The security landscape in Europe has changed dramatically in the 2020s. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, as well as the shifting transatlantic relations during the second Trump presidency, have challenged long-standing assumptions about stability and cooperation. This book examines these changes through the perspectives of authors from 23 countries across Europe and Central Asia.
 
Organized by region, the volume employs Robert Jervis’s theory of perception and misperception as a unifying framework to demonstrate how states perceive and react to emerging risks and uncertainties. It shows how national security outlooks are shaped by local concerns and broader geopolitical shifts.
 
Additionally, the book examines how countries are repositioning themselves in relation to the European Union, NATO, and the OSCE, offering a timely and nuanced account of an increasingly complex security order.

Elisabeth Johansson-Nogués is Research Professor and Jean Monnet Chair at the Institut Barcelona d'Estudis Internacionals. Prof. Johansson-Nogués' main area of research is the European Union's foreign and security policy, with a special focus on relations between the EU and neighbouring countries to the east and south. A secondary research line is state-society relations in Eastern Europe, Middle East and North Africa and she has written extensively on the role of security, civil society, minorities and gender. She is the PI of the National Grant project Institutional responses to the changing European security order (in RESPONSE) funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (2023-2026).

Federica Zardo is Senior Researcher at the Department for Migration and Globalisation at the Danube University in Krems (Austria) and lecturer at the University of Vienna. She is a political scientist working at the intersection between International Relations and Public Policy, with an empirical focus on the EU´s migration policy and EU external action. She is currently the PI of the MigFund project funded by the Austrian Research Fund that studies change in EU funding tools for migration and asylum. Her research has been published in outlets such as Comparative European Politics, European Politics, Journal for Immigrant and Refugee Studies, International Migration, the Journal of European Public Policy, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Geopolitics, International Politics, Mediterranean Politics and the European Foreign Affairs Review. In addition to her research activities, she teaches courses on the EU foreign policy, European integration and EU migration policy at the University of Vienna. 

Hanna Ojanen is a Senior Research Fellow at the Politics Unit, Faculty of Management and Business, Tampere University (Finland). She leads the research project STRAX on transformation of strategic cultures in Europe. Her research includes European integration, foreign, security and defense policy, Nordic cooperation, Finnish foreign, security and defense policy, multilateralism, and inter-organizational relations, notably EU-NATO relations.