Yf Reykers
Biographic Data
| ID | 1136188 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Yf Reykers |
| GIVEN NAMES | Yf |
| FAMILY NAME | Reykers |
| SIGNATURE | REYKERS Y |
| AFFILIATIONS | Maastricht University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0080-1815 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 65 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 28 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
The 2026 Bernard Brodie Prize
Military Ad Hoc Coalitions and Their Role in International Conflict Management
Against the background of a crisis of United Nations (UN) peace operations, military ad hoc coalitions (AHCs) have increasingly gained a foothold as conflict management tools. This article provides the first comprehensive empirical mapping of military AHCs, focusing on the following questions: how have military AHCs evolved over time, where have they been deployed, who are the most active contributors, and how do AHCs interact and compare with ot…
The 2025 Bernard Brodie Prize
Invitation games and the politics of joining US-led coalition warfare
How do status-seeking governments in small states mobilize parliamentary support for participation in US-led warfare coalitions? We argue that the formulation of official invitations by the United States plays an overlooked instrumental role in the domestic ratification game. Invitations can be a strategic tool for governments confronted with divided parliaments to secure support for contributions close to their position. Building on a modified a…
Integrating ad hoc coalitions in international conflict management
While United Nations peacekeeping has been in decline since 2014, ad hoc coalitions have become prominent in international conflict management. We argue that these two trends have changed the field of international conflict management into what we call 'conflict management à la carte'. Contemporary examples of ad hoc coalitions in international conflict management are the Multinational Joint Task Force, fighting the Boko Haram insurgency in the L…
Ad hoc coalitions
Launching multinational peace operations are time and politically sensitive decisions that frequently involve the use of force. As a result, a host of accountability issues arise. To date, mainly backward‐looking and hierarchical accountability measures have been developed to guide the implementation of multinational peace operations led by the most prominent actors in this policy domain: intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and ad hoc coalitio…
The 2024 Bernard Brodie Prize
Evaluating crisis response speed of international organisations
Armed conflicts, pandemics or natural disasters often necessitate rapid, coordinated responses by international organisations (IOs) to avoid escalation or loss of life. However, effective analytical tools to assess and compare the speed of these responses are lacking. This paper introduces a framework for evaluating IO crisis response speed, with the aim of better understanding which IOs are best equipped to offer rapid crisis responses and which…
Ad hoc coalitions in European security and defence
Ad hoc forms of military cooperation have become commonplace in European security and defence. The EU has even voiced the ambition to strengthen mutual support between its CSDP operations and European-led ad hoc coalitions. We ask whether and how this mutual support is strengthened and what it means for European defence integration. We focus on two cases: Task Force Takuba deployed to the Sahel region and the European Maritime Awareness mission i…
From policy to practice
North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO’s) active cooperation with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) on the protection of civilians (PoC) challenges the academic assumption that NATO’s decision-making structures are generally closed to civil society participation. What explains the decision of NATO officials to work with NGOs when developing a Policy for the PoC, and how did this cooperation take place? Combining insights from resource dep…
From EU battlegroups to Rapid Deployment Capacity
The article uses the case of the development of the European Union Battlegroups to the Rapid Deployment Capacity (RDC) to better understand the changing learning capacity of the EU in its military Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). The article develops a theoretical framework to capture the most significant factors affecting learning by drawing on insights from the literatures on organizational learning and policy failure, with a specific…
Governance Through Regime Complexity
The international response to armed conflict in Africa often takes the form of a regime complex characterized by institutional proliferation, overlap, unclear hierarchies, and multiple interconnections. At the same time, the course of conflict is hardly predictable. In such an environment, how can component units (institutional fora) of a regime complex effectively govern through complexity? We explore this question by focusing on the EU as an im…
What we got wrong
Ad hoc coalitions in global governance
Ad hoc coalitions (AHCs) are an indispensable but scantly conceptualized part of global governance. In recent years, several typologies and classifications of global governance arrangements have been provided, mostly differentiating them based on their organizational design features of degree of formality and membership composition. These do not capture AHCs and the role they play in global governance. In this article, we not only provide a conce…
Enemies or allies? How NGOs can push the military towards transparency around the use of force
This article examines the conditions under which non-governmental organisations (NGOs) gain access to defence administrations when campaigning for transparency around the use of military force. We theorise that gaining access in this traditionally secluded domain is a matter of supply and demand. NGOs can gain access through technical and political information, yet not without demand for these resources, dependent on the politicisation of concern…
