more about networking, what makes it difficult, and what we learned from trying to make it slightly less terrifying at the DTA. Stay tuned!

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In my research, I have been interested in rethinking democratisation as an ongoing process of political subjectification that concerns the ways in which democratic principles, such as equality, freedom and resistance to oppression, are reimagined and sought to be realised in national contexts. In one such instance, I examine the origins of the Latvian digital platform “MyVoice” in the aftermath of post-recession protests in the country that was among the hardest-hit places in the 2009 economic crisis. The platform was created by a small grassroots group in 2011 that used an existing legal provision that allowed for citizen-submitted legislative initiatives. If the required 10,000 signatures were not so easy to collect on paper, on the internet it proved to be a much easier – and highly popular – exercise of direct citizens’ voice.  The platform, operated by a non-governmental organisation and supported by microdonations of its users, has since become a major site of political participation with a significant impact: since the platform’s inception, 118 laws in Latvia have been changed because of citizens’ initiatives.

“MyVoice” illustrates that democratic initiative is not solely situated with formal political institutions or a pre-determined set of civil society and third sector organisations. It can be born anywhere and anyplace, prefiguring new capacities for existing institutions and practices. In this process, democratic innovations are situated to acquire a much larger role than being just a consultative mechanism – they can also act as a space of protest, resistance and, most importantly, as a site of constructing new collective identities. This interplay between protest and inventiveness was especially pertinent to the focus of our symposium at the UACES Conference. In late autumn of 2025, reacting against the Latvian parliament’s sudden withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention – an international human rights treaty that has become a battleground of anti-gender politics – “MyVoice” became one of the main channels of conveying a wider public rejection of the decision. The petition against the withdrawal from the Convention gathered a record number of signatures (almost 70,000) in a record amount of time (over three days). The platform offered a competing site of political representation to traditional institutions, rivalling the image of society presented by the parliamentary majority. As such, it underlined the potential of democratic innovations to become spaces of resilience, which is particularly relevant in democracies under strain.

The thread of unexpected patterns of citizen self-organisation ran through other presentations at our panels. Postsocialist Europe has largely been studied through the lens of democratic backsliding, with the focus on countering democratic decline remaining on external actors such as the European Union. However, mass protests and grassroots campaigns in countries like Bulgaria, Hungary and Serbia have demonstrated that this lens on democratic defence is limited. The overall conclusion of the symposium was that it is high time to explore democratic inventiveness as a conceptual perspective to better understand response to autocratisation and backsliding. Tracing these new practices, tools and meanings of resistance and democratic reimagining shows that democratic decline does not have to be a foregone conclusion in the region itself and also beyond it.

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The IPPR have a useful report on the costs of not having mutual recognition of conformity assessment with the EU, highlighting how this might generate much more economic impact than any of the reset dossiers. Sadly, it doesn’t appear to engage with why the EU has steadfastly refused to even discuss such an agreement for the past several years (spoiler: there’s no good reason for them to do it).

But the eye has been caught much more by the latest report from the Tony Blair Institute, with a foreword from the man himself. This prompted some initial thoughts from me.

At one level, there’s quite a lot to be positive about from the work. It rightly argues (as I’ve been trying to since, well, ages) that the UK needs to develop a more positive vision of what its relationship with the EU should be, grounded in an understanding of how that fits into the country’s development and position in the world, rather than being driven by unhappiness with How Things Are.

It also is correct to note that the UK can’t avoid this, given its exposure to the EU (economically and geopolitically). If Britain gets a cough when Europe sneezes, then being involved in helping Europe not get poorly makes sense.

But these good points are lost in what follows, which reads much like Tony’s Special Wishlist of All The Things.

By becoming a progressive and dynamic place and setting a goal of rejoining within the next decade, the UK can more effectively press for new deals with the EU that serve the former’s advantage (calculated by a “Power Maximising Test” that will tell us all what the right level of cooperation is for any given area).

That in turn will also allow the UK to stop the EU doing bad things that hurt it and the UK, because everyone will see that’s the right thing.

Oh, and the EU itself will be simultaneously a much more powerful and effective global actor, speaking with one voice on all manner of things, while also being a “Europe of nation states”, i.e. one that lets each country do what it wants when it needs to.

There is minimal sense that the EU understands itself to have the dominant position in the relationship, as the larger and the less-needy party, nor of how it will see being told how to sort itself out by politicians from a country that – not that long ago – decided it wanted out of the organisation altogether.

There’s also no recognition that the EU has never, ever let itself be changed by non-members’ preferences or needs, and has repeatedly used the accession process to require massive adjustments on the part of the acceding state.

