Editorial: Security, Conflict, and the Limits of International Order

Efe Can Gürcan (ORCID ID: 0000-0002-5415-3163)

Received: 18 Jul 2026 | Accepted: 18 Jul Aug 2026 | Published online: 20 Jul 2026

How to cite this article: Gürcan, E. C. (2026). Editorial: Security, Conflict, and the Limits of International Order. Global Geopolitics, 1(3), 312–315.

DOI: 10.64901/29778271.2026.020

Security is rarely only about the balance of military capabilities. It is also about the rules through which states coexist, the alliances and institutions they construct, the technologies they permit themselves to use, and the boundaries they draw between sovereignty and international responsibility. Periods of geopolitical change make these connections particularly visible. Established arrangements become less reliable, new alignments emerge before their consequences are fully apparent, and technological or political developments raise questions for which existing institutions do not always provide ready answers.

The third issue of Global Geopolitics approaches security in this broader sense. Its five articles move across different periods and geographical settings, from the architecture of Eurasian security and the strategic landscape of the Eastern Mediterranean to autonomous weapons and the international politics of the Nigerian Civil War. They do not offer a single account of contemporary geopolitics. What connects them instead is a concern with the limits of existing arrangements: the limits of security architectures in accommodating shifts in power, of alliances in reconciling divergent interests, of international law in responding to new military technologies, and of international institutions when humanitarian claims encounter sovereignty and geopolitical interests.

Richard Sakwa’s “Between Comity and Conflict: Revisiting Eurasian Security in the Multipolar Era” begins from a fundamental problem: how can security be organized across a politically plural Eurasia without reproducing either hegemonic tutelage or competing blocs? His answer emerges from a genealogy extending from the unrealized Volga Charter and the Yalta-Potsdam moment to the UN Charter International System and the later consolidation of the “Political West.” Sakwa locates the roots of contemporary insecurity in a persistent gap between competing conceptions of European and Eurasian order. Against this background, he develops the idea of heterarchical comity, grounded in Charter pluralism, as an alternative basis for coexistence among states that need not share the same political model or geopolitical orientation.

Li Zhengdong examines the Eurasian security problem from a different direction in “Multipolarity and the Geopolitical Reorganization of the Eurasian Security Order.” Drawing on Brzezinski’s realist framework, Li argues that the redistribution of power across Eurasia is producing fragmentation rather than equilibrium. Strains within the transatlantic alliance, unresolved debates over European strategic autonomy, divergent threat perceptions within Europe, and Russia’s declining influence in parts of the Caucasus and Central Asia are creating overlapping areas of competition and uncertainty. His description of Eurasia as a developing “strategic collision belt” captures a central paradox: a more dispersed distribution of power can widen the room for strategic maneuver while simultaneously making regional security less predictable.

Questions of alignment and strategic maneuver are also central to Sina Kısacık and Erinç Bayri’s “The United States in the Eastern Mediterranean: Strategic Landscape Analysis of Energy Diplomacy, Security Politics, and Alignment Shifts.” The Eastern Mediterranean provides a particularly revealing setting because energy routes, maritime disputes, military partnerships, and great-power competition intersect within a relatively concentrated geographical space. Kısacık and Bayri trace how U.S. engagement since the 2000s has helped reshape this landscape through security partnerships, legislation, and calibrated military involvement. At the same time, Washington’s closer relations with Greece, the Republic of Cyprus, Israel, and Egypt have coincided with growing tensions with Türkiye. The result is a regional configuration in which local disputes and alliances have become increasingly entangled with U.S. efforts to contain Russian influence and limit China’s infrastructural and technological reach.

If the first three articles are principally concerned with the organization of geopolitical space and security relations, Jan Falgueras-Riu’s “Regulating the Absurd: ‘Killer Robots’ and the Morality Behind Arms Regulations” turns to the boundaries of permissible violence in international security. Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems present an unusual regulatory problem because the question is not exhausted by whether a weapon can comply with existing international humanitarian law. Falgueras-Riu asks what happens when lethal decision-making itself becomes increasingly detached from immediate human agency. Distinguishing among established IHL concerns, ethical problems specific to autonomous force, and risks shared with other unmanned weapons, he makes the case for additional standards centered on meaningful human control. The article brings a distinctly human question into debates often dominated by technological capability: not simply what autonomous weapons can do, but what decisions societies are prepared to delegate to them.

The final contribution places the tension between sovereignty and international responsibility in historical perspective. In “Human Rights and the United Nations in the Geopolitics of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970),” Oluchukwu Ignatus Onianwa examines why sustained humanitarian concern over the Nigeria–Biafra conflict failed to produce substantive UN political intervention. Drawing on archival material from The National Archives in London and the United Nations Headquarters in New York, the article reconstructs the interaction among human rights advocacy, great-power calculations, African diplomacy, and the UN Secretariat. British resistance to internationalization, more limited initiatives by Canada and France, and the Organization of African Unity’s insistence on sovereignty and territorial integrity narrowed the space available for UN action. U Thant’s deference to the OAU framework ultimately kept the organization’s role largely within the humanitarian sphere. The case demonstrates how the institutional treatment of human suffering can depend as much on prevailing conceptions of political authority and regional order as on the gravity of the humanitarian claims themselves.

These articles make clear why security remains such a difficult object of geopolitical analysis. It operates simultaneously at several levels. It concerns relations among major powers, but also regional actors seeking room for maneuver; institutions and legal rules, but also the political conditions under which those rules acquire force; military technologies, but also judgments about responsibility and legitimate violence. Historical experience further cautions against assuming that institutions will necessarily resolve these tensions simply because common rules formally exist.

For Global Geopolitics, this breadth is important. Geopolitics should remain attentive to territory, strategic rivalry, and distributions of power without treating them as self-contained explanations of international politics. The contributions to this issue show, in different ways, how questions of power are inseparable from the institutional and normative settings in which political actors operate. Security orders endure not simply because they reflect a particular balance of forces, but because states and societies find ways—sometimes successfully, sometimes not—to negotiate the limits of conflict, autonomy, responsibility, and coexistence.

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