The Venezuelan crisis is often framed in Northern scholarship as a binary struggle between authoritarianism and democracy or as a peripheral arena of the so-called Second Cold War. Such framings appear persuasive at first glance, yet they obscure deeper structural dynamics that become visible when the crisis is examined from a South American perspective. The crisis reveals the erosion of a regional project designed to preserve autonomy in defense and security. What is at stake is not only the fate of a regime, but the dismantling of an institutional architecture that once allowed the region to manage its own crises.

E-International Relations is free to read. We rely on reader support to make this possible.

Subscribe now

The unilateral military operation carried out by the United States on 3 January 2026, which resulted in the capture of Nicolás Maduro, crystallized this process. That intervention did not emerge in a vacuum. It became possible because South America had already dismantled the political instruments capable of containing escalation and preventing the externalization of regional crises. The normalization of direct military intervention marks a qualitative shift in the regional security environment and exposes the costs of privileging ideological alignment over institutional solidarity.

The internationalization of the Venezuelan crisis is neither inevitable nor simply the result of domestic authoritarian drift. It is the outcome of deliberate regional choices, especially the abandonment of the Union of South American Nations and its Council of South America Defense. By trading institutional constraint for short-term ideological convergence, South American governments surrendered control over their immediate strategic environment and reopened the door to extraregional intervention.

South American efforts to construct autonomous security arrangements long predate contemporary ideological divides. Early projects of regional coordination were driven less by opposition to the United States than by strategic necessity. Initiatives such as the Congress of Panama in 1826 emerged from fears of European reconquest in the aftermath of independence. At that moment, the United States was perceived not as a threat but as a potential partner in a hemispheric defensive arrangement.

The original interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine reflected this expectation. Many Latin American elites understood it as a collective shield against external powers rather than a mandate for subordination. The underlying logic was cooperation instead of dependency, a preference for working with Washington rather than working for it. This logic eroded over time. By the early twentieth century, the doctrine had been transformed into a justification for unilateral intervention, later institutionalized through the Organization of American States. Hemispheric security became progressively aligned with Northern priorities, narrowing the space for regional agency.

The creation of the Council of South America Defense in 2008 marked the most advanced attempt to reverse this historical pattern. It reflected a conscious effort to translate historical lessons into institutional practice. The council was not conceived as an ideological project, but as a pragmatic mechanism to foster trust, transparency, and shared strategic understandings among South American defense establishments. Its objective was not collective defense against regional adversaries, but the construction of a security culture capable of managing crises without external tutelage.

A central premise of the council was the shared perception that the primary threat to South America originated outside the region. Instability within South America was considered dangerous mainly when it created openings for extraregional intervention. The council was therefore designed to deny legitimacy and access to foreign military involvement by institutionalizing dialogue, confidence-building measures, and peer restraint. Through sustained interaction among defense ministers and military officials, the council functioned as a community of practice that gradually normalized transparency and cooperation. This process strengthened regional coordination while preserving peripheral agency through selective engagement with external powers. Autonomy was pursued through institutional density rather than isolation. This process also allowed for a consolidation of South America as an autonomous regional security complex.

This institutional architecture began to unravel after 2016, when regional cooperation became increasingly subordinated to ideological polarization and short-term domestic calculations. UNASUR was abandoned, the defense council rendered inoperative, and ad hoc groupings such as the Lima Group emerged in its place. The strategy of diplomatic isolation, closely aligned with Washington’s policy of maximum pressure, failed to produce political change in Venezuela. Instead, it dismantled the mechanisms that had previously allowed South America to manage political divergence autonomously. This shift was often framed as an ideological revanche against previous regionalist projects.

The consequence was the rapid internationalization of the Venezuelan crisis. In the absence of regional mediation, Venezuela was reframed not as a South American political problem to be addressed collectively, but as a security threat to be neutralized by extraregional powers. This shift represents a process of strategic regression, in which the region reverted to being an object rather than a subject of international politics. As documented in studies on crisis and collapse, institutions like PROSUR acted as a "hollow shell" that lacked technical density. Furthermore, the threat of becoming a Venezuela became a domestic tool for polarization. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro and other leaders used the Venezuelan crisis to mobilize their bases, ensuring that foreign policy served internal ideological battles rather than regional stability.

The Venezuelan crisis now unfolds within the broader dynamics of intensified great power rivalry, which has reshaped the global strategic landscape and reduced the margin for regional maneuver. The rivalry between the United States, China, and Russia has elevated Venezuela’s strategic relevance due to its energy resources and symbolic value. The absence of a regional defense framework has amplified these dynamics and reduced South America’s capacity to shape outcomes. Fragmentation carries tangible costs. Without coordinated defense mechanisms, the region faces growing difficulty in protecting strategic assets such as the Amazon, the South Atlantic, and critical mineral reserves. Negotiating individually with major powers places states in structurally weaker positions and reinforces patterns of geopolitical regression.

The Venezuelan crisis illustrates with particular clarity the costs of privileging ideological alignment over institutional solidarity. By dismantling UNASUR and the Council of South America Defense, South America abandoned a political technology designed to contain escalation and prevent the externalization of regional crises. The most tangible consequence has been the reintroduction of unilateral military intervention by the United States as a credible and normalized option. This development undermines the foundations of an international order formally grounded in sovereignty and the prohibition of the use of force.

Reversing this trajectory requires a recalibration grounded in Active Non-Alignment. This approach rejects automatic alignment while affirming agency through selective engagement and institutional reconstruction. Applied to defense, it implies rebuilding a non-partisan regional architecture capable of absorbing political divergence without externalizing conflict. Such a recalibration faces significant obstacles. South American integration remains deeply dependent on the ideological orientation of governments in office. Active Non-Alignment is therefore not an abstract ideal, but a strategic necessity rooted in historical experience and contemporary constraints. It offers a framework for restoring agency in a regional order increasingly shaped by external pressures.