To take one obvious example, the then EEC developed its Common Fisheries Policy in the early 1970s precisely because several new states with large fishing waters wanted to join and the existing members wanted to embed their preferences about access and management before the new lot got a say. Just like the new EU made choices about institutional arrangements and funding for agriculture and regional development before admitting Central and East European states in the 2000s: if only I could remember the name of the guy in charge in the UK back then.

I find it very hard not to lay this at the feet of Blair himself, given how closely this all reads to his previously stated views on the matter. The helpful sections on specific domains of cooperation get lost in the over-extrapolation the report authors are asked to make, for example.

Given that the initial response to the report has been generally as bad as might be expected, it’s tempting just to write this off as Late Stage Blairism and move on.

But again, the diagnosis of the failings of the current (and historic) British approach to European policy still stands up, as does the need to start building an alternative grounded in a positive mission and set of objectives that tie into the country’s wider development.

I don’t think bathwater can be either stupid or ridiculous, but there is still a baby to be saved in all this, and whether that’s done will be a much better marker of whether the UK has got beyond Brexit than anything else in all this.

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Much of the existing literature on EU digital policy has examined the subject through legal, regulatory, or Commission-centred perspectives. While these approaches are important, they can overlook a fundamental feature of EU governance: strategic policy objectives are rarely controlled by a single institution. Instead, they emerge through interactions among institutions with different competences, resources and political priorities (Tsebelis and Garrett, 2001; Peterson, 2001; Kreppel and Oztas, 2017). My research therefore approaches EU digital strategic autonomy through a hybrid governance framework combining three dimensions of power: political steering, technocratic expertise and intergovernmental bargaining.

The European Council plays an important role in defining the broad political direction. Article 15 of the Treaty on European Union assigns it the role of providing the Union with the necessary impetus for its development and defining its general political directions and priorities (European Union, 2016). In recent years, European Council conclusions have increasingly connected competitiveness, technological sovereignty, resilience and strategic autonomy. For example, the European Council has called for reducing strategic dependencies, strengthening European technological capabilities and developing a more sovereign digital transition (European Council, 2025a, 2025b). The European Council therefore contributes significantly to the political framing and prioritisation of strategic autonomy, even though it does not exercise legislative functions. Yet political direction alone does not produce policy.

The European Commission plays a different but equally important role. Under Article 17 TEU, the Commission promotes the general interest of the Union and takes appropriate initiatives to that end, while also exercising important executive and coordinating functions (European Union, 2016). Its institutional position gives it substantial influence over policy formulation and legislative initiatives. Research on EU agenda-setting has highlighted the Commission’s capacity to act as a policy entrepreneur and to connect agenda-setting with policy formulation (Kreppel and Oztas, 2017; Leppänen, 2022). This role is particularly visible in digital policy. The Digital Services Act (DSA), Digital Markets Act (DMA) and European Chips Act illustrate how broader strategic objectives can be translated into concrete regulatory and industrial initiatives (European Parliament and Council of the European Union, 2022a, 2022b, 2023). These instruments demonstrate that strategic autonomy is not simply a political aspiration; it can also be pursued through the EU’s regulatory and industrial capacities.

At the same time, the Council of the European Union and the member states remain essential to the process. Under the ordinary legislative procedure, Commission proposals are negotiated and adopted by the Council and the European Parliament. The Council consequently provides an important arena for intergovernmental bargaining in which national preferences, economic interests and different assessments of strategic dependencies can influence the final shape of EU legislation (Tsebelis and Garrett, 2001; Tallberg, 2008).

This means that EU digital strategic autonomy cannot easily be attributed to one institution. Instead, it is produced through a continuous process of interinstitutional interaction and negotiation. The European Council can establish broad political priorities; the Commission can translate those priorities into legislative and regulatory initiatives; and the Council, together with the European Parliament, participates in negotiating and adopting the resulting legislation. The distribution of influence therefore varies across stages of the policy process rather than being concentrated in a single institutional actor. This perspective is also consistent with scholarship on digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy. Broeders, Cristiano and Kaminska (2023) show that the EU’s digital sovereignty agenda combines internal-market considerations, fundamental rights and geopolitical concerns. Rather than representing a single policy logic, digital sovereignty involves a combination of regulatory, economic and geopolitical objectives. This makes the institutional question particularly important: different institutions may exercise different forms of authority over different dimensions of the same strategic objective.

Presenting this research at UACES provided an opportunity to test this argument before an international audience of scholars working on European politics and governance. The discussion following the presentation was particularly useful for thinking about how different forms of institutional authority interact and how the concept of strategic autonomy can be distinguished from related ideas such as digital sovereignty, technological sovereignty and technological independence. One of the broader lessons I took from the conference is that strategic autonomy should not be understood simply as an outcome or policy label. It is also a governance process. Understanding who defines priorities, who possesses the expertise to formulate and implement policies, and who has the authority to negotiate their final form is essential to understanding how the EU responds to strategic vulnerabilities.

