EU SME policy: On the edge of governance

Klein- und Mittelunternehmen, Mittelstandspolitik, Diffusion, Good Governance, EU-Staaten, Small and medium-sized enterprises, Small business policy, EU countries

Oil, materiality and International Relations

Oil is a major topic in International Relations (IR). However, the discipline has tended to focus primarily on the effects and impacts of oil, particularly in relation to conflict, war and empire, and on the international political economy of oil, such as the role of the large oil companies and the oil-rich producer states. This article offers a more holistic approach by adopting a new materialisms framework. This framework has the physical materiality of oil, and its agentic capacity to produce social and political relations over time and space, at its centre. This offers new perspectives along the material journey of oil from exploration, production to transportation, processing and consumption. This, in turn, provides a more differentiated history of oil as a material force that shapes human and political interaction. The benefit of this approach is that it requires IR to be in a more substantive dialogue with other disciplines, most notably with human geography which has a strong tradition of research on energy and spatiality, but also with other disciplines in the social sciences and with the growing body of work in energy humanities. In addition, adopting a new materialisms approach to the study of oil acts as a potential template for the study of other energy resources and products, such as gas and coal as well as renewables such as wind and solar energy

Why the Arab Spring set Russia on the road to confrontation with the West

What are the key factors underpinning the stand-off between Russia and the West over Ukraine? Roland Dannreuther writes that while tensions escalated in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the Arab Spring had a significant role in framing the eventual confrontation. He notes that disagreements over the West’s intervention in Libya had a key impact on the domestic balance of power within Russia, while fears of protest movements threatening the regime of Vladimir Putin helped foster a deep suspicion of Western approaches to democracy promotion

The political economy of Brexit and the future of British capitalism first symposium

The political economy of Brexit generates new challenges for the UK’s national business model and for European capitalism more broadly. Two symposia examine the implications of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU in key economic policy areas. These symposia contribute to two main bodies of academic literature: the political economy literature on varieties of capitalism, with a specific focus on the UK, and the political economy literature on key economic policy areas of the EU. This short introduction to the first symposium first outlines the key features of the British variety of capitalism and highlight the main questions raised by Brexit in that respect. It then summarises the main findings of the papers of the first symposium and tease out some common themes

Eastward enlargement : NATO and the EU

With the peaceful revolutions of 1989, the Central and East European countries reunified a Europe which had been divided throughout the Cold War. It has been natural that most of these states have demanded and have, in priciple, been promised membership of the two institutions which have been perceived to be the foundations of Western Europe's security and prosperity - NATO and the EU. However, progress towards NATO and EU enlargement has been fraught with difficulties and obstacles. This study analyses the major constraints against enlargement, focusing on the difficulties that NATO and the EU have faced in adapting themselves to the post-Cold War strategic enviroment. The study alo evaluates the progress that has nevertheless been made and assesses the future prospects for enlargement, focusing in particular on the implications of the expected NATO decision to be the first to invite new members to join the organisation

Technological developments since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

© The Author(s), 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Dannreuther, N. M., Halpern, D., Rullkotter, J., & Yoerger, D. Technological developments since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Oceanography, 34(1), (2021): 192–211, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2021.126.The Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative (GoMRI) funded research for 10 years following the Deepwater Horizon incident to address five themes, one of which was technology developments for improved response, mitigation, detection, characterization, and remediation associated with oil spills and gas releases. This paper features a sampling of such developments or advancements, most of which cite studies funded by GoMRI but also include several developments that occurred outside this program. We provide descriptions of technological developments, including new techniques or the novel application or enhancement of existing techniques, related to studies of the subsurface oil plume, the collection of data on ocean currents, and oil spill modeling. Also featured are developments related to interactions of oil with particulate matter and microbial organisms, analysis of biogeochemical processes affecting oil fate, human health risks from inhalation of oil spill chemicals, impacts on marine life, and alternative dispersant technologies to Corexit®. Many of the technological developments featured here have contributed to complementary or subsequent research and have applications beyond oil spill research that can contribute to a wide range of scientific endeavors.This research was made possible by the Gulf of Mexico Research Initiative