Stephanie C. Hofmann's research while affiliated with Institute of Development Studies and other places

Publications (26)

Research
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/europpblog/2020/01/07/is-the-liberal-international-order-in-a-state-of-terminal-decline/
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This chapter presents major works dealing with supranational political diplomatic actors and action. Regional, international, and global organizations have established their position as major vehicles for producing and implementing public and club goods beyond the state. The proliferation of international organizations (IOs) as well as their increa...
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Bilateral relations between France and either Germany or the United Kingdom are the backbone of European security and defence cooperation. From a strategic and cultural point of view, these formalized bilateral relations are not self‐evident. In this article, we track the memory‐framing processes accompanying the creation of major bilateral initiat...
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Full-text available
The contemporary global order is widely said to be in crisis. But despite a rapidlyproliferating literature on the subject, there is little clarity or consensus aboutwherein the‘crisis’consist, or what precisely is under threat. We offer arestricted characterization of the post-war global order based on itsfundamental substantive and procedural ord...
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Renegotiating the World Order: Institutional Change in International Relations. By Phillip Y. Lipscy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 341p. $99.99 cloth, $34.99 paper. - Volume 17 Issue 1 - Stephanie C. Hofmann
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The proliferation and scope expansion of regional organizations (ROs) is one of the most prominent features in contemporary international politics. In particular, many regional economic organizations (REOs) have expanded into the security realm. This trend has often resulted in an overlap with regional security organizations (RSOs) already in place...
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Has the European Commission become an agent of collective securitisation in EU energy policy? We argue that EU energy policy has seen repeated collective and national securitisation moves directed in particular at Russian gas exports to the EU. However, as energy is a commodity which can be framed as a security, market or even environmental issue,...
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This paper contributes to theory development about the politics of overlapping organizations. It explains how organizational overlap can affect the execution of organizational mandates. Within the universe of intergovernmental overlapping organizations, I argue that we need to study institutional positions in conjunction with governmental preferenc...
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The proliferation of regional economic organizations (REOs) is a prominent feature of the contemporary international environment. Many of these organizations aspire to promote regional peace and stability. Some strive to promote these goals only through economic cooperation, while others have expanded their mandate to include mechanisms that addres...
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How do rising powers choose to allocate their finite resources among the multiple global and regional security organizations? Building on the literatures on forum shopping and rising powers, we argue that the different organizational investment choices of rising powers are explained by varying regional ideational affinities. Organizational settings...
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France’s so-called exceptionalism in multilateral security policy is often explained with its Gaullist political culture. However, a closer look shows that Gaullism cannot easily capture different French policies, particularly toward NATO. To unearth what can explain policy variance, this paper asks the question of whether French political parties...
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How do allies successfully manage their alliance partnership in times of political crisis? We argue that the procedural norm of political contestation and the substantive norm of security consensus set the parameters for non-detrimental disagreement among democratic alliance partners. Rather than interpreting sharp disagreements with the US as sign...
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Regional transformation has emerged as a major topic of research during the past few decades, much of it seeking to understand how a region changes into a zone of conflict or cooperation and how and why some regions remain in perpetual conflict. Although the leading theoretical paradigms of international relations have something to say about region...
Chapter
The nature of international cooperation has been at the heart of the debate in international relations (IR) theory since the creation of the field. The various loci of political authority and the role of the state, especially, have received much attention. Many IR theories have been built on the assumption that all actors within a state either impl...
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A growing number of scholars argue that the development of the common security and defence policy (CSDP) should be analysed as the institutionalization of a system of security governance. Although governance approaches carry the promise of a sophisticated, empirically grounded picture of CSDP, they have been criticized for their lack of attention t...
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The creation and continued existence of CSDP cannot be understood without reference to the institutional environment within which it is located. To explain its emergence and design, one needs to study the institutional architecture into which this additional institution emerged. Once institutional overlap exists, it becomes a crucial independent va...
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An increasing number of authors describe the European Union as an advanced form of transgovernmentalism. Whether called Europeanization, supranational intergovernmentalism, multilevel governance, administrative fusion or Brusselisation, the transgovernmentalist thesis states that European politics is shaped by the growing interaction of national go...