The European experience therefore raises a broader question that extends beyond digital policy: when strategic objectives emerge in complex and multi-level political systems, where does the authority to pursue them actually reside? Examining the answer requires looking not only at what policies the EU adopts, but also at the institutional relationships and power dynamics through which those policies are produced. In this sense, studying EU strategic autonomy is ultimately also a study of institutional power: who sets the agenda, who translates political priorities into policy instruments, and who shapes the compromises through which those instruments become European policy.

Bibliography

Borrell, J. (2020). Why European strategic autonomy matters. European External Action Service, 3 December 2020.

Broeders, D., Cristiano, F., & Kaminska, M. (2023). In search of digital sovereignty and strategic autonomy: Normative Power Europe to the test of its geopolitical ambitions. Journal of Common Market Studies, 61(5), 1260–1278. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13462

European Council. (2020). European Council meeting, 1 and 2 October 2020 – Conclusions. Brussels, 2 October 2020.

European Council. (2025a). European Council conclusions on competitiveness and twin transition. Brussels, 23 October 2025.

European Council. (2025b). European Council conclusions. Brussels, 23 October 2025, sections on the sovereign digital transition and technological dependencies.

European Parliament and Council of the European Union. (2022a). Regulation (EU) 2022/1925 of 14 September 2022 on contestable and fair markets in the digital sector (Digital Markets Act). Official Journal of the European Union, L 265, 12 October 2022, 1–66.

European Parliament and Council of the European Union. (2022b). Regulation (EU) 2022/2065 of 19 October 2022 on a Single Market for Digital Services (Digital Services Act). Official Journal of the European Union, L 277, 27 October 2022, 1–102.

European Parliament and Council of the European Union. (2023). Regulation (EU) 2023/1781 of 13 September 2023 establishing a framework of measures for strengthening Europe’s semiconductor ecosystem (European Chips Act). Official Journal of the European Union, L 229, 18 September 2023, 1–53.

European Union. (2016). Consolidated version of the Treaty on European Union. Articles 15 and 17. Official Journal of the European Union, C 202, 7 June 2016.

Kreppel, A., & Oztas, B. (2017). Leading the band or just playing the tune? Reassessing the agenda-setting powers of the European Commission. Comparative Political Studies, 50(8), 1118–1150.

Leppänen, S. (2022). Agenda-setting, policy formulation, and the EU institutional context: The case of the Just Transition Fund. European Policy Analysis.

Peterson, J. (2001). The choice for EU theorists: Establishing a common framework for analysis. European Journal of Political Research, 39(3), 289–318.

Tallberg, J. (2008). Bargaining power in the European Council. Journal of Common Market Studies, 46(3), 685–708. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-5965.2008.00798.x

Tsebelis, G., & Garrett, G. (2001). The institutional foundations of intergovernmentalism and supranationalism in the European Union. International Organization, 55(2), 357–390.

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Let me start with a simple observation. If you pick up an official document from China’s BRI and one from the EU’s Global Gateway, you may notice something surprising. Both initiatives speak about closing global infrastructure gaps, supporting sustainable development, and promoting green and digital connectivity. Yet they are often understood as competing for the same partner countries, markets, and geopolitical influence. So, are these expressions of convergence real—or only superficial?

This puzzle motivates my research: to what extent and in what ways do the BRI and Global Gateway exhibit narrative convergence, and how can we explain it? I argue that this convergence does not necessarily reflect genuine strategic alignment. Instead, it can be understood as a form of strategic branding: the deliberate use of governance narratives to establish legitimacy and manage influence in a competitive geopolitical environment.

My analysis identifies two complementary drivers. First, both initiatives operate under a common international normative environment. They face similar global challenges, expectations associated with their roles as major powers, and reputational criticisms—including concerns about dependency in partner countries. This encourages both China and the EU to draw on widely accepted international language, including the Sustainable Development Goals and the UN climate framework. The international normative environment does not determine what they do, but it shapes which narratives are considered credible and legitimate.

Second, convergence also emerges through selective mimicry and strategic interaction. The BRI and Global Gateway target many of the same regions, creating a competitive environment in which each seeks to establish an attractive and distinctive identity. China presents the BRI as pragmatic, inclusive, and supportive of the Global South, while the EU frames Global Gateway as a transparent, sustainable, and rules-based alternative. These self-images both enable and constrain their branding strategies.