War in Ukraine
Ad hoc coalitions and institutional exploitation in international security
While the increasingly thick web of global, regional and sub-regional security arrangements and institutions has received ample scholarly attention, the phenomenon of ad hoc military coalitions and how they impact these institutions has been relatively little explored. We examine ad hoc coalitions in international security responses and develop a tentative typology of military responses that takes ad hoc coalitions into consideration, where we di…
A permanent headquarters under construction? The Military Planning and Conduct Capability as a proximate principal
This article studies the European Union (EU) Military Planning and Conduct Capability (MPCC), which was established in June 2017 and holds the strategic command of EU non-executive missions. While this is the closest the EU has ever come to a permanent military headquarters (HQ), the MPCC has not yet attracted much scholarly attention. This article fills this gap by applying principal-agent theorization about chains of delegation. It conceptualiz…
No wings attached? Civil–military relations and agent intrusion in the procurement of fighter jets
This article studies civil–military relations in defence procurement. Applying insights from the principal–agent model, we argue that decision-making about defence procurement is inherently vulnerable to agency problems. Given the technical nature of these dossiers, governments and parliaments are often heavily dependent upon military expertise, creating leeway for defence administrations to steer decision-making towards their preferences. By mea…
Holding Accountable UN-Authorized Enforcement Operations
Is the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) capable and willing to hold accountable the forces which it authorizes? Although it is an often-voiced recommendation that the UNSC should step up its accountability efforts, such as by installing more strict reporting requirements to avoid mission creep, evaluations of the effectiveness thereof remain largely absent. This article suggests that a combination of process-tracing methods with insights fr…
Parliamentary involvement, party ideology and majority-opposition bargaining
This article examines the impact of parliamentary involvement in troop deployment decisions on restrictions on military mandates by examining the Belgian contribution to the 2011 Libya intervention and the coalition against the self-proclaimed Islamic State. More specifically, we analyse (1) the effect of party ideology on mandate preferences, and (2) the impact of bargaining between majority and opposition parties on the outcome of mandate negot…
Parliamentarisation as a Two-Way Process
This article investigates the drivers of the parliamentarisation of war powers. Building on recent findings in the study of war deployments, we argue that the existing literature has predominantly focused on parliamentary drivers of parliamentarisation, leaving potential executive interests untouched. To fill this gap, we propose a rational-choice institutionalist based framework for identifying the motivations and strategies of both parliamentar…
Constructive ambiguity or stringent monitoring? Towards understanding UN Security Council oversight over non-UN-led forces
The United Nations Security Council’s (UNSC) oversight over mandate implementation by the regional organizations and coalitions it authorizes is strongly characterized by processes of selectivity. Yet, little is known about these processes. Why is the stringency of these reporting requirements so diverse? And why is compliance to these reporting requirements deemed more important in one case, while less in the other? This article illustrates the …
Multinational rapid response mechanisms
Military rapid response mechanisms are generally understood as troops that are on standby, ready to be deployed to a crisis within a short time frame. Yet, the overall track record of the existing multinational rapid response mechanisms within the European Union, the African Union, and North Atlantic Treaty Organization remains disappointing, and the United Nations does not even have a rapidly deployable capacity anymore. Meanwhile, despite that …
EU Battlegroups
This article reviews the gloomy saga of the EU Battlegroups, focusing on four questions: Where do they come from? What do they look like? What have they been hindered by? And where do they go from here? It builds upon earlier findings in the literature and adds novel insights based on original data. In doing so, the article pays particular attention to the standby nations’ constant calculation of political and financial costs. It argues that reco…
Parliamentary involvement, party ideology and majority-opposition bargaining
This article examines the impact of parliamentary involvement in troop deployment decisions on restrictions on military mandates by examining the Belgian contribution to the 2011 Libya intervention and the coalition against the self-proclaimed Islamic State. More specifically, we analyse (1) the effect of party ideology on mandate preferences, and (2) the impact of bargaining between majority and opposition parties on the outcome of mandate negot…
War in Ukraine
Parliamentarisation as a Two-Way Process
This article investigates the drivers of the parliamentarisation of war powers. Building on recent findings in the study of war deployments, we argue that the existing literature has predominantly focused on parliamentary drivers of parliamentarisation, leaving potential executive interests untouched. To fill this gap, we propose a rational-choice institutionalist based framework for identifying the motivations and strategies of both parliamentar…
Multinational rapid response mechanisms
Military rapid response mechanisms are generally understood as troops that are on standby, ready to be deployed to a crisis within a short time frame. Yet, the overall track record of the existing multinational rapid response mechanisms within the European Union, the African Union, and North Atlantic Treaty Organization remains disappointing, and the United Nations does not even have a rapidly deployable capacity anymore. Meanwhile, despite that …