Citations

... It is, moreover, notably willing to deploy troops, with a strategic culture which is both interventionist and supports the deployment of force outside the region, and a hawkish stance on external threats, especially from Russia and China (Ministry of Defence, 2021). In terms of international networks, the UK is a founding member of NATO, a Permanent Member of the UN Security Council, a member of the G7, and -along with France -one of the two countries leading on the creation of the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) (Hofmann & Mérand, 2020); in addition to regional defence networks such as the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), Northern Group of Defence Ministers, and others (RUSI, 2023). Despite clear limits to the UK's strategic action, including successive budget cutting exercises and conflict between the UK's role as a residual great power and a sub-contractor of the American-led order (Blagden, 2019; Morris, 2011), the UK remains a major security and defence (S&D) actor. ...
... Explanations abound as to why the LIO and its main characteristics -institutionalized multilateralism, the promotion of individual liberties, the rule of law, and open markets -have become increasingly contested (per the debate among, e.g., Ikenberry 2018;Eilstrup-Sangiovanni and Hofmann 2020;Mearsheimer 2019;Nye 2017;Alcaro 2018;Grewal 2018;Lake et al. 2021;Huang 2020;Copelovitch et al. 2020). Most approaches center on factors arguably exogenous to the LIO, such as global power shifts, notably the rise of China and US hegemonic decline (e.g. ...
... For the regional economy to thrive and develop sustainably, there must be sufficient and plentiful labor resources. Literature [15][16] shows that inter-regional trade activities have a multiplicative effect on regional economic growth. The literature [17] indicates that the gross social product and gross national income in the region increase exponentially in the midst of frequent inter-regional trade. ...
... Methodologically, a frame analysis seems well suited for engaging with the still-emerging field of hydrogen. Whereas many studies have analyzed discourses on EU energy policies [22,23] or in the context of energy transitions in specific member states [24], an examination of the framing of EU hydrogen policies in the context of external partner countries has, to our knowledge, not been undertaken so far. Through our endeavor, we hope to contribute to theory development in the field as well as to provide a first mapping of the discourse and frame promotion by relevant actors. ...
... Realist-inspired regime complexity research has argued that becoming members of more than one IO at a time and equipping additional organisations with similar policy competencies is a rational strategy for strong states to pursue. Regime complexity allows powerful states to subsequently influence policies across multiple organisations and thereby pursue their own substantive interests (Alter and Meunier, 2009;Drezner, 2009;Panke, 2020) or use their power to engage in forum-shopping for a broad range of issues (Benvenisti and Downs, 2007;Henneberg and Plank, 2020;Hofmann, 2019). While in individual cases, such as in the intellectual property domain, some small states have also used forum-shopping (Helfer, 2009), it is the powerful states that have the resources to actively engage across multiple arenas at the same time which is key to exert influence across the board. ...
... The first part of the transaction-cost argument is thus that RIOs are more or less attractive to donors because they differ in terms of the scope of their policy competencies. While most RIOs were initially created to foster trade and economic integration, many African RIOs have broadened their policy competencies over time, particularly in order to address security and good governance (Haftel and Hofmann, 2017;Stapel, 2022). Today, many of them have additional competencies in policy sectors as diverse as science, the environment, agriculture, energy and human rights (Panke et al., 2020). ...
... In the African cases above, the un provided additional resources and support once the ros demonstrated the value of preventive action. 34 Regional organizations' greater facility with conflict prevention may be due to three factors. First, the potential conflicts ...
... To capture the link between the power resources of a state and the capacity to effectively make use of them, for example, Volgy and Bailin (2003) introduced the concept of "domestic strength", 16 Schweller (2006: 13) that of "state mobilization capacity", 17 and Zakaria (1998) the concept 15 The disposition to follow by other states in the region is likely to affect the willingness to lead on the part of a regional power (Malamud 2011). Detachment might be also caused by a lack of regional ideational affinity in the view of the regional power, which may lead to engagement in global rather than regional organizations (Hofmann et al. 2016). Conflicts inside or between states within the region might provide opportunities for a regional power to exercise leadership with the objective to bring order to the region, although too much conflict can also lead to a detachment from a troublesome regional context. ...
... In a Non-Paper released in preparation for the NATO meeting in Wales in September 2014, Bulgarian security experts warned that "the Republic of Bulgaria is in one of the areas with the highest concentration of risks and threats within the Euro-Atlantic community". 16 These risks and threats stem from the change in the balance of power in the Black Sea because of the conflict in Ukraine, combined with the negative effects of sanctions and the country's energy dependence on Russia. In other words, even if the conflict in Ukraine was not seen as posing a direct threat to Bulgaria's territorial integrity, it still had a disruptive impact with respect to its socio-economic security, most significantly the country's energy security. ...
... I introduce the concept of institutional elasticity to better understand this phenomenon. While elasticity has been employed (anecdotally by some) in management, sociology, and economics (Watanabe et al., 2004;Hijzen and Swaim, 2010;Awasthi et al., 2020;Knoblach and Stöckl, 2020), few have applied it to institutionalized interstate relations (Hofmann and Mérand, 2012). Elasticity is commonly understood as 'the tendency of a body to return to its original shape after stretching, stress, or compression' (Hofmann and Mérand, 2012). ...