This becomes particularly visible when each side selectively borrows elements associated with the other. Under criticism over debt sustainability and the environmental impact of the BRI, China increasingly incorporated language around “high-quality” development and introduced initiatives such as the Debt Sustainability Framework and the Clean Silk Road. Meanwhile, the EU adopted the BRI’s logic of a coherent, visible, state-backed connectivity offer, most clearly through the “Team Europe” approach and Global Gateway’s headline financial commitment. In other words, each actor can borrow from the other without abandoning its own identity: China can adopt elements associated with quality and sustainability, while the EU can adopt the visibility and coherence of a unified geopolitical offer.

Yet there is a gap between normative convergence and practical depth. Where shared institutional language generates the appearance of convergence, the underlying divergence in interests and governance philosophy tends to reassert itself. When cooperation requires moving from rhetoric to resource commitment, the underlying divergences in governance philosophy and strategic interest reassert themselves. Practice cooperation was, in other words, most effective precisely where it was least costly: in low-risk technical compatibility and procedural dialogue, not in the strategic integration that either side’s role conception might have implied. This also suggests that narrative convergence can coexist with strategic competition. For China and the EU, branding is not simply about communicating policies; it is part of how they compete for legitimacy, influence, and partners. At the same time, understanding the strategic logic behind each other’s narratives matters for avoiding mutual misunderstanding and identifying areas where competition might coexist with cooperation on shared challenges.

For partner countries, the stakes are even higher. Choosing between the BRI and Global Gateway is not simply a choice between two brands or sources of funding. It can also mean navigating different governance models, conditionalities, and long-term relationships with external powers. Looking beyond the language of convergence, therefore, helps us understand what lies beneath it—and why two geopolitical competitors may sometimes speak remarkably similar languages.

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The recent progress of large language models, and generative artificial intelligence (AI) more generally, has been the object of many discussions that have inspired both awe and fear. One point seems to rapidly gather consensus: AI must be regulated.

My PhD project (Francisco 2025) aimed to analyse the international governance of AI from a sustainability and geopolitical perspective. As a matter of fact, pressing challenges spanning algorithmic bias, cybersecurity, impacts on the labour market, democracies and data ownership are important and necessary aspects of making sure AI does no harm. But in addition, questions about the water and energy consumption of generative AI and the construction of data centres show one thing: the successful governance of AI cannot miss out on ensuring AI is sustainable and contributes to sustainability when used.

In addition, how AI governance is understood will impact who benefits, how, and where. This is why political ideas and the power they hold must be interrogated, and this what I have shed light on with my research.

AI governance: promoting AI for sustainability and for the benefit of all

Studying international and national policies about AI and digitalisation highlights three main tensions in AI governance (Francisco & Heintz, 2026). The first one is how to balance the need for global regulations, which may require flexibility, with developing policies that are precise enough to have an impact when implemented. The second tension lies between long-term and short-term benefits and risks, as governing AI addresses different temporality. The final tension finds itself between the interests that countries, and polities like the European Union (EU), may have in ensuring technological sovereignty and advantages, and the need for international collaboration to develop successful AI models. In this context, international organisations like the United Nations (UN), the OECD or the African Union have attempted to play a role as platform for collaboration (Francisco & Heintz, 2026).

Against this background, policy documents from the UN, the EU or the World Economic Forum show two approaches to the governance of AI in a sustainability context (Francisco & Linnér, 2023). The first approach aims to encourage the use of AI for sustainability purposes. We identified that the use of AI is expected to contribute to better data collection and analysis, with examples such as diseases outbreak, climate change patterns, or energy systems. The idea underlying this argument is that sustainability challenges can be solved with high quality and rapid knowledge of what is happening, but also more accurate future predictions. In addition, AI is expected to enhance automation. Automation, in combination with more evidence-based decision-making, is also expected to bring about greater efficiency and reduced inequalities, especially for women and girls, and populations in developing countries (ibid.). But on the other hand, many of the policies from international organisations and states I analysed call for a global common framework with room for flexibility, to be complemented by more precise, and national regulations (Francisco & Heintz, 2026; Francisco & Linnér, 2023). The EU, the UN, and the OECD in particular have been calling for trustworthy, ethic-based or human-centred approaches in AI development (ibid.).

The hidden geopolitics of AI governance

The ideas behind international and AI policies orient the debate and goals of AI governance. The AI governance policies I analysed reinforce the focus on data-based and technologically-enabled environmental action, which is typical of the ecomodernist and green governmentality discourses (Francisco, 2025; Francisco & Linnér, 2023). In this respect, the reliance on technical solutions for environmental governance are in fact common discourses in environmental governance, which seem at odds with the otherwise expectation that new technologies are transformative (Ulnicane et al., 2022).

