Blockchain Papers

Dorothy Gail Rey

This research study investigates the evolution of the Taliban from an insurgent movement into a hybrid insurgent-state actor. Utilizing datasets from terrorism, conflict, and open-source intelligence, the paper analyzes the motivations, organizational structure, financing mechanisms, operational capabilities, targeting patterns, and governance practices of the Taliban. It assesses the group's transition from insurgency to a de facto government following its resurgence in Afghanistan and examines the implications for regional security, international recognition, sanctions compliance, and counterterrorism policy. The findings indicate that the Taliban's unique blend of centralized ideological leadership, decentralized operational execution, economic adaptability, and increasing diplomatic engagement poses a multifaceted challenge for contemporary security analysis and international governance frameworks.

Januarius Asongu

The Ambazonian conflict in Cameroon’s Anglophone regions has unfolded within an era defined by mobile connectivity, social media, and digitally mediated political contention. This article examines the role of mobile technology in shaping the conflict’s trajectory from early mobilization to prolonged armed stalemate. It argues that mobile technology functioned as both an enabling and destabilizing force: facilitating mass mobilization, diaspora coordination, documentation of abuses, and digital finance, while simultaneously accelerating fragmentation, disinformation, cybersecurity exposure, and state surveillance. Drawing on comparative cases including the Arab Spring, ISIS, Ukraine, Ethiopia, and Myanmar, the article situates Ambazonia within broader patterns of digital contention and digital authoritarian response. The analysis further demonstrates how ungoverned digital visibility and decentralized online fundraising undermined strategic coherence and legitimacy. The article concludes that while mobile technology can amplify resistance, it cannot substitute for political legitimacy, institutional coherence, or negotiated settlement. Durable peace requires a transition from networked resistance to normatively grounded frameworks such as the Alliance for Peace and Justice (APJ) Peace Plan.

Sunil Kumar

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) aims to offer transparency, autonomy, and trustless transactions via blockchain technology. However, public perception often diverges from these goals, as media coverage tends to focus on data breaches, fraud, and privacy issues. This paper examines the relationship between DeFi’s technical issues, security vulnerabilities, privacy concerns, and monitoring challenges, and how media portrayals influence societal trust. Through analysis of forensic methods, transaction monitoring, and media narratives, the study reveals the conflict between DeFi’s decentralized principles and the centralized fears constructed through discourse. The results provide insights into how public trust in DeFi is influenced, challenged, and reshaped.

Serhiі Petrukha, Nina M. Petrukha, Bohdan O. Hudenko

The article provides an interdisciplinary theoretical analysis of the system of financial support for military volunteer formations of territorial communities (MVFTCs) in the context of classical and modern conceptions of financing the security and defense sector. It is noted that in the context of hybrid and asymmetric threats, volunteer structures play an important role in ensuring national resilience, and their financial support is of particular importance from the point of view of public policy, social justice, and public legitimacy. The basic models of security force financing – centralized, decentralized, and mixed – are considered, and the place of MVFTCs within the hybrid defense architecture is determined. The article systematizes the typology of possible models for financing the MVFTCs (State-based, volunteer, private, hybrid, self-financing) and analyzes their advantages and risks. Particular attention is paid to normative and value aspects: legitimacy, fairness, recognition of the subjectivity of volunteers, and the symbolic significance of material support. The interconnection between the internal motivation of participants in formations, social identity, and the influence of external incentives, in particular monetary rewards, is revealed. It is argued that excessive financial incentives without taking moral factors into account can lead to a crowding-out effect on motivation. The thesis is put forward that an effective model for ensuring the functioning of the MVFTCs should combine material, legal, and moral instruments to ensure both the combat readiness of the formations and support from both the State and civil society. The conclusion is made about the need for legislative regulation of the status of the MVFTCs and their integration into the general system of defense financing.

Fariz Huseynov, Jeanene Mitchell

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to spur further exploration of blockchain technologies for environmental peacebuilding, specifically through water management. Although the environmental peacebuilding field acknowledges the potentially transformative nature of frontier technologies, most existing studies do not address how such technologies can contribute to peacebuilding through improved natural resource governance. Using a theory synthesis research design, this conceptual paper connects these studies to discuss how blockchain technologies in water management may contribute to environmental peacebuilding through the efficient and transparent management of natural resources. Design/methodology/approach The authors use a conceptual approach and a theory synthesis research design to present potential mechanisms through which blockchain technology can potentially contribute to environmental peacebuilding. Findings The authors discuss the limitations in the literature on environmental peacebuilding, blockchain and water management, concluding that the third generation of studies should focus on the role of frontier technologies. This approach should especially address the negative consequences of technology for peacebuilding objectives. The authors argue that blockchain applications in water management can potentially contribute to environmental peacebuilding objectives in three ways: (i) creating a mechanism for confidence-building in low-trust contexts through automated and transparent water transactions, (ii) facilitating postconflict economic development through attracting capital and increasing the efficiency of water management and (iii) improving governance through greater transparency and local participation in natural resource management. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is among the first to conceptually explore the use of blockchain technology for water management in the context of environmental peacebuilding. The insights from this study can guide policymakers of conflict sides that focus on resolving issues such as lack of governance and low state agency.

Aaron Vlasak

The nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), on southeastern Europe’s Balkan Peninsula, is a unique product of international peace building based on a consociational model of ethnic power sharing. Organized around protection of “vital interests” of its constituent ethnic communities, the BiH state is radically decentralized. In forest administration, national government is practically nonexistent; multiple substate entities including cantons and municipalities operate as autonomous, self-governing units. This paper finds that the politics of accommodation, ironically couched in the language of rights, creates conditions of illiberal dissociation which block consensual natural resource governance. Conservation policies which require political compromise, thus, face a challenge in BiH’s illiberal consociation. Through policy analysis and interviews with representatives of key organizations affected by the 2008 Law on Una National Park, this study finds that when policies are implemented at levels of expected cooperation, the resultant needs are to reconcile rifts of interpretation and coordinate competencies vertically among dissociative bureaucracies.