Reclaiming the Spirit of 1826 does not mean replicating past institutional forms. It means restoring the logic that autonomy is achieved through institutions and collective action rather than ideological alignment. Without rebuilding regional defense cooperation, the Venezuelan pivot risks consolidating itself as a durable symbol of South America’s marginalization in the global order.

Guilherme Frizzera holds a PhD in International Relations from the University of Brasília, where he conducts postdoctoral research on digital sovereignty, strategic autonomy, and Global South responses to infrastructural dependence in cyberspace. He coordinates the International Relations programme at UNINTER, Brazil.

*Originally published in 2016 and preserved as part of our archive project.
E-International Relations is free to read. We rely on reader support to make this possible.

Subscribe now

Noam Chomsky is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Seen by many as “the father of modern linguistics”, his work as a theoretical linguist from the 1950s revolutionized the field of linguistics by treating language as a uniquely human, biologically based cognitive capacity. Through his contributions to linguistics and related fields, including cognitive psychology and the philosophies of mind and language, Chomsky helped to initiate and sustain what came to be known as the “cognitive revolution.” Chomsky has also gained a worldwide following as a political dissident for his analyses of the pernicious influence of economic elites on U.S. domestic politics, foreign policy, and intellectual culture. The author of more than 120 books, Chomsky is widely recognized as a paradigm shifter who helped spark a major revolution in the human sciences, and is one of the most cited scholars in the last few decades. His most recent documentary, Requiem for the American Dream, focuses on the defining characteristic of our time—the deliberate concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a select few.

How has the way you understand the world changed over time and what (or who) has prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?

For better or worse, I’ve pretty much stayed the same throughout my life. When I was a child in elementary school I was writing articles for the school newspaper on the rise of fascism in Europe and the threats to the world as I saw them from a 10-year-old point of view, and on from there. By the time I was a young teenager, I was very involved in radical politics of all kinds; hanging around anarchist bookstores and offices. A lot concerned what was happening during the Second World War: the British attack on Greece and the atomic bomb I thought was shattering.

The things I consider inspiring is seeing people struggling: poor suffering people, with limited resources, struggling to really achieve anything. Some of them are very inspiring. For example, a remote very poor village in southern Colombia organising to try to prevent a Canadian gold-mining operation from destroying their water supply and the environment; meanwhile, fending off para-military and military violence and so on. That kind of thing which you see all over the world is very inspiring.

In your documentary Requiem for the American Dream, you note that the driving down of tax rates and the outsourcing of lower-skilled jobs has exacerbated inequality in recent years. Both of these phenomena are arguably due to the pressures of globalisation, and so, is this period of rapid globalisation generally bad for workers?

They could be described as globalisation but it would be a mistake to do so. Globalisation can take all kinds of forms. For example, if there were anybody that believed in free markets they might take Adam Smith seriously. Adam Smith pointed out that the fundamental element of free markets is the free circulation of labour. We don’t have that. We have sharp restrictions on the movement of labour, and so, it not only means that working people can’t come to the United States to work, it means that privileged professionals, such as lawyers or CEOs, can set up protectionist barriers to prevent competition from abroad. Plenty of lawyers and doctors from abroad who are highly skilled could easily meet U.S. professional standards but of course they aren’t allowed in because professionals can protect themselves.

Globalisation could be designed so that it’s beneficial to the general population or it could be designed so that it functions along the lines of the international trade agreements, including the Uruguay Round, the WTO Agreement, NAFTA, the current Atlantic and Pacific agreements, which are all specifically designed as investor rights agreements, not even trade agreements. Very high protection for major corporations, for big pharmaceuticals, media conglomerates, and so on, and very high barriers through intellectual property rights. Devices that allow corporations, but of course not people, to sue governments action that might potentially harm their profits. That is a particular form of globalisation designed in the interest of the designers. The designers are concentrations of private power, linked closely to state power, so in that system they are consequences of globalisation.

You refer to the impact of the GI Bill of Rights and how in 1950, higher education was largely free and was seen much more as a public good. The period during the 1980s threatened the foundations of these integral institutions that had been established through the New Deal. How and why did these institutions come under attack?

The 1950-1960s had very high growth rates, no financial crises because of New Deal regulations that were still in place, and relatively egalitarian growth so every quintile grew roughly at the same level. That is what is called the golden age. It ended with the collapse of the post-War Bretton Woods system when the United States under Nixon blocked the convertibility of the dollar to gold which collapsed the international financial system which had all kinds of consequences. One was a rapid increase in the flow of capital and a rapid increase in speculation rather than serious investment leading to the financialisation of the economy which has been a major phenomenon in recent years. A lot of this had to do with the reduction of the rate of profit for manufacturing which convinced the owners of capital that it would be more profitable to shift towards financial manipulation than to actual production.

Along with this comes the options that were the extensions of a long process that goes way back to try to move production to places where wages are much lower, where you don't need to worry about environmental standards. It’s not that business began to try to reverse the policies. They also wanted to reverse the policies as it goes back to the late 1930s. By the late 1930s, the business community was appalled at the gains that were being made by working people and the general population. You read the Business Press in the late ‘30s and it talks about the threat of what they call the rising political power of the masses which is going to threaten the needs of American enterprise.

Businesses are always involved in a class war; sometimes they can do better and sometimes they can do worse but right after the Second World War, the major attack on labour and New Deal measures begun and took awhile to take off but with the breakdown of the international financial system in the early ‘70s, opportunities arose and class warfare increased. You can see that already in the late Carter years and it took off very strongly during the Reagan/Thatcher period where neoliberal policies were instituted and which had a devastating effect on the weaker societies, including the third world. In the richer societies, the United States and Europe, it has the effect of imposing relative stagnation on the large majority of the population while for a tiny sector a huge increase in wealth, but these are just all aspects of a constant class war that is being carried out. If there’s no reaction to it on the part of public organisations, then the class war succeeds.

