How can political actors generate geopolitical power, deterrence, and resilience without concentrating authority in a sovereign hierarchy? Dominant approaches in international relations tend to locate strategic capacity in actors and their material resources, treating relations primarily as channels for cooperation, competition, or influence. This lecture advances a theory of relational geopolitics in which strategic capacity is generated through relationships themselves. In the process, relations reshape actors’ interests, identities, resources, and ability to act. The theory proposes four mechanisms connecting relational configurations to geopolitical outcomes: resource aggregation, institutional conversion, reciprocal commitments, and relational redundancy. These mechanisms can also operate in reverse when collective action fails. I develop the argument through the European Union’s emerging strategy of total defence. Across military preparedness, economic security, infrastructure, enlargement, societal resilience, and external partnerships, the EU is designing strategic effects through a system of institutions, collective identities and relationships rather than through centralized command. The lecture concludes by outlining a comparative research agenda for studying relational power, deterrence, resilience, and breakdown across alliances, regional organizations, non-Western regional formations, and contested international orders.

About the speaker

Dr. Veronica Anghel works at the intersection of comparative politics and international relations. As an assistant professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies she co-directs the European Governance and Politics Programme and leads the ‘Global Risks to the EU’ project. Her current research focuses on the European Union’s geopolitical role in the global order, and European integration and enlargement. She is also a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe and an Associate Editor for the Journal of European Public Policy. She has been awarded the Inaugural ‘Rising Star’ Award of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) in 2021.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies