Events unfolded once again at a swirling pace in 2016. Terrorists hit Europe’s capital in March. The British population voted for Brexit in June. Turkish armed forces failed to topple Erdoğan in July. A resurgent Russia flexed its military muscles again in the Middle East and actively interfered in American elections, in which the American population elected Trump in November. We are worried but certainly not surprised by the volatility of contemporary international relations. In previous editions of our contribution to the Dutch government’s Strategic Monitor, we already observed a surge in assertive behavior, and noted a dangerous uptick in...

As part of our contribution to the inter-agency Strategic Monitor of the Dutch government, HCSS continues to track overall trends in global cooperation and conflict. This effort dates back to the last major forward-looking governmental strategic defense reflection that took place in the Netherlands in 2010: the Future Policy Survey¹, which spawned the Dutch government’s efforts to create and sustain a ‘Strategic Monitoring’ effort. In its strategic foresight section, this interdepartmental study highlighted what the survey argued (and we still feel) to be two quintessential parameters of any future security environment: whether states or non-state actors would be dominant in...

HCSS introduced the two terms ‘nowcasting’ and ‘geodynamics’ in the last version of our contribution to the Dutch government’s Strategic Monitor.¹ By ‘nowcasting’ – as opposed to forecasting – we mean the process of monitoring, depicting and analyzing ongoing developments in international relations as they occur. It is our attempt to move beyond the anecdotal towards the systematic by starting to produce richly granular evidence-based time series for what is happening in the fields of international politics and security. This effort mirrors the rich – even if imperfect – datasets² that economists have been using for decades to analyze ongoing...

Could Turkey really bid “adieu” to the West in the aftermath of the failed coup attempt of 15-16 July 2016? This was one of the questions on the minds of policymakers and pundits around the world as the government in Ankara started consolidating power and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan felt abandoned by his Western allies.

For decades, Turkey has been among the most important strategic partners for the West and also one of the most difficult ones. Sitting at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, the strategic sea lanes of the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean and straddling a...

“Wake up Moldova, you have had enough!” has become the slogan of what were the largest demonstrations since the former Soviet republic gained independence in 1992. Europe’s poorest country has been in economic and political turmoil since public anger erupted over the biggest corruption scandal in Moldovan history. An estimated 1 billion dollars – or approximately 15% of Moldova’s gross domestic product (GDP) – vanished from three major banks in 2014.¹ This led to a bailout by the National Bank, resulting in the depreciation of the national currency, a rise in prices and tariffs and a further decline in living...

The modern era’s Great Power Peace has come under severe strain in recent years. In Asia, China is increasingly flexing its military muscle in the Pacific region— much to the dismay of many of its smaller neighboring states. Close encounters on sea and in the air between the armed forces of regional states are by no means an exception. Japan’s leadership has called for a revision of its pacifist constitution and has begun strengthening its military forces. Meanwhile, the US is bolstering its military presence in the region to contain China and to deter it from regional expansion. Closer to...

No other development over the past 15 years better epitomizes the clash between and the merger of, modernity and tradition than the rise of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham), also known as ISIL (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) or Daesh.¹ Appearing seemingly out of nowhere over the course of 2013-14, the organization captured the attention of international audiences through widely broadcast acts of barbarity, followed by the proclamation of its own state and upending state borders in the process. A longtime observer of Middle Eastern affairs, Patrick Cockburn, wrote that “[t]he birth of the new state...

The presence of peace is more than the absence of conflict. Analyses and evaluations of the state of the international security environment often focus solely on the most concerning developments and tend to fall back on various conflict-centric metrics when providing assessments of the security landscape, as we have done in the previous chapter. In these cases, statistics pertaining to battle-related fatalities, insurgency activities, or displaced peoples forced out of their homes often take center stage. Such an approach has merit when attempting to explore the causes and effects of violent conflict, or when evaluating country-level risk of violence episode...

This concluding chapter offers the main take-aways based on the trends we have identified in this year’s monitoring effort, suggests an interpretation of what drives these trends, and formulates a set of recommendations for Dutch defense and security organizations.

Our international system has entered a period of volatility and friction. It is volatile because high impact events follow one another in rapid succession. It is frictious because many of these events tend to be conflictual rather than cooperative in nature. At the highest level, the HCSS StratMon, relying on different measurements, reports a clear overall downward trend in cooperation that...