Popular public organisations have been under attack and atomised, and the labour movement has been under severe attack. One aspect of the concentration of private wealth is that it sets off a vicious cycle; private wealth concentrates and it carries with it political power. That political power is used to introduce legislation which increase private wealth and so the cycle goes on. It’s not a law of nature, or a law of economics; these are matters of relative power of various classes of people and the ongoing conflicts over the social and political nature of the system. It right now happens to be a period of regression from the general viewpoint of the population. It’s happened before and it’s been overcome. You see it happening in many ways. One aspect is the decline of democracy which is very visible both in the United States and in Europe and has led to the significant decline of the more-or-less centrist parties. In the United States, the Democrats and the Republicans are both under severe attack from popular-based forces, such as Trump and Sanders. People that have very much the same interests and concerns and if they could get together on those issues it would be a major popular force and in Europe you see the same thing. Recently, in the Austrian elections, the two traditional parties that ran the country were out of the elections. The choice was between a neo-fascist party and a green party.

You reference Martin Gilens' study that finds that around 70% cannot affect government policy in any form. How has this alienation among the powerless translated in the discourse seen during the 2016 election primaries?

Very directly. That’s part of the basis of the support for Trump and Sanders. In some respects, they’re pretty similar reactions. There’s a close correlation between effective disenfranchisement and simply abstention which has been studied for years. Walter Dean Burnham years ago did a study of the socio-economic character of non-voters in the United States and what he found is that they’re pretty similar to the people in Europe who voted for Social Democratic and Labour-based parties. Since they don’t exist in the United States, they just didn’t vote. It’s been around for a long time, but it’s just getting exacerbated as large sectors of the population are just cast by the wayside in the course of neoliberal programs. Either they would organise, be effective and do something about it, such as the 1930s with the militant labour movement or just get angry or frustrated, xenophobic, racist, destructive and so on.

Inequality in all its forms continues to threaten democracy in the United States. Do you see evidence that positive change to reverse these trends will arise, and is there a case for optimism?

We can be very optimistic. Things like this have happened before and they’ve been overcome. The 1920s were a period kind of like this in many ways, but the 1930s were a significant revival, things changed and there are forces you can easily identify. A lot of the support for Sanders is promising and could have a lot of promise but it depends how it is developed; the same with Corbyn in England and Podemos in Spain. There are reactions to problems that are not easy to overcome, but I think there are plenty of possibilities.

—

This interview was conducted by James Resnick. James is Deputy Features Editor at E-IR.

Water has been an important natural resource since the beginning of civilization. It is one of many resources studied in the field of International Relations, from a variety of perspectives and theories, to examine its influence on politics and state behavior. The decrease in water supplies brought on by climate change has made water an contentious subject in social and political debates, and the rivalry over water's limited supplies during the global water crisis poses important justice issues of allocation, accessibility, lawful recipients, and prioritized uses. When Ethiopia began filling the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) in 2020, the dispute between Ethiopia and Egypt over the GERD and the Nile Basin was not just about generating electricity. It was about sovereignty, identity, and history. While a realist perspective frames the issue as a matter of national interest and security, we will approach the subject through the lens of identity and perception. How do the conflicting identities and discourses of Egypt and Ethiopia over the Nile River and the GERD shape their political behavior? 

*Originally published in 2025. E-International Relations is free to read. We rely on reader support to make this possible.

Subscribe now

The historical roots of the Nile conflict 

Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan are engaged in a long-standing disagreement over the Nile, the world's longest river. Despite the breakdown of mediated negotiations, all three countries remain heavily dependent on the river. The Nile is a transboundary river, with Egypt and Sudan as the downstream nations that depend heavily on its water for various purposes, albeit to varying degrees. More than 97% of Egypt's freshwater and 77% of Sudan's freshwater comes from the Nile River. For the past 5,000 years, Egypt maintained regional hegemony and enjoyed unchallenged access to the Nile. 

Colonial powers mostly fueled the conflict between the nations of the Nile Basin. To promote the sugar and textile industries, these colonial powers sought to establish sizable plantations to produce cotton and sugarcane, which they exported to Europe and other continents. Britain controlled treaty negotiations over the use of the Nile River to safeguard its interests in Egypt, at the expense of the other riparian governments. These treaties gave Egypt priority water rights. This laid the historical foundations for the imbalance in the distribution of the Nile's waters, which remains one of the main reasons for the conflict among the nations of the basin. 

After gaining independence, many African nations rejected the colonial agreements as biased and not legally valid. The Republic of Sudan renegotiated the 1929 agreement and, on November 8, 1959, in Cairo, reached a revised agreement with the United Arab Republic of Egypt regarding the full utilization of Nile waters. This marked the first agreement between sovereign nations in the Nile Basin.  The agreement confirmed that Sudan would receive less water than Egypt, despite the river's major portion flowing through Sudan. However, Ethiopia and other upstream countries viewed the deal as unjust because it restricted their ability to utilize and develop the Nile's resources.

Egypt’s identity and the existential threat narrative 

Egypt depends entirely on the Nile River for its freshwater needs. Ethiopia claims exclusive rights to use these water sources, with more than 80% are being consumed. This situation has made it a permanent goal for Egyptian leadership to ensure the continued flow of Nile waters. The significance of the Nile in ancient Egyptian thought stems from two fundamental reasons. First, Egypt was often referred to as the ‘gift of the Nile’, which explains the deep respect and veneration Egyptians held for the river. Second, it was considered inconceivable that the lifeblood of Egypt originated outside its sacred lands. This belief in the sacred nature of the Nile has helped to shape Egypt's national identity and its perception as a homeland. 

