Tim Sweijs

The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies (HCSS) | HCSS

Western governments have adopted an assortment of counter-hybrid threat measures to defend against hostile actions below the conventional military threshold. The impact of these measures is unclear because of the ambiguity of hybrid threats, their cross-domain nature, and uncertainty about how countermeasures shape adversarial behaviour. This paper...

The Oxford Handbook on Space Security focuses on the interaction between space technology and international and national security processes. This volume theorizes the development and governance of space security and analyzes the specific pressure points currently challenging that regime. Space security is a complex assemblage of societal risks and...

The risk of inadvertent nuclear escalation due to actions in the conventional domain is a serious, and underrated, feature of the current stand-off between NATO and Russia, following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. This brief by HCSS analysts Paul van Hooft, Davis Ellison, and Tim Sweijs notes that NATO leaders and armed forces need to be consci...

Contrary to detailed work on deterrence by punishment, Western strategic thought about denial and its effects is conceptually muddled at the expense of effective strategy-making. This article seeks to reconceptualize denial and rethink its emotional effects. It defines denial as a strategy aimed at frustrating the adversary’s military power and pro...

The European role in the Indo-Pacific has grown over the past years, as part of Europe’s slow geopolitical reawakening, evidenced by increased European naval visits to the region and national and EU policy statements focusing on the Indo-Pacific. What the implications are of this growing role is not yet clear. The report “Guarding the Maritime Com...

Increased geopolitical competition, nuclear multipolarity, and emerging technologies are steadily undermining strategic stability as well as the existing arms control and non-proliferation regime architecture. The 1980s and 1990s were a high-water point in terms of the normative and legal institutionalization of arms control and non-proliferation r...

This report examines the state of deterrence in the European and Asian theaters, with a focus on NATO Europe and East Asia. The report takes that focus to distinguish the deterrence of specific threats against specific states from more generally dissuading rivals from any action that is deemed unwelcome. Otherwise, deterrence risks becoming all thi...

Small and middle powers in Europe and Asia are under increasing threat for two interrelated reasons: (1) the threat of revisionist aggression from Russia and China and (2) the increasing structural and domestic limitations on US external power projection. In this essay, we argue that investing in conventional deterrence, specifically the ability t...

Strategists are fond of saying that the nature of war is immutable, but its character is not. Even Von Clausewitz, whose very objective was to develop a general theory of war, held that every age has “its own kind of war, its own limiting conditions, and its own peculiar preconceptions.” The same can be said for strategy. History offers ample examp...

Both deterrence theory and deterrence practice are evolving to address contemporary strategic challenges. In the military domain, states progressively integrate and synchronise military operations. Outside of it, they exploit grey zone strategies that combine different instruments of influence across multiple domains. These developments are now giv...

This open access volume surveys the state of the field to examine whether a fifth wave of deterrence theory is emerging. Bringing together insights from world-leading experts from three continents, the volume identifies the most pressing strategic challenges, frames theoretical concepts, and describes new strategies. The use and utility of deterr...

Conflicts between states have taken on new forms and hybrid operations play an increasingly important role in this volatile environment. Belligerent powers introduce a new model of conflict fought by proxy, across domains, and below the conventional war threshold to advance their foreign policy goals while limiting decisive responsiveness of their...

Artificial intelligence (AI for short) is on everybody’s minds these days. Most of the world’s leading companies are making massive investments in it. Governments are scrambling to catch up. Every single one of us who uses Google Search or any of the new digital assistants on our smartphones has witnessed first-hand how quickly these developments n...

This research note explains our approach to political violence forecasting employing a combination of structural and automated event data. We have created four civil war onset models using data from 1979-1999 (in sample), which we then use to predict the onset of civil war from 2000-2015 (out-of-sample). Our time horizon is one month into the futur...

"The other side of the security coin" recognizes societal resilience to conflict as the foundational pillar of peace. Avoiding traditional conflict-centric metrics such as the number of battle-related fatalities, level of insurgency activities, or total amount of displaced peoples, this study outlines positive drivers of peace within the realm of s...

We compare the predictive performance in forecasting the onset of large scale political violence worldwide of five statistical models and three commonly used fragility/instability indices using PITF and UCDP data for the period 2000-2015. We find that the models typically outperform the rankings and that a 'consensus' model performs better than the...

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 populati...

Eight observations from two practitioners about the use and utility of strategic foresight in security and defense planning.

"National security starts with strategic anticipation: what are the risks for the Dutch national security? How can the Netherlands prepare for this, and what choices and investments are needed in order to do so? The HCSS Strategic Monitor analyses global trends in cooperation, confrontation and conflict, and identifies the most important security...

High-stakes crises between states are dotting the world map. The annexation of Crimea locked Russia and the West into a standoff, while recent months witnessed flaring tensions between Turkey and Russia as well as between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Rather than isolated incidents, these events mark a larger trend: the comeback of interstate crisis. For...

What are a country’s traditional and non-traditional security challenges? How are these being discussed and by whom? What is the relevance of security, ethics and human rights to these issues? Questions like these are often addressed in security policies. Yet to date an overview of these concerns does not exist. Research conducted within the projec...

Contemporary international relations are shaped by an intricate and to a certain extent uneasily co-existing mixture of liberal and realist logics. On the one hand, there are many signs pointing towards inexorably growing interdependencies between states that pave the way to prosperity and peace. On the other hand, there are similar signs that stat...

Since its last bottom-up security and defense review (2010), the Dutch government has committed itself to strengthening its ‘strategic anticipation’ function. Various public and private actors participate in this effort by examining trends and developments in the global security environment and by teasing out their potential security implications f...

FP7-SEC-2011-1,Grant Agreement 285593,

HCSS analysed 76 peer-reviewed academic studies and 42 expert opinions on the security implications of financial-economic crises. .This analysis found three main pathways by which financial-economic crises impact international stability and security • Economic crises impact the balance of power at both the regional and global levels. They alter the...