EU Battlegroups
This article reviews the gloomy saga of the EU Battlegroups, focusing on four questions: Where do they come from? What do they look like? What have they been hindered by? And where do they go from here? It builds upon earlier findings in the literature and adds novel insights based on original data. In doing so, the article pays particular attention to the standby nations’ constant calculation of political and financial costs. It argues that reco…
Losing control
Russia's behaviour in the United Nations Security Council remains poorly understood. Applying principal-agent insights, this article analyses the Russian abstention towards Resolution 1973, which authorised intervention during the 2011 Libya crisis. Introducing a triangle of delegation, it shows that preferences diverged regarding the means and aims of the intervention. The article also investigates the information asymmetries which characterised…
Ad hoc coalitions in European security and defence
Ad hoc forms of military cooperation have become commonplace in European security and defence. The EU has even voiced the ambition to strengthen mutual support between its CSDP operations and European-led ad hoc coalitions. We ask whether and how this mutual support is strengthened and what it means for European defence integration. We focus on two cases: Task Force Takuba deployed to the Sahel region and the European Maritime Awareness mission i…
What we got wrong
Ad hoc coalitions in global governance
Ad hoc coalitions (AHCs) are an indispensable but scantly conceptualized part of global governance. In recent years, several typologies and classifications of global governance arrangements have been provided, mostly differentiating them based on their organizational design features of degree of formality and membership composition. These do not capture AHCs and the role they play in global governance. In this article, we not only provide a conce…
Ad hoc coalitions and institutional exploitation in international security
While the increasingly thick web of global, regional and sub-regional security arrangements and institutions has received ample scholarly attention, the phenomenon of ad hoc military coalitions and how they impact these institutions has been relatively little explored. We examine ad hoc coalitions in international security responses and develop a tentative typology of military responses that takes ad hoc coalitions into consideration, where we di…
A permanent headquarters under construction? The Military Planning and Conduct Capability as a proximate principal
This article studies the European Union (EU) Military Planning and Conduct Capability (MPCC), which was established in June 2017 and holds the strategic command of EU non-executive missions. While this is the closest the EU has ever come to a permanent military headquarters (HQ), the MPCC has not yet attracted much scholarly attention. This article fills this gap by applying principal-agent theorization about chains of delegation. It conceptualiz…
Governance Through Regime Complexity
The international response to armed conflict in Africa often takes the form of a regime complex characterized by institutional proliferation, overlap, unclear hierarchies, and multiple interconnections. At the same time, the course of conflict is hardly predictable. In such an environment, how can component units (institutional fora) of a regime complex effectively govern through complexity? We explore this question by focusing on the EU as an im…
Military Ad Hoc Coalitions and Their Role in International Conflict Management
Against the background of a crisis of United Nations (UN) peace operations, military ad hoc coalitions (AHCs) have increasingly gained a foothold as conflict management tools. This article provides the first comprehensive empirical mapping of military AHCs, focusing on the following questions: how have military AHCs evolved over time, where have they been deployed, who are the most active contributors, and how do AHCs interact and compare with ot…
From EU battlegroups to Rapid Deployment Capacity
The article uses the case of the development of the European Union Battlegroups to the Rapid Deployment Capacity (RDC) to better understand the changing learning capacity of the EU in its military Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). The article develops a theoretical framework to capture the most significant factors affecting learning by drawing on insights from the literatures on organizational learning and policy failure, with a specific…
Enemies or allies? How NGOs can push the military towards transparency around the use of force
This article examines the conditions under which non-governmental organisations (NGOs) gain access to defence administrations when campaigning for transparency around the use of military force. We theorise that gaining access in this traditionally secluded domain is a matter of supply and demand. NGOs can gain access through technical and political information, yet not without demand for these resources, dependent on the politicisation of concern…
No wings attached? Civil–military relations and agent intrusion in the procurement of fighter jets
This article studies civil–military relations in defence procurement. Applying insights from the principal–agent model, we argue that decision-making about defence procurement is inherently vulnerable to agency problems. Given the technical nature of these dossiers, governments and parliaments are often heavily dependent upon military expertise, creating leeway for defence administrations to steer decision-making towards their preferences. By mea…
Political Parties and Interest Groups
This benchmark study of the political party–interest group relationship—crucial in shaping the characteristics of democratic political systems—provides an in-depth analysis of the connection between special interests and political parties across thirteen democracies: Argentina, Britain, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United States.
