ELN publications feature authoritative research, high-quality analysis, diverse viewpoints and practical recommendations to address current foreign, defence, and security policy challenges.
Drawing on parallels with the Manhattan Project, the ELN’s Oliver Meier argues that AI companies cannot be relied upon to govern the risks their technology creates. Examining Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah’s response to Pope Leo’s encyclical, he contends that meaningful safeguards will require governments and international institutions to impose robust regulation.
After 16 years without a consensus final document, write Carmen Wunderlich and Leonardo Bandarra, the challenge facing the NPT is less about disagreement on specific issues than about growing doubts over the role and value of the review process within an increasingly complex nuclear order, and amid geopolitical shifts and the renewed prominence of nuclear deterrence in global security policy.
The upcoming EU-Western Balkans Summit in Montenegro will test whether the European Union can turn geopolitical urgency into credible enlargement policy, writes Serbian politician and diplomat Goran Svilanović. He contends that integrating the Western Balkans is now a strategic necessity amid great power competition and growing uncertainty in transatlantic relations.
At a time of heightened nuclear risk, the credibility of the non-proliferation regime increasingly depends not on treating the NPT and TPNW as rival models, but on finding ways for them to function in a mutually reinforcing way. As Simabatu Mayele Sims Nono writes, reshaping the NPT-TPNW relationship can turn it from a source of fragmentation into a lever for stabilisation.
Amid mounting geopolitical tensions and deepening scepticism about multilateral diplomacy, diplomats, experts, and civil society representatives are gathering in New York for the 2026 NPT Review Conference to confront growing divisions over disarmament and non-proliferation. In these reflections, ELN staff who attended the RevCon examine the mounting risks facing the global nuclear order, and consider what they reveal about the future of the NPT regime.
Balázs Csuday writes that Péter Magyar’s landslide victory has upended Hungary’s political order, opening the door to constitutional conflict, institutional upheaval, and a major foreign policy reset after 16 years of Viktor Orbán’s rule. The result could reshape Hungary’s relationship with the European Union and reverberate across Europe’s populist right.
This commentary collection compiles 11 articles by ELN network members and external collaborators as part of the ELN’s Protecting the Non-Proliferation Treaty project. The collection was published to align with the 2026 NPT Review Conference in New York City.
Germany is entering a new era in its relationship with the United States. The old Atlanticist reflex has not disappeared, however it no longer reflects the instincts of the next generation of senior officials. For them, the moral clarity of the Cold War is not the starting point. It is an era of disruption, doubt, and strategic volatility. Berlin should take this into account, writes Vincent Tadday. The future of the transatlantic relationship will not be secured by waiting for the past to return.
At NATO headquarters and in European chancelleries, a new consensus has emerged: the security of the Euro-Atlantic and the Indo-Pacific is indivisible. Yet Europe’s major powers are responding to this reality in strikingly different ways. As Harvard Kennedy School Fellow Joel Christoph writes, this divergence is not a weakness to be papered over. It is an asset that should be organised.