Steffen Eckhard

Focusing on German and EU support with assisting local police reform in the context of international peacebuilding in Afghanistan since 2001, this article scrutinizes whether the two organizations exhibit a strategic fit between their policy mandate and the design of management tasks. Comparison of two vastly different institutions - Germany, a nation state, and the EU, an international organization - sheds analytical light on the way different bodies manage a similar policy problem. By way of empirical research, the paper finds that incremental planning, decentralization and autonomous leadership enhance performance as they enable peacebuilders to respond flexibly to the dynamic challenges they face in the field. This was the case with Germany, however not with the EU. No strategic fit prevailed on evaluation. Strategy review either failed (Germany) or had unintended consequences (EU).

Steffen Eckhard

Shifting back to a broader perspective, this chapter compares the answer the book’s four case studies provide for the question: How does variation in institutional designs affect peacebuilding outcomes? The answer falls into two parts. First, comparison of the four missions’ performance shows that EU peace operations—characterized by centralization and a high degree of headquarters supervision—perform worse than the two other missions with relatively decentralized and more autonomous operations. Given Afghanistan’s status as a least-likely case for successful peacebuilding, explaining the failure of operations in this context is a less compelling ‘puzzle’ per se. In Kosovo, however, the negative impact of institutional design becomes more clear. As the case of EULEX Kosovo demonstrates, even when all external conditions are ostensibly ideal, poor organizational design and performance can still prevent meaningful progress in police reform. The second set of findings pertains to the performance of differently designed bureaucracies. The case studies’ inductive analysis yielded four hypotheses, relating to specific methods of mission planning, implementation frameworks, leadership styles, and evaluation systems. Comparison of Germany and the two international organizations further suggests that bureaucracies with ‘complex’ principals require different institutional designs than their domestic counterparts. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Gulnar Mammadova

The empirical evidence and the academic literature point to the opposed directions on the capability of the territorial arrangements to extenuate conflict in ethnically divided and civil war-worn countries. Little is known about the diverse capacities of the territorial power sharing arrangements in diminishing violence in the post-conflict societies. Therefore, this thesis aims to contribute to the field through studying the conditions under which territorial power sharing arrangements reduce violence in the post-conflict settings. I argue that a resumption of violence is less likely following territorial power sharing arrangements in cases where a relatively high level of economic decentralization is provided for a subnational entity, as it allows the rebel groups to sustain their support base among key constituencies. To test the theoretical argument, a structured, focused comparison of territorial power sharing arrangements in Aceh province of Indonesia and Mindanao province of the Philippines is conducted. The empirical findings give support to the hypothesis in the expected direction. Aceh, where the resumption of violence did not occur, also was enjoying a relatively higher level of economic decentralization. While in ARMM, where the violence resumed after five years following the peace agreement, economic decentralization was relatively low. Nevertheless, the extended analysis reveals additional factors. Transformation of the rebel organization into the political parties and inclusive peace agreements potentially may have impact on the territorial power sharing arrangements’ capability to contain violence in the post conflict environments.

Frans Osinga

This chapter addresses the remarkable disconnect between resilience literature and military theory. War puts high demands on the resilience of military organizations. Western militaries have adopted organizational and operational concepts to cope with the myriad challenges of violence, turbulence, uncertainty and an adaptive opponent that, when studied against the background of resilience literature, are quite sound. The maneuvrist approach and the idea of strategic paralysis both target the multiple nodes across various layers of an opponent’s organization that allow it to display coherent and purposeful behaviour. Both aim to disrupt the resilience of the opponent. In turn, the concept of mission command and recent operational concepts such as network centric warfare and swarming are fully congruent with the literature about complex systems, adaptability and current insights on what produces organizational resilience in highly threatening and fluid environments: decentralization, formal and informal networks, solid feedback mechanisms, self-organization, mutual trust, and semi-autonomous units. This chapter suggests that, where resilience studies are still in the exploratory stage, without clear definition and coherent theory, there is benefit in studying military theory and military organizations, which are increasingly informed by the same literatures as resilience studies.

Chris Berg, Sinclair Davidson, Jason Potts

Are there differences between the sale of an unopened Super Mario Bros. computer game and of the digital collage of 5,000 images? Viewed from the perspective of the doctrine of exhaustion, we can easily conclude that the two transfers have significant differences. The auction of the tangible data carrier of the Super Mario’s 1986 edition (for $660,000) 1 fits well into the doctrine. The auction of the NFT (non-fungible token) representing Beeple’s “Everdays: the First 5000 Days” (for an equivalent of an astounding $69.3 million) 2 seems to be hype with a snowball effect rather than a modern encapsulation of digital exhaustion. Some commentators, 3 including the present author in collaboration with Alexandra Giannapoulou, João Pedro Quintais, and Balázs Bodó, 4 have thoroughly introduced the incompatibility of the NFT mania with the existing copyright status quo, and so – in connection with the present book’s topic – the sale of tokenized information, which is capable of representing information related to digital artworks, is practically excluded from the scope of the exhaustion of the right of distribution. At the same time, NFTs de facto offer a “code-based digital ecosystem that has practical consequences for the copyright-relevant fields of creativeness.” 5 The sale and resale of NFTs is possible; an exchange of information and title to “own” and “trade” information related to copyrightable subject matter is technologically guaranteed. In line with that, a quasi-exhaustion regime has also emerged. As such, the NFT mania can practically evidence the need for and modern technology’s capability of offering digital marketplaces for artworks as well.