Losing control
Russia's behaviour in the United Nations Security Council remains poorly understood. Applying principal-agent insights, this article analyses the Russian abstention towards Resolution 1973, which authorised intervention during the 2011 Libya crisis. Introducing a triangle of delegation, it shows that preferences diverged regarding the means and aims of the intervention. The article also investigates the information asymmetries which characterised…
Palgrave Handbook of Inter-Organizational Relations in World Politics
Constructive ambiguity or stringent monitoring? Towards understanding UN Security Council oversight over non-UN-led forces
The United Nations Security Council’s (UNSC) oversight over mandate implementation by the regional organizations and coalitions it authorizes is strongly characterized by processes of selectivity. Yet, little is known about these processes. Why is the stringency of these reporting requirements so diverse? And why is compliance to these reporting requirements deemed more important in one case, while less in the other? This article illustrates the …
Multinational rapid response mechanisms
Military rapid response mechanisms are generally understood as troops that are on standby, ready to be deployed to a crisis within a short time frame. Yet, the overall track record of the existing multinational rapid response mechanisms within the European Union, the African Union, and North Atlantic Treaty Organization remains disappointing, and the United Nations does not even have a rapidly deployable capacity anymore. Meanwhile, despite that …
EU Battlegroups
This article reviews the gloomy saga of the EU Battlegroups, focusing on four questions: Where do they come from? What do they look like? What have they been hindered by? And where do they go from here? It builds upon earlier findings in the literature and adds novel insights based on original data. In doing so, the article pays particular attention to the standby nations’ constant calculation of political and financial costs. It argues that reco…
Holding Accountable UN-Authorized Enforcement Operations
Is the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) capable and willing to hold accountable the forces which it authorizes? Although it is an often-voiced recommendation that the UNSC should step up its accountability efforts, such as by installing more strict reporting requirements to avoid mission creep, evaluations of the effectiveness thereof remain largely absent. This article suggests that a combination of process-tracing methods with insights fr…
Parliamentary involvement, party ideology and majority-opposition bargaining
This article examines the impact of parliamentary involvement in troop deployment decisions on restrictions on military mandates by examining the Belgian contribution to the 2011 Libya intervention and the coalition against the self-proclaimed Islamic State. More specifically, we analyse (1) the effect of party ideology on mandate preferences, and (2) the impact of bargaining between majority and opposition parties on the outcome of mandate negot…
Parliamentarisation as a Two-Way Process
This article investigates the drivers of the parliamentarisation of war powers. Building on recent findings in the study of war deployments, we argue that the existing literature has predominantly focused on parliamentary drivers of parliamentarisation, leaving potential executive interests untouched. To fill this gap, we propose a rational-choice institutionalist based framework for identifying the motivations and strategies of both parliamentar…
A permanent headquarters under construction? The Military Planning and Conduct Capability as a proximate principal
This article studies the European Union (EU) Military Planning and Conduct Capability (MPCC), which was established in June 2017 and holds the strategic command of EU non-executive missions. While this is the closest the EU has ever come to a permanent military headquarters (HQ), the MPCC has not yet attracted much scholarly attention. This article fills this gap by applying principal-agent theorization about chains of delegation. It conceptualiz…
No wings attached? Civil–military relations and agent intrusion in the procurement of fighter jets
This article studies civil–military relations in defence procurement. Applying insights from the principal–agent model, we argue that decision-making about defence procurement is inherently vulnerable to agency problems. Given the technical nature of these dossiers, governments and parliaments are often heavily dependent upon military expertise, creating leeway for defence administrations to steer decision-making towards their preferences. By mea…
Ad hoc coalitions and institutional exploitation in international security
While the increasingly thick web of global, regional and sub-regional security arrangements and institutions has received ample scholarly attention, the phenomenon of ad hoc military coalitions and how they impact these institutions has been relatively little explored. We examine ad hoc coalitions in international security responses and develop a tentative typology of military responses that takes ad hoc coalitions into consideration, where we di…