The modern Egyptian thinker Jamal Himdan emphasized a critical perspective on the Nile's importance by stating: "The first civilization was the fruit of a blissful union between Egypt and the Nile. If history is the father of the Egyptians, then Egypt is the mother of the world, and the Nile is simply the greatest ancestor of human civilization". Furthermore, the Nile River is considered an integral part of Egyptian identity, deeply embedded in the culture, mythology, and political discourse of what it means to be Egyptian. The management and control of the Nile became apparently a religious issue in both Egyptian and Ethiopian minds, historically associated with a miraculous theme in Christianity until the 19^th century. So, the Nile serves as a socially and spiritually constructed symbol rather than just a natural resource. Both Ethiopians and Egyptians revere the Nile, viewing it as having a divine origin and being intertwined with their national destinies. This belief influences their behavior, conventions, and even their states' interests. 

As a result, the tensions surrounding the Nile are rooted in deep cultural and religious narratives that extend beyond mere political or security concerns. The threat posed by dam construction to Egypt's access to the Nile could redefine aspects of its national identity, which is historically and culturally intertwined with the river. This identity is founded on the belief that the Nile, adopted by the ancient Egyptians, is rightfully theirs alone. 

Ethiopia’s identity and the justice narrative 

The concept of water justice aims to ensure fair access to water for all stakeholders and across different generations. A proper understanding of water justice should be grounded in the right to access water, equitable use and distribution of water resources, participation in decision-making processes related to the governance and management of water resources, and the effective utilization of water in river systems. Many scholars link the concept of ‘justice’ to terms such as equity, fairness, reasonableness, and equality. This connection considers global needs and challenges, which are directly tied to sustainable development. Numerous studies have shown that employing these concepts is vital for allocating transboundary water and managing shared water resources, serving as a mechanism for maintaining regional and international peace and security. 

Ethiopia asserts that, unlike other upstream countries, its right to manage its water resources fairly and responsibly. GERD symbolizes this pursuit of water justice. Historically, Ethiopia has been excluded from agreements made without its involvement, hindering its ability to benefit from a river that originates within its borders. Ethiopia views this exclusion as a violation of the principles of equitable water usage. According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the GERD embodies ‘unity in the face of poverty and perceived backwardness’ for Ethiopia, making the dam project highly significant for the nation. Moreover, "The GERD is a matter of ensuring sovereignty" stated Demeke Mekonnen, the Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister of Ethiopia. Becoming a significant power exporter would provide Ethiopia with the energy it needs, strengthen its economy, reduce extreme poverty, and foster profitable international connections.  

This narrative has been leveraged to support the dam's mission and establish internal national legitimacy. Additionally, it promotes a vision that aligns with Ethiopia's overall growth and economic justice aspirations. As a result, the dam has become a symbol of the country's regeneration. Ethiopia frames the dam as a distinctly African project, emphasizing that the Nile is shared among eleven African states, and many observers believe it will facilitate the continent's green transition. Conversely, Egypt views these developments as a potential threat to Arab water security. Therefore, the dispute surrounding the dam goes beyond mere hydrological concerns; it represents a deeper struggle between Egypt’s ancient civilizational identity and Ethiopia’s emerging modern identity centered on the Nile. 

From the perspective of Ethiopians, the construction of the dam also transforms the symbolic representation of the Nile and the development of Ethiopia's national identity. Historically, the Nile was seen as a curse from an economic point of view that deprived Ethiopia of its natural resources and was associated with negative connotation. However, perceptions of the river have changed dramatically, with it now viewed as a catalyst for Ethiopia's economic and developmental progress. The Nile has emerged as a unifying element in the creation of a new Ethiopian identity, grounded in industrialization and modernization, with the GERD at its core. This indicates that Ethiopia is striving to build a collective identity that legitimizes its pursuit of the GERD project, despite Egypt’s ongoing opposition. Ethiopia aims to establish a new national identity rooted in growth and self-determination. At the same time, Egypt asserts historical rights over the Nile, reflecting a deeper identity clash between the two nations. 

Egyptian foreign policy and strategic behavior toward the GERD 

The Nile River has long been a vital source of life for Egyptians, making Egypt's foreign policy in Africa, particularly its relationship with Ethiopia, one of the country's most critical foreign policy priorities. Many writings by policy and decision-makers illustrate this viewpoint. For example, in the Philosophy of the Revolution text, President Gamal Abdel-Nasser identified the Arab, African, and Islamic worlds as the most significant spheres of Egypt's foreign policy. He emphasized the Nile River as the artery of life, a key reason for Egypt's engagement in African affairs. Similarly, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, an Egyptian diplomat and former UN secretary-general, delineates four primary foreign policy spheres for Egypt: Arab, African, Mediterranean, and Islamic. He considers Africa the most important of these due to the challenges posed by the Nile. One of the most pressing challenges posed by the Nile is the GERD, particularly for both Egypt and Ethiopia. 

The GERD is a major hydropower project built on the Blue Nile. The project has sparked a dispute among Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia over claims to natural and historical rights to the Nile's waters, as outlined in the 1929 and 1959 watercourse treaties. These agreements granted Egypt veto power over projects along the river in other riparian states. They established Egypt's annual share of Nile waters at 55.5 billion cubic meters and Sudan's at 18.5 billion cubic meters, while overlooking the needs of upstream countries. 

Since Egypt relies on the Nile for over 90% of its water supply, any disruptions to the river's flow are regarded as a national security issue. This dominance, often referred to as hydro-hegemony, contrasted with the ambitions of then Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, who aimed to utilize the river to improve domestic and regional socioeconomic conditions. For Ethiopia, the GERD is essential to its Growth and Transformation Plan. This growth was expected to result from attracting large-scale foreign investments and increasing power generation from 2,000 to 10,000 megawatts.  When Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi announced the country's intention to construct the GERD in 2011, Egypt was preoccupied with the impacts of the Arab Uprisings on its domestic politics. As a result, Egypt did not effectively address the issues surrounding the GERD. Internal challenges took precedence over external ones, preventing the GERD issue from being prioritized in Egypt's foreign policy agenda.  