Moreover, the current AI governance landscape tends to sideline the interest of the Global South (Francisco, 2025; Francisco & Heintz, 2026). Of course, there are calls for the inclusion of developing countries and marginalised groups, especially by the UN, the OECD, and the African Union (Francisco & Heintz, 2026; Francisco & Linnér, 2023). But when looking more in detail at what the policies focus on, structural inequalities and the global political economy of AI, for example the extraction of critical minerals for building computer hardware, or the ethical challenges linked to data annotation and extraction, are seldom points of discussions. It means that while international policies recognise the need to actively include marginalised populations, many of their specific needs go unacknowledged. In addition, the AI policies I analysed implicitly create power imbalances, with a centre composed of the United States, China, and leading organisations like the UN, the OECD and the EU, while other states are relegated to more peripheral roles (Francisco, 2025).

AI governance and climate security: different perspectives

The complex geopolitical and sustainability challenges surrounding AI lead to the question of climate security.  Something does not simply happen to be a security problem; it is usually the result of political debates and efforts by political actors to turn a topic into a matter of security. With global environmental change, the climate has become an important element of security, with different understanding of what should be secured and how (McDonald, 2013).

Depending on what is meant by climate security, the understanding of how AI can be included is likely to differ in four main ways (Francisco, 2023). First, AI could be included in efforts to foster national security. That is, the political focus would be on the use of technologies such as drones and computer vision in climate-induced conflicts (or conflicts perceived as such). A national understanding of security would also focus on the use of online propaganda and misinformation, as opinions on climate change are tied to strong political identities. Second, an international understanding of climate security would shed light on how AI could be used by international organisations in their work to foster sustainable development, but also on the use of AI by private companies. Third, a human understanding of climate security would support efforts to use AI-technologies for sustainable development and the betterment of humans more generally, on the condition that risks are also addressed. Finally, an ecological view on climate security would allow for an exploration of how AI and digital technologies affect the way we see and relate to the world, which could open avenues on the sustainable governance of AI (Francisco, 2023, 2025).

Dr. Marie Francisco is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Thematic Studies- Environmental Change of Linköping University, Sweden. With a background in International Relations and Social Environmental Science, her research focuses on the environmental policy discourses about artificial intelligence and digital technologies at the international and national level.

References

Francisco, M. (2023). Artificial intelligence for environmental security: National, international, human and ecological perspectives. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 61, 101250. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cosust.2022.101250

Francisco, M. (2025). Making Sense of Artificial Intelligence for Global Environmental Governance: Ideas, Power, and Policy Pathways. Linköping University Electronic Press. https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-213333

Francisco, M., & Heintz, F. (2026). 14- The geopolitics of AI in global environmental governance. In B.-O. Linnér, T. Bennich, & H. Carlsen, Handbook on the Geopolitics of Sustainability (pp. 167–178). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781035342549.00026

Francisco, M., & Linnér, B.-O. (2023). AI and the governance of sustainable development. An idea analysis of the European Union, the United Nations, and the World Economic Forum. Environmental Science & Policy, 150, 103590. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsci.2023.103590

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Ulnicane, I., Knight, W., Leach, T., Stahl, B. C., & Wanjiku, W.-G. (2022). Governance of Artificial Intelligence: Emerging International Trends and Policy Frames. In The Global Politics of Artificial Intelligence. Chapman and Hall/CRC. https://doi.org/10.1201/9780429446726-2

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The moment it did come up was during the panel I took part in on the post-Brexit UK, where I talked about the instability of the relationship with the EU, something I’ll be returning to presently. My basic argument was that whatever happens, there isn’t a resilient foundation on which to rest and from which to act.

One question that did come up was whether the current relationship – low-key and benign, if unexciting – wasn’t in fact serviceable enough for our needs. After all, neither side seem that bothered about either a return to the fun times of the Brexit years or starting up a journey to re-accession. London and Brussels have got back in the habit of talking to, and listening to, each other, so can we not just assume that we can work it out as we go? Indeed, in a purely practical sense, if the relationship is as it is, does it not just to suffice, since we’ve not got another one to use instead?

My response to this fits my usual diagnosis of the failings of UK-EU relations, namely that an absence of clear strategic objectives on either side of the relationship mean that the dominant mode is a mix of neglect and bursts of crisis management. Put differently, the absence of obvious problems doesn’t mean that everything’s fine.

For a recent example, consider the mini-fuss over marmalade labelling earlier this year.

As part of the (generally pretty smooth) negotiations on an SPS agreement, DEFRA released a list of EU legislation that UK businesses would have to comply with once the deal is done; a rare example of useful forward planning.

That list got almost no media interest at the time, but some weeks later a story dropped on GB News about how the deal would mean that henceforth marmalade would have to be labelled with which fruit it was made of, and this would be a terrible imposition on already hard-done-by companies.

That almost all marmalade currently on sale in the UK already has such labelling was no barrier to a little (but still much larger than the previous) pile of media pieces appearing. Bendy bananas redux, if you will.

