The Russian invasion of Ukraine has sparked outrage and economic reprisals from most of the international community and is bound to continue to drive the defence policy of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO)’s members for the foreseeable future.
After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many European NATO Member States have announced their plans to significantly increase their defence spending. In line with this trend, on 1 March 2022, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis officially announced his government’s intention to increase the defence capacity of the Romanian State from the current 2% of the national GDP to 2.5%.
New technologies are transforming the security and defence sectors at a faster pace than ever before. Digital technologies, in particular, are affecting established balances of power within the global security landscape. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that Europe’s security and defence sectors remain at the cutting edge of technological development.
The ReVector program –an anti-mosquito Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) creation undertaken at Stanford University– entered its second research phase advancing animal testing.
In today’s age of social media and Generation Z (Gen Z) "taking over" the world, there is a new modern approach to military defence. Ordinary citizens record military activities on their phones and post videos on social media. The social media app TikTok, which is often associated with dance trends, is currently being used to watch a very different kind of choreography: the movement of military forces that could be on the brink of a new severe conflict on European soil (Britton and Mulligan, 2022). The app has recently come into the spotlight as tensions between Russia and Ukraine have led to what could be called "the first TikTok conflict" (Bowman, 2022). Videos of Russian troops gathering at the borders of Ukraine are widely distributed on TikTok (Sonne et al., 2022).
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