The European Union has come to treat disinformation not as a problem of false information, but as a threat to democracy itself. In this article, Dominique Arseneau-Bruneau examines how legality, legitimacy, and speed shape the EU’s response to information confrontation and what its experience reveals about the limits of democratic defence.
How will the war in Ukraine end? While NATO allies have been effective in preventing Ukraine’s defeat, defining a political end-state has proven much more complicated. In this piece, Jonah Moffatt examines the “victory paradox” between Moscow and Kyiv, and the implications of this stalemate on Canadian national interests. With peace talks on the back burner and shifting geopolitical priorities, the relationship between peace and victory becomes increasingly unclear.
Countries from around the world are invited to represent themselves through national pavilions at the Venice Biennale, an international cultural exhibition with a focus on art in Venice, Italy. In 2026, 100 nations participate in the festival. It provides a unique platform for cultural diplomacy, the projection of soft power, and for countries to showcase Read More…
How does a pathogen with little pandemic potential threaten international security and defence? What happens when adversaries create and reuse conspiracies against a traumatized public? Ji Young Kim explores the current hantavirus outbreak, illustrating how hostile actors weaponize institutional betrayal and post-COVID trauma to disrupt NATO logistics and outline the urgent next steps required.
How can NATO integrate Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) into the Cyber Defence Framework? In this article, Christopher Macartney highlights the developments and capabilities of UGVs during the Russia-Ukraine War and strengthening UGV network defences as a strategic asset for NATO in the future of warfare.
As artificial intelligence becomes embedded in modern warfare, it is reshaping how states conduct war and raising urgent questions of ethics and accountability regarding the potential absence of human judgment in lethal decisions. If machines can decide when force is used, who ultimately remains accountable for the decision to take a human life in war?
As economic security becomes increasingly central to international policymaking, trade law is being reshaped by sanctions, export controls, and other security-based economic measures. In this article, Hassan Ahmed examines how the WTO’s national security exception has evolved from a narrow safeguard into a more routine justification for strategic economic action, and how allied states increasingly coordinate such measures through informal alignment rather than unified legal frameworks. Using examples ranging from semiconductor export controls to sanctions coordination following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the article explores the growing intersection of trade law, strategic competition, and alliance politics, including the implications for middle powers such as Canada.
In this special report, Soha Sarfraz examines how Iran and Russia use influence operations and information warfare to weaken democratic cohesion across NATO societies. Particularly by targeting key institutions through digital disruption, narrative manipulation, and the covert exploitation of grassroots mobilization. She argues that these campaigns threaten not only institutions themselves, but also the social trust, political consensus, and informational resilience that sustain collective defence, underscoring the need for stronger democratic resilience and alliance-wide responses to hybrid threats.
Hope Arpa re-evaluates the logic of nuclear deterrence in the context of nuclear programs allegation’s use to justify interventions. The article considers allegations of nuclear programs as motivators of preemptive strikes, discursive tools to justify intervention politically and socially, and the perception of enemy states as nuclear ambitious causing security dilemmas. The root cause of these conflicts is not necessarily framed as exclusively the nuclear weapons themselves, but the international system’s framing of them as the ultimate ‘self-defense’ tools.
This article argues that without integrating IP protection into its cyber, emerging and disruptive technologies, and innovation strategies, NATO risks undermining the very technological edge it seeks to secure.