In short, the level of public, media and political interest is low, leaving everyone exposed to silly season pieces (and ill-intentioned actors, should they feel so inclined).

A more serious version of this appeared just as I was putting this piece together.

Politico reported that November’s summit won’t see agreement on ‘Burnham’s big new Brexit deal’, which as readers of this blog will know shouldn’t be news, since Burnham has no deal, big, new or otherwise.

That anyone, including the reporter who definitely knows better, should think that this was the case points to the non-management of expectations by either side and the substantial risk of relations entering into vicious circles of briefings and counter-briefings.

In short, the absence of strategic visions for the relationship in either London or Brussels means that there is no master narrative for politicians to cleave to and to smooth out the small bumps in the road.

As much as technical relations seem to be pretty functional, even these evidently rely on a cadre of people who have built up enough experience of working together out through the original Brexit negotiations, but who are liable to be churned by their respective employers with no robust mechanisms for preserving institutional memory.

None of these issues should be a surprise to anyone, since they have been evident for a long time, and indeed much flagged by the small number of people still focused on the matter. But the concern has to be that the current model of getting by will not have the resilience to cope with the next crisis, whatever that might be.

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In practice, this is not a problem of wrestling Lots of Things, but instead more about trying to work out whether the absence of visible activity is a function of a very tight ship, or of a lack of activity.

Undoubtedly, negotiations on the May 2025 reset agenda in the Common Understanding has progressed well, to the point that several dossiers are largely wrapped up: SPS and ETS are the two big ones. Internal Energy Market talks finally got underway in the early summer too, the last big element to get going.

At the same time, once it became clear that Keir Starmer was stepping down, the EU decided to pause everything, there being little point in making deals with a departing leadership. Moreover, the arrival of a new PM might also offer new opportunities for the EU to secure more concessions, especially if Andy Burnham was really that much more pro-cooperation and wanted to get a quick win.

The evidence of the first couple of months of Burnham suggests that this has not been the case. Indeed, as the tracker below (mildly sarcastically) suggests, Burnham’s time in power has been marked by talking about pretty much anything apart from EU policy.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic148

The ‘regular’ EU-UK summit heralded by the Common Understanding, and already rather uncertain by the time of the May anniversary of the first one, has only been pushed back since, with Burnham’s recent talk of November feeling more aspirational that definite. This is not a government in a rush to press forward on things, despite Burnham’s repeated invocations of the damage of Brexit to the economy.

From what little he has said, the impression is very much one of continuity-Starmer: use the reset process to secure some wins, plus avoid the worst effects of the continual activity of the EU to protect and promote its interests. The language about ‘Made in Europe’ reflects another common thread to Starmer, once the UK had determined the potential impacts on high-profile sectors of the economy and the possible leverage of working together in Europe in the face of – how to put it? – debatable international relations.

However, all of this has been very much off-camera, without much grandstanding by either side, neither of whom really feel any value in kicking up a fuss. Even the failure of SAFE talks was managed away without too much hand-wringing and with efforts to find other ways of building defence procurement cooperation.

But there has been one exception.

Youth mobility has become the poster-child of the reset, and the one with the most conspicuous disagreements.

As a reminder, the two sides have always had different positions with regard to the fundamentals of any scheme, grounded in its purpose, scale and operationalisation.

PDF: https://bit.ly/UshGraphic127

Since the 2025 summit, those gaps (on caps on numbers, university fees and permitted activities) have not definitively closed down. Instead, there has been a steady drip-feed of briefings by both sides to try to signal intent and (less often) offer possible landing grounds.

The following is a list of all Financial Times stories that include such briefings, the paper being a convenient shared space for negotiators:

• 7 November 2025. ‘EU officials’ flag the need for the scheme to be drawn up as a binding legal instrument, rather than the memoranda of understanding the UK has with other third countries
• 5 December. A leaked EU ‘draft text’ has no cap on numbers, and gives EU students access to UK university fees
• 15 March 2026. ‘UK officials’ offer to give way of fees, in return for a cap and other concessions
• 5 June. ‘UK officials’ reiterate their offer on fees
• 3 July. The ‘Commission’ says the proposed cap is too low, EU nationals need to be exempt from the NHS surcharge and have access to UK fees
• 13 July. ‘EU diplomats’ say the cap offered by the UK is a ‘non-starter’ and repeat points on the surcharge and fees
• 18 August. ‘EU diplomats’ again say the cap offered is too low, but might consider something in the ‘low 100ks’, and say fees is ‘vital’
• 23 August. A leaked UK negotiating brief from ‘UK officials’ says Starmer was willing to concede on fees and up to 100k on the cap, in return for access to Made in Europe or steel tariffs

This procession suggests a number of points that speak to the wider relationship.