In the following years, negotiations involving the World Bank, the United States, and, since 2020, the African Union attempted to mediate the situation. Despite these efforts, the parties failed to reach a comprehensive, binding agreement concerning the dam's filling and operation.  On February 20, 2022, amid a continued stalemate in negotiations, Ethiopia activated the turbines of the GERD, marking the start of the dam's power generation phase. This decision, made by Ethiopia without consulting Egypt and Sudan, highlights a continuing trend of unilateral decision-making and a preference for sovereignty over collaboration and compromise in resolving this crisis. 

The three phases of Egypt’s foreign policy regarding the GERD

1. 2011–2013: Domestic Preoccupation

Internal unrest following the 2011 Arab Uprising significantly limited Egypt's foreign strategy in the early 2010s. Egypt's response to Ethiopia's announcement of the GERD was slow and ineffective, primarily due to the political turmoil that included the overthrow of President Mubarak, the transitional government, and the brief control of the Muslim Brotherhood. Domestic priorities overshadowed foreign concerns, allowing Ethiopia to strengthen its position on the dam. During this period, Egypt was undergoing changes in its political and social identity, shaping its actions beyond mere material factors such as finances or power. Conflicts arose over ideas and values, and the state’s identity was still being defined. Societal and national identity appeared divided, leading to an unclear perception of Egypt’s role. Thus, internal political discussions focused mainly on preserving the state which diminished decision-makers awareness of Egypt's responsibilities as a guardian of the Nile. 

2.  2014–2019: Strategic Realignment and Diplomatic Reengagement

Egypt began to assert a more coherent and proactive foreign policy when President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi took office in 2013. The GERD was a prominent issue on Egypt's national security agenda. Cairo sought to reestablish communication with Sudan and Ethiopia, leading to the 2015 Declaration of Principles (DOP). Egypt also strengthened its negotiating position by leveraging diplomatic alliances with the United States, Europe, and Gulf allies, emphasizing cooperation while maintaining its historical water rights. 

3.  2020–today: Assertive Diplomacy and Internationalization 

As Ethiopia continued to fill and operate the GERD independently, Egypt adopted a more assertive diplomatic stance, by framing the conflict in terms of international law and regional stability. Additionally, Egypt recognized the need for both internal reforms and external pressure, as evidenced by domestic water management initiatives such as pricing policies and irrigation modernization. Overall, Egypt's foreign policy regarding the GERD has shifted from a reactive and internally focused stance to a strategic, globally oriented approach, achieving a balance between diplomatic engagement and the defence of its critical water interests. Further, following the ascent of President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi to power, the Egyptian state aimed to restore a cohesive national identity along three key dimensions: Internal stability as a prerequisite for regional leadership; re-establishing Egypt's role as a leader in the Arab and African regions; and evoking the historical symbolism of Egypt as the gift of the Nile. 

To create a strong regional alliance that compels Ethiopia to return to the negotiating table and uphold the principle of do no harm, Egypt is attempting to realign the Horn of Africa nations that previously supported Ethiopia under the Entebbe Agreement. This strategy is part of a broader Egyptian ambition to regain its African influence, which has waned over the decades, and to reassert itself as a key player in the regional security dynamics of the Red Sea and Nile Basin. In this context, Egypt’s efforts in the Horn of Africa reinforce its self-image as a major Nile power, tasked with safeguarding the regional water system. Its initiatives to engage countries like Eritrea, Somalia, and Djibouti, alongside efforts to counterbalance Ethiopia, reflect an identity narrative that views the security of the Nile as an extension of Egyptian national security. 

Conclusion

The complexity of the water conflict between Egypt and Ethiopia stems from differing perceptions and identities that each state holds regarding itself and the other. For Egypt, the Nile River is a crucial component of its national and historical identity, intertwined with concepts of survival, national security, and its rich cultural heritage, leading it to perceive the river as a historical right that must be preserved. In contrast, Ethiopia seeks to forge a new identity that reflects its emergence as a rising regional power and to actualize it through significant development projects, such as the GERD. The resolution of the conflict surrounding the GERD requires a transformation of perceptions and narratives between Egypt and Ethiopia. It can be achieved through dialogue, confidence-building measures, and the establishment of shared norms. The central idea is to create a collective identity among states that share the Nile, viewing it as a source of mutual development rather than a source of competition, and recognizing the river as a shared regional heritage and a cooperative resource. 

Table 1: The key treaties, their signatories, and main provisions

Treaty Name | Year | Signatory Parties | Main Principles

Anglo–Ethiopian Treaty | 1902 | Great Britain on behalf of Sudan and Ethiopia | Outlined the boundaries between Ethiopia and Sudan and had a provision prohibiting Ethiopia from building on the Sobat River, Lake Tana, or Blue Nile without British approval.

Anglo–Egyptian Treaty | 1929 | Great Britain representing its East African colonies: Kenya, Tanganyika, Uganda and Egypt | Outlined the boundaries between Ethiopia and Sudan and had a provision prohibiting Ethiopia from building on the Sobat River, Lake Tana, or Blue Nile without British approval.

Nile Waters Agreement between Egypt and Sudan | 1959 | Egypt and Sudan | Allocated 55.5 billion m³ of water to Egypt and 18.5 billion m³ to Sudan annually; gave both countries veto power over any Nile projects in other riparian states.

---

References

Abdel Moneim, Yasmine. “Balancing Cooperation and Conflict in International Water Law: A Case of the Nile River Basin.” Environmental Policy and Law 0, no. 0 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1177/18785395251385825.

