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Iran's January 2020 missile attacks on US military bases in Iraq following the assassination of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps General Qasem Soleimani correspond to a stark change of Iran's approach. Iran has namely abstained from using its ballistic missile program (BMP), which was only used twice after the 1980–88 Iran–Iraq War: in 2017 and 2018, in both instances in retaliation against ISIS attacks. The article explores the change in Iran's employment of its BMP from a strategic culture perspective while paying special attention to the principles of Shi'a Islam, which form a particular discursive habitat in which Iran's strategic actions are framed and rationalized. Iran's approach to the BMP is thus inseparable from qisas (retaliation), while obeying the overarching principle of maslahat; but also characterized by the varying importance of the the principles zarare aghall, ezterar and nafye sabil. We conclude that a perspective focusing on religious principles can contribute to our understanding of strategic cultural change, in what concerns its possible orientation, range and limits., The authors would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and the editors of International Affairs for their very constructive comments. This study was conducted at the Research Center in Political Science (UID/CPO/0758/2020), University of Minho/University of Evora, and supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science through national funds.

[Excerpt] Since the beginning ofthe 1990s, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine (along with Moldova) have been considered targets of some 'special' European Union (EU) project in its Eastern neighbourhood, as a group of the so-called Western New independent States and after the Eastern enlargement the EU's immediate neighbours. They share another commonality: while the membership application of the Southern EU neighbour Morocco was rejected on grounds of not being a `European' country, this argument cannot be applied to the three states in question. At the same time, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine display different patterns of relationship with the EU. Russia is the EU's Strategic Partner with the framework of the Four Common Spaces guiding the bilateral cooperation; Ukraine has European aspirations and is an active member of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP); and Belanis is only participating in the Eastern Partnership initiative, while the fundamental document regulating the cooperation with the EU, i.e. the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA), remains unsigned. [....], (undefined)

This chapter explores attitudes and actions of Greek and Slovenian diplomacies towards the European External Action Service (EEAS). It examines the two countries' attitudes towards the EEAS, its leadership and its relations with other institutional actors, including the national diplomacies. The core objective of Slovenian foreign policy after gaining independence was to consolidate its place in the Euro-Atlantic security community in order to deflect any potential security threat from its immediate neighbourhood. The only new area in which there has been significant potential for Greece has been in regional energy cooperation given the discovery of energy resources in the eastern Mediterranean. Slovenia and Greece share a foreign policy goal, namely to ensure the European Union (EU) perspective of the countries of Southeast Europe. The empirical research we conducted suggested that the Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs is currently still in the process of accustoming itself with the operation of the EEAS.