Firstly, the UK has moved further than the EU on these points. We might reasonably assume that the EU will get domestic fees, but without any evident quid pro quo on caps or other dossiers. Indeed, when such cross-linkage has been mentioned by the UK, the reply from the EU has been very dismissive. This reflects the underlying asymmetry in the relationship: the UK needs this more than the EU, and the EU knows this.

Secondly, this is as much evidence as we have that Burnham is not going to stray very far at all from Starmer’s positions: The PM was talking again about Made in Europe in his first PMQs this week. Whether that helps or hinders progress on negotiations remains to be seen, but the sense that Brussels was ultimately underwhelmed by Starmer’s translation of rhetoric to action does not look set to be challenged by Burnham any time soon.

Finally, it points to the perils of low-stakes negotiating. None of the items on the table will be of notable macro-economic significance for either side, but instead act as markers of good intent and willingness to try to keep the wheels spinning on the minimal architecture of the Trade & Cooperation Agreement’s free trade area. Part of this might be the anxiety over who will be in power in the UK following the next general election, but more of it is that neither side see their relationship as either particularly important or in need of urgent attention. With plenty of other things to be getting on with, this is something that lacks any strong sense of pressure to wrap things up.

Of course, it’s still early days, but if the last seven PMs have taught us anything, then it’s that their revealed preferences on EU policy are pretty clear, pretty quickly.

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If the original justification for a restriction is carried forward with each renewal of the regime without independent reassessment, the measure’s initial necessity risks gradually becoming a presumption of its continuing necessity.

Ukraine provides an especially demanding contemporary example of this problem. In July 2026, Ukraine once again extended martial law. As Russia’s armed aggression continues, the grounds for maintaining the emergency regime remain exceptionally strong. Precisely for that reason, the Ukrainian experience makes the distinction particularly clear: between the continued necessity of the emergency regime itself and the narrower question of the fate of particular restrictions operating within it.

Two Objects of Justification

European scholarship has already examined the temporal problem of emergency governance in considerable depth. Alan Greene shows how the duration of emergency powers can blur the boundary between exception and the normal constitutional order. Stéphanie Hennette Vauchez traces the routinisation of emergency instruments and their migration into ordinary governance. Yoomin Won shows how the absence of strict temporal limits and the possibility of repeated renewals can allow derogations to remain in force for extended periods. Stuart Wallace, in turn, draws attention to prolonged derogations under Article 15 ECHR and to the need for procedures for reviewing emergency measures.

What is less clear is how this temporal problem operates at the level of individual restrictions. If the emergency regime itself lawfully continues, should the original justification for each measure automatically continue with it, or does the necessity of the measure require an independent assessment in light of current circumstances?

If one of the central European concerns is that emergency rule may become a durable form of governance, the next question is how to prevent the durability of the regime from becoming the durability of the justification for every measure within it.

This requires a distinction between two objects of assessment. The first is regime-level necessity: why the emergency regime should continue. The second is measure-specific necessity: why this particular restriction, in its present scope and as applied to these persons, remains necessary.

They are connected, but they are not identical.

Article 15 ECHR already provides the basis for such a distinction. There must be a war or other public emergency threatening the life of the nation; yet a state may derogate from its Convention obligations only to the extent strictly required by the exigencies of the situation. Recognition of an emergency therefore does not complete the analysis of the state’s particular response to it.

The case law of the European Court of Human Rights adds a temporal dimension to this distinction. Brannigan and McBride v United Kingdom, the Court attached importance to whether the necessity of the relevant emergency measures remained under continuing review. In A. and Others v United Kingdom, recognition of a public emergency threatening the life of the nation did not remove the need for a separate examination of whether the contested measures were strictly required. In Baş v Turkey, the Court again emphasised European supervision of national discretion and the relevance, among other factors, of the circumstances and duration of the emergency.

This is not a new test under Article 15. The proposed distinction simply avoids collapsing two questions that the Convention and the Court’s case law already require to be assessed separately: the continuation of the emergency and the necessity of a particular response to it.

What Time Changes

At the beginning of a serious crisis, the state acts with incomplete information. Threats evolve rapidly, consequences are difficult to predict, and some measures must be adopted before a complete evidential picture is available.

Several years later, the position is different. It is already known how a restriction operates in practice. Some initial predictions may have proved correct; others will not. Public institutions adapt to a prolonged crisis. Less restrictive means of achieving the same objective may emerge. The distribution of the threat itself may also change across territories or categories of persons.

What changes over time is not necessarily the legal conclusion, but the evidential picture on which that conclusion rests. A restriction that was necessary in the first month of a war may remain just as necessary several years later. By then, however, the state will possess information that it did not have at the outset: evidence about the practical operation of the measure, its consequences, possible alternatives, and changes in the threat itself.