Akram Ezzamouri, The Nile River Dispute: Fostering a Human Security Approach, ARIES 22: 24, 2022. 

Colette Yamashita Holcomb, Ethiopia’s Nile Dispute Runs Deeper than Physical Resources, Columbia Political Review, 25.9.2023, retrieved from https://www.cpreview.org/articles/2023/9/ethiopias-nile-dispute-runs-deeper-than-physical-resources

Erbas, Isa. 2022. “Constructivist Approach in Foreign Policy and in International Relations.” Journal of Positive School Psychology 6, no. 3: 43.

Habtamu Diriba and others, Transboundary conflict management of the

Halawa, Hafsa. “Egypt’s Decade of Water Woes.” Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI), 2022. http://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep45730.

Hamdy A. Hassan, Egypt and controlling the Nile: From mythologies to real politics, Pambazuka News, 07.09.2017, retrieved from https://www.pambazuka.org/egypt-and-controlling-nile-mythologies-real-politics-0

Hassan, Hamdy A., and Ahmad Al Rasheedy. “The Nile River and Egyptian Foreign Policy Interests.” African Sociological Review / Revue Africaine de Sociologie 11, no. 1 (2007): 25–37. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24487584.

İlkbahar, Hasan. “Egyptian Foreign Policy and the Nile River: A Historical Analysis.” İçtimaiyat 8, no. 2 (2024): 369–384. https://doi.org/10.33709/ictimaiyat.1411572.

International Crisis Group. Bridging the Gap in the Nile Waters Dispute. Africa Report No. 271. March 20, 2019. https://www.crisisgroup.org/africa/ethiopia-sudan-egypt/271-bridging-gap-nile-waters-dispute

Lansing Institute. (2024, November 1). Egypt creates anti-Ethiopia alliance in the Horn of Africa. https://lansinginstitute.org/2024/11/01/egypt-creates-anti-ethiopia-alliance-in-the-horn-of-africa/

Nile River Basin: Past, present, and future, International Journal of Advances in Engineering and Management, Volume 3, Issue 9 Sep 2021

Smith, Curtis. 2024. “War Over Water: The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam and the Potential for the World’s First Modern Conflict Over Water.” The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs.

Sümer, Vakur. Agreement over Nile? Khartoum Declaration and Ten Principles that Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia Have Agreed Upon. Center for Middle Eastern Studies, January 26, 2016. https://orsam.org.tr/en/yayinlar/agreement-over-nile-khartoum-declaration-and-ten-principles-that-egypt-sudan-and-ethiopia-have-agreed-upon/

United Nations. (n.d.). Water and climate change. In Climate issues. United Nations. https://www.un.org/en/climatechange/science/climate-issues/water

Chourouk Mestour is a doctoral candidate in international relations, focusing on security and strategic studies across Africa, with a particular emphasis on North Africa, international relations theories, and postcolonial studies. Her research encompasses a range of outputs, including articles in Arabic, book reviews, English-language reviews of research papers, and translations in both Arabic and English.

While indigenous civil society organisations (CSOs) are important actors in post-conflict peacebuilding, they have traditionally played a somewhat secondary role by carrying out unofficial Track II (T2) peacebuilding activities, such as peace education programs and problem-solving workshops. They are often absent from the negotiating table, with official mediation instead led by international actors and diplomats. This does not mean indigenous organisations are ineffective, but that their peacebuilding influence has tended to be more focused on community relations than determining a conflict’s future. However, in recent times, indigenous CSOs have increasingly assumed a more central role in peacebuilding operations. As international actors, most notably the United States, continue to roll back the amount of humanitarian funding and support given to peacebuilding, a space has opened for indigenous CSOs to more explicitly shape the future trajectory of their conflict and associated peacebuilding efforts.

E-International Relations is free to read. We rely on reader support to make this possible.

Subscribe now

By focusing on the Cypriot conflict, this short article will demonstrate how several peacebuilding CSOs have recently assumed greater responsibility and agency, notably by influencing the country’s peacebuilding priorities. As external actors continue to reduce their support, indigenous CSOs will likely play a central peacebuilding role in the future. We should no longer view them as secondary or peripheral actors, but as integral peacebuilders with an unmatched understanding and attachment to conflict and related peacebuilding efforts. 

Civil Society’s Peacebuilding Role

In recent decades, researchers and policymakers have increasingly argued that indigenous civil society organisations (CSOs) – here defined as organisations comprising of shared interests, purposes and values, distinct from the state, market and family, such as religious associations, women’s organisations and human rights groups – play a critical role in post-conflict peacebuilding (Barrow 2023, 1). As they are ingrained into disputant communities, they understand their ‘cultural context and nuanced dynamics’ (Jewett 2019, 119) and can thereby develop effective, working relationships with conflicting parties, who commonly perceive them as legitimate and well-meaning actors.

While there is wide recognition that indigenous CSOs should be involved in peace efforts, the specific means by which they contribute to peacebuilding continues to attract scholarly debate. Some scholars focus on the merits and drawbacks of including CSOs in official peace negotiations - Track 1 (T1) efforts - a practice often referred to as ‘direct participation’ in peace processes (Kew & Wanis-St. John 2008,17). The arguments put forward for including CSOs at this high level include their ability to ensure greater public representation in negotiations, while engendering societal and community ownership of an eventual peace agreement (Paffenholz 2014; Lorentzen 2020).

However, there have traditionally been few cases of CSOs directly influencing peace talks at the negotiating table, with Paffenholz noting that ‘negotiators have tended to favour the exclusion of CSOs from peace negotiations’ (Paffenholz 2014, 73). There are notable exceptions to this trend. For example, the 2003 peace settlement in Liberia was signed by the government and two rebel groups, besides several CSOs, such as the Inter-Religious Council for Liberia (Nilsson 2012, 244). However, other official peace negotiations, such as in Northern Ireland and Bosnia, were ‘exclusive’ given that those directly involved in the negotiations were ‘political leaders and diplomatic envoys’ (Kmec & Ganiel 2019, 151).