Enemies or allies? How NGOs can push the military towards transparency around the use of force
This article examines the conditions under which non-governmental organisations (NGOs) gain access to defence administrations when campaigning for transparency around the use of military force. We theorise that gaining access in this traditionally secluded domain is a matter of supply and demand. NGOs can gain access through technical and political information, yet not without demand for these resources, dependent on the politicisation of concern…
War in Ukraine
Governance Through Regime Complexity
The international response to armed conflict in Africa often takes the form of a regime complex characterized by institutional proliferation, overlap, unclear hierarchies, and multiple interconnections. At the same time, the course of conflict is hardly predictable. In such an environment, how can component units (institutional fora) of a regime complex effectively govern through complexity? We explore this question by focusing on the EU as an im…
What we got wrong
Ad hoc coalitions in global governance
Ad hoc coalitions (AHCs) are an indispensable but scantly conceptualized part of global governance. In recent years, several typologies and classifications of global governance arrangements have been provided, mostly differentiating them based on their organizational design features of degree of formality and membership composition. These do not capture AHCs and the role they play in global governance. In this article, we not only provide a conce…
Ad hoc coalitions
Launching multinational peace operations are time and politically sensitive decisions that frequently involve the use of force. As a result, a host of accountability issues arise. To date, mainly backward‐looking and hierarchical accountability measures have been developed to guide the implementation of multinational peace operations led by the most prominent actors in this policy domain: intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and ad hoc coalitio…
The 2024 Bernard Brodie Prize
Evaluating crisis response speed of international organisations
Armed conflicts, pandemics or natural disasters often necessitate rapid, coordinated responses by international organisations (IOs) to avoid escalation or loss of life. However, effective analytical tools to assess and compare the speed of these responses are lacking. This paper introduces a framework for evaluating IO crisis response speed, with the aim of better understanding which IOs are best equipped to offer rapid crisis responses and which…
Ad hoc coalitions in European security and defence
Ad hoc forms of military cooperation have become commonplace in European security and defence. The EU has even voiced the ambition to strengthen mutual support between its CSDP operations and European-led ad hoc coalitions. We ask whether and how this mutual support is strengthened and what it means for European defence integration. We focus on two cases: Task Force Takuba deployed to the Sahel region and the European Maritime Awareness mission i…
From policy to practice
North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO’s) active cooperation with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) on the protection of civilians (PoC) challenges the academic assumption that NATO’s decision-making structures are generally closed to civil society participation. What explains the decision of NATO officials to work with NGOs when developing a Policy for the PoC, and how did this cooperation take place? Combining insights from resource dep…
From EU battlegroups to Rapid Deployment Capacity
The article uses the case of the development of the European Union Battlegroups to the Rapid Deployment Capacity (RDC) to better understand the changing learning capacity of the EU in its military Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP). The article develops a theoretical framework to capture the most significant factors affecting learning by drawing on insights from the literatures on organizational learning and policy failure, with a specific…
Military Ad Hoc Coalitions and Their Role in International Conflict Management
Against the background of a crisis of United Nations (UN) peace operations, military ad hoc coalitions (AHCs) have increasingly gained a foothold as conflict management tools. This article provides the first comprehensive empirical mapping of military AHCs, focusing on the following questions: how have military AHCs evolved over time, where have they been deployed, who are the most active contributors, and how do AHCs interact and compare with ot…
The 2025 Bernard Brodie Prize
Political science (25 works) · Law (18 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Economics (15 works) · Public Administration (14 works) · Business (12 works) · Law (12 works) · Peacebuilding and International Security (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · International Relations and Foreign Policy (11 works)