This implies neither a presumption that a long-lasting measure is unlawful nor an automatic intensification of judicial scrutiny with each new renewal.

The claim is much narrower. If a restriction remains in force, the reasons for maintaining it must remain connected to current circumstances, rather than only to the circumstances in which it was originally introduced.

When a restriction is introduced, the state explains why it is necessary to respond to the threat. When it remains in force for years, an additional question arises: what current circumstances continue to justify this particular measure, in this scope, and as applied to these persons?

This does not require the state to re-establish the necessity of the entire emergency regime with every renewal. The outcome may remain unchanged. What must be capable of being renewed is not necessarily the measure itself, but the state’s ability to explain why its continued operation remains necessary.

Ukraine as a Contemporary Test

Following the introduction of martial law, Ukraine’s border-crossing rules restricted the departure of various categories of men while providing for statutory exceptions. In August 2025, the government amended those rules to permit male Ukrainian citizens aged 18 to 22 inclusive to cross the border, subject to the applicable exceptions.

For the purposes of the present argument, the political merits or shortcomings of that decision are secondary.

Martial law remained in force. Russia’s armed aggression continued. The general need for emergency regulation had not disappeared. Yet the state altered the category of persons to whom a particular restriction applied, without terminating or weakening the emergency regime as a whole.

This example does not establish that restrictions continuing to apply to other categories of men are unlawful or should be repealed. It shows something different: the duration of an emergency regime and the duration of a particular measure need not follow the same legal trajectory.

The regime may continue while the scope of an individual restriction is reconsidered in light of changed circumstances. A state may have exceptionally strong reasons for maintaining the emergency regime while reaching a different conclusion about the appropriate scope of a particular measure.

Why Is This Measure Still Necessary Now?

It is here that the distinction becomes legally significant for European judicial review. The considerable discretion afforded to national authorities in assessing an emergency threat should not displace independent scrutiny of a particular measure.

Domenjoud v France illustrates this distinction from another angle.

Following the 2015 terrorist attacks, France was operating under a state of emergency. In the run-up to the COP21 climate conference in Paris, the authorities restricted the movement of two environmental activists. The general emergency context was the same, but the individual factual grounds for the measures differed.

In relation to one applicant, the Court considered the information concerning his previous conduct sufficient to substantiate the alleged risk. In relation to the other, there was no comparable individual evidential basis; the Court also found no sufficiently close connection between the measure imposed on him and the threat relied upon by France in the context of its derogation.

Domenjoud therefore demonstrates not a temporal change in a measure, as in the Ukrainian example, but the other side of the same distinction: a general emergency context does not remove the need to establish a sufficient connection between a particular measure, a particular person, and a particular threat.

Two different questions follow:

Does the emergency continue to justify the existence of the exceptional legal regime?

And:

Does the particular restriction remain necessary in its present form?

The second question does not require a court to reassess the first in its entirety. A court may ask the narrower question whether there remains, today, a sufficient connection between the particular measure, its present scope, and the threat on which the state relies.

This does not transfer crisis management to judges. It preserves an independent role for judicial scrutiny of the particular measure.

Temporariness Must Operate Within the Emergency Regime

The European experience of terrorism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and war demonstrates how incomplete the traditional picture of temporariness can be: a crisis begins, exceptional powers are introduced, the crisis ends, and the ordinary legal order returns.

Prolonged emergencies disrupt that sequence.

If temporariness acquires legal significance only once the emergency itself has ended, it offers too little protection in a crisis lasting for years. Temporariness must have legal content within an emergency regime that is still continuing.

That content does not lie in a requirement that measures automatically become less restrictive as time passes, but in preserving the possibility of reviewing their continuing justification. If the factual basis remains, the restriction may remain. If circumstances have changed, the measure may be narrowed, modified, or terminated before the emergency regime itself comes to an end.

In this way, temporariness ceases to be merely a promise of a future return to ordinary law and becomes a legal requirement operating in the present.

For European law, this has wider significance. The longer emergency governance becomes part of legal reality, the more important it is not to allow the duration of the regime itself to become an independent argument for leaving every measure within it unchanged. Otherwise, scrutiny of temporariness will focus only on the fate of the emergency regime as a whole, while individual restrictions may continue on the basis of justifications formed for circumstances that have already changed.

The legal significance of renewal is therefore both important and limited. By renewing an emergency regime, the state confirms the continuing necessity of exceptional governance. But that does not, by itself, determine the fate of every measure operating within it.

To renew the regime is not automatically to renew the justification for every restriction.

In a prolonged emergency, European judicial review must preserve the possibility of asking the narrower question:

Why, precisely, is this measure still necessary today?

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