In these cases of exclusion, CSOs have historically embarked on unofficial forms of peacebuilding, which take place away from the negotiating table. In practice, CSOs typically become facilitators of unofficial Track 2 (T2) interventions. T2 is a term often attributed to Joseph Montville, who defined it as ‘unofficial, informal interaction between members of adversary groups or nations that aim to develop strategies, influence public opinion, organise human and material sources in ways that might help resolve their conflict’ (Montville and Davidson 1981, 192). T2 interventions are largely welcomed by officials and policymakers, as they typically supplement T1 diplomacy by creating peaceful conditions where official negotiations are more likely to succeed. Specific T2 interventions include dialogue forums, where parties are brought together by a facilitator to improve interpersonal relationships and understanding; problem-solving workshops, consisting of controlled communication where disputants are encouraged to discuss potential peacebuilding strategies; and peace education programs, designed to promote peaceful coexistence by countering divisive narratives (Burgess and Burgess 2010; Çuhadar & Dayton 2012).

Cypriot Peacebuilding and Civil Society

Cyprus has been divided between the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC) and the southern Republic of Cyprus (RoC) since Turkey’s 1974 invasion culminated in the separation of the island’s two largest ethnic communities, the Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots. Official peace talks have taken place periodically over the past 50 years, but have repeatedly failed to appease both communities and resolve their points of contention.

The most recent attempts to resolve the conflict were the 2017 peace talks held at the Swiss resort of Crans-Montana. The talks were convened by the United Nations’ (UN’s) Special Adviser on Cyprus, Espen Barth Eide, and included representatives from Cyprus’ guarantor powers (Britain, Greece and Turkey), in addition to the EU and leaders of both the RoC and TRNC (Coufoudakis 2018). The talks lasted for ten days, beginning on 28th June 2017, before collapsing ‘amid anger and recriminations’ on 7th July (Smith 2017). One of the main points of contention was Turkey’s refusal to withdraw its troops from the island, which is a condition insisted upon by the Greek Cypriot (GC) community.

As has been the case with previous peace talks, the Crans-Montana negotiations were ‘exclusive’, with little opportunity for civil society inclusion. As such, the island’s civil society has traditionally relied on alternative means of peacebuilding, principally the facilitation of unofficial T2 interventions. This has been the case since the number of Cypriot peacebuilding CSOs proliferated after 2003, when restrictions preventing Turkish and Greek Cypriots from crossing the divide were relaxed. Women’s groups, youth-based organisations, educational associations and religious groups developed in the years that followed, such as the Association of Historical Dialogue and Research (AHDR) and Hands Across the Divide (HAD). While the CSOs have different interests, they facilitate similar types of peacebuilding activity. They include dialogue forums where Greek and Turkish Cypriots (TCs) can discuss and propose solutions to different aspects of conflict, and educational programs where young GCs and TCs learn about each other’s community away from the nationalist education curricula they are exposed to in school.

One CSO that has received considerable scholarly attention – owing to its somewhat unique contribution within the Cypriot context - is the Home for Cooperation (HFC), a community hub within Nicosia’s buffer zone. Officially opened in 2011, it describes itself as ‘the embodiment of intercommunal cooperation, contributing to the collective efforts of civil society in their engagement with peacebuilding’ (HFC website 2023), given that it provides TCs and GCs with a place to meet and socialise in the space dividing the two communities. It hosts a range of events, including multicommunal performing arts festivals designed to strengthen links between citizens, build bridges and facilitate interaction (Ladini 2009, 54-5; Tziarras 2018).

Declining international support

However, it has become increasingly clear over the past decade that Cypriot CSOs are assuming greater responsibility for the future of the island’s conflict and peacebuilding. There are several interconnected reasons for this. There is widespread domestic understanding that Cyprus is way down the list of priorities facing the international peacebuilding community. Even though Cyprus is geopolitically important for several reasons – including contestation between Turkey and the EU over offshore gas extraction in the Eastern Mediterranean – it is believed that international attention will remain predominantly focused on other issues, such as the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Palestine conflicts, for the foreseeable future. It is telling that there has been little appetite to restart official peace talks since their most recent demise in 2017.

This declining international attention on Cyprus is evidenced by the decreasing amount of international funding being channelled into the island’s humanitarian and peacebuilding activities. Over the past year, we have seen foreign actors and governments – most notably the US – limiting their financial humanitarian support. In early 2025, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was heavily defunded, with over 80% of the agency’s global humanitarian and peacebuilding programmes cancelled by March 2025 (Faguy 2025). The UK has also cut foreign aid by over £6 billion, while other European countries have heavily reduced their commitments (Peace Direct 2026).

Cyprus is an interesting case in this regard, as the decline of international financial support began much earlier than 2025. The US was previously one of the most prolific supporters of Cypriot reconciliation measures. USAID financially supported the island’s Action for Cooperation and Trust (ACT) programme, which was set up to support ‘civil society initiatives’ aimed at ‘peacebuilding and confidence building’ between both communities, including cultural heritage and educational projects (UNDP webpage 2023). However, the programme was discontinued in March 2016, following USAID’s decision to stop funding Cypriot projects. This was primarily owing to USAID’s priorities shifting ‘to other parts of the world where there is more active conflict’ (Interview with USAID employee 1, 2023).

