Military assistance is a perennial feature of international relations. Such programmes typically aim to improve the effectiveness of local partners, exporting the donor's way of war through the provision of training and equipment. By remaking indigenous armies in their own image, donors likewise hope to mitigate the profound agency costs associated with the transfer of military capability. But, while technical and organisational transformations can provide notable battlefield advantages, the philosophies underlying such innovations are not so easily propagated. Instead, new tactics, structures, and technologies typically intersect with pre-existing local schemata of war, producing novel if sometimes dysfunctional hybrid praxes. According to principal-agent theory, the application of greater conditionality in the provision of military assistance should improve the fidelity of military diffusion, aligning agents’ divergent interests with their principals’ goals. In practice, however, principal-agent exchanges rarely exist in isolation. Examining the modernisation of nineteenth-century Japan as a case study in military diffusion, this article argues that competition between rival patrons allows recipient states to play would-be principals off against each other, bypassing conditionality by replicating a marketplace for military assistance. In so doing, however, agents trade functionality for sovereignty in their military diffusion.

Realist and rationalist approaches to balance of power politics underplay the degree to which balances are socially constructed. We develop a constructivist approach that accounts for the elusive and contentious nature of the balances that states seek to balance. The approach foregrounds contests over balance interpretations between states that shape whose conceptions and assessments underpin the making and remaking of balances. We argue that shifts in balancing practices are crucial to the dynamics of these contests. To substantiate this argument, we empirically study the contests over the conventional and theatre nuclear balances between East and West in the last two decades of the Cold War. The case study shows that the conventional and theatre nuclear arms control negotiations – that is, the partial shift from adversarial to associational balancing – initially fuelled and amplified both contests. At the same time, the arms control negotiations eventually resolved the contests through the development of shared understandings of the two balances, thus ending the adversarial balancing between East and West. Overall, we contribute to theory development on balance of power politics by highlighting the importance of contests over balance interpretations and by providing insights into the politics and dynamics that shape these contests.

The term regional security dialogue brings to mind state-organised conferences and events; however, an under-appreciated subset of such dialogues are organised by non-state actors that have unique formal aspects. These quasi-formal dialogues operate alongside, and sometimes in competition to, state-sanctioned processes. Why do some of these forums appear to be more effective at fostering regional dialogue than strictly formal or informal processes with the same goals? Drawing from heterogenous discourse approaches, we address this question by identifying and expanding the concept of the quality of discursive space, as a key feature for the success of security dialogues. We then apply this concept to two of the most successful so-called Track 1.5 security dialogues: the Munich Security Conference (MSC) in Europe and the Shangri-La Dialogue (SLD) in Asia. We analyse these cases using a mix of interviews with participants and organisers, participant observation, and public outputs with the aim of improving the understanding of the role and impact of Track 1.5 diplomacy in the practice of international security. Our findings highlight that it is what we call the quality of discursive space, as a mix of different components in this space, which differentiates effective dialogues from mere policy ‘talk shops’.

This article theorises the repressive security practices of authoritarian states in the context of transnationalism and globalisation. While emerging research on transnational repression has identified a range of extraterritorial and exceptional security practices adopted by authoritarian states, it has not fully studied the implications of such practices on space and statecraft. Using data from the Central Asia Political Exile Database project (CAPE) and interviews conducted with exiled Tajik opposition groups based in Russia and Europe, we theorise the spatial connections between the territorial and extraterritorial security practices using the concept of assemblages. We further outline how these practices escalate in a three-stage model, in which exiles go on notice, are detained and then rendered or assassinated. Such an approach sheds light on the inherent links between the normalisation of security practices and the creation of transnational space with distinct forms of geographical state power that is embedded in non-national spaces and is manifested through spatially organised actors, networks, and technologies within assemblages.