USAID is not the only donor to curtail its financial support. The UK was also previously a significant supporter of Cypriot peacebuilding activities, but its 'focus has turned elsewhere’ in recent years, given there is ‘less money to go around than there used to be’ (Interview with Cyprus High Commission representative 2023). There is also a growing assumption among foreign donors that it is ‘futile’ supporting Cypriot peacebuilding initiatives until the island’s two nationalist administrations (in the RoC and TRNC) learn to ‘speak with each other again’ and ‘reconcile their differences about the island’s future’ (Interview with Cyprus High Commission representative 2023). The domestic political situation is cited by other donors, including the EU, as a factor deterring their financial peacebuilding support.

Asserting Agency

Some initial studies have been carried out to question how the declining level of funding has impacted indigenous peacebuilding actors in different parts of the world. Peace Direct, an International NGO, finds that it has led to increased pressure on local peacebuilders to continue their activities without financial support, while long-term planning has become increasingly difficult owing to the precarious position many indigenous actors now find themselves in (Peace Direct 2026). Ukrainian CSOs are struggling to provide the same level and quality of humanitarian services, including educational programmes (Dolinina 2025), while peacebuilding CSOs operating in the Central African Republic and Democratic Republic of Congo are trying their best to continue at least some of their community integration activities (Peace Direct 2026). Another recent study finds that key ‘efforts led by women peacebuilders have been severely undermined by recent funding cuts’, including women-led educational initiatives in Syria and Afghanistan (GIWPS 2025).

The purpose of this article is not to deny or challenge these negative implications arising from the decline of international funding, but to argue that this situation also creates an opportunity, at least once the initial shock of funding termination has subsided. This is the attitude shared by many Cypriot peacebuilding CSOs, which have had longer to adjust to decreased funding than CSOs operating in other contexts. They speak of asserting their agency by assuming greater ownership and responsibility for the island’s conflict and peacebuilding efforts. This simultaneously allows them to break from their previous dependency upon external actors and agendas, with several CSOs claiming that their autonomy was previously restricted, given that donors typically prescribe and ‘dictate what exactly the money should be used for’ (Interview with HFC employee 1, 2023). As such, while many Cypriot CSOs originated as relatively ad hoc groups planning and facilitating T2 interventions in accordance with donors’ preferences, they increasingly see themselves as integral to keeping the idea of a peaceful resolution ‘alive’ within the wider Cypriot community. As few other actors are driving forward the Cypriot peace agenda, it is a case of ‘if not us, then who?’ (Interview with AHDR employee 1, 2023).

While there is no single strategy or mechanism by which Cypriot CSOs assert their agency, one principal method has been to shape the structure and agenda of the overall peace process. In practice, this entails pressing for the inclusion of certain groups and individuals in the peace process, and campaigning for specific topics and conflict-related issues to be added to the island’s overall peace agenda, or to be prioritised once negotiations resume sometime in the future. Several CSOs believe that their close relationship with the UN’s Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus (UNFICYP) is integral in allowing them to push ‘for change in how the conflict is managed’ (Interview with HFC employee 1, 2023). As official peace talks take place under the auspices of the UN, in collaboration with other members of the negotiation team, the UN ultimately determines their procedure and is generally responsible for managing and coordinating the island’s peacebuilding efforts.

As such, the ‘good relationship’ formed between UNFICYP and two education-focused CSOs, the Association for Historical Dialogue and Research (AHDR) and the Home for Cooperation (HFC), has allowed the two CSOs to push UNFICYP, and the international peacebuilding community more broadly, into making peace education a ‘key component of any eventual peace agreement’ (Interview with AHDR employee 1, 2023). The CSOs believe widescale adoption of the ‘peace education’ term and framework is itself a key ‘indicator of success’ (Interview with HFC employee 1, 2023), with UNFICYP’s Civil Affairs section fully integrating the ‘premise of peace education’ into their work and activities (Interview with UNFICYP employee 1, 2023). The CSOs and UNFICYP are clear that there would be fewer opportunities to influence the peace process and UNFICYP’s own priorities if external actors and donors, including the US, remained explicitly focused on determining the island’s peace process.

In practice, the CSOs’ agenda-setting ability derives from AHDR’s Director being recently added to the Technical Committee on Education’s membership. This is one of the island’s 12 Technical Committees, which aim to encourage and facilitate ‘greater interaction and understanding between the two communities’ (UNDP webpage). They also have specific remits and areas of focus, such as education, culture and the environment. AHDR’s Director has long worked with UNFICYP and is widely judged to have a ‘deep knowledge of education’ that benefits the committee (Interview with UNFICYP employee 1, 2023). His membership provides him with the opportunity to raise AHDR’s objectives with the full committee, including the CSO’s consistent call for schools to assume a ‘critical, empathetic and multiperspectival approach’ to history education (AHDR Policy Paper 2013, 7). This has enabled AHDR to demonstrate the importance of peace education to UNFICYP and other committee members, and has contributed to UNFICYP’s acceptance of the peace education framework.

There are further examples of indigenous CSOs influencing the agenda of the Cypriot peace process. Hands Across the Divide (HAD) was established in 2001 as the island’s first multicommunal women’s organisation. It specifically focuses on uniting Greek and Turkish Cypriot women, in addition to campaigning for the inclusion of women in official peace negotiations. HAD believes their targeted campaigning has forced international actors, most notably the UN, to ‘take note’ of their ‘specific demands’, including their desire for ‘more women to be formally involved in peace negotiations’, which is now a priority for UNFICYP (Interview with HAD member 1, 2023). Indeed, the employment of a Gender Affairs Officer as part of UNFICYP’s Civil Affairs team – a position that was added in 2017 – largely stemmed from ‘continued discussion and campaigning from civil society groups, especially Hands Across the Divide’ as to the importance of gender inclusion in all aspects of peacebuilding (Interview with UNFICYP Gender Affairs Officer 2024). HAD are adamant that the island’s civil society is increasingly ‘filling the void’ left by the international community’s growing detachment from the island (Interview with HAD member 1, 2023).

Conclusion

The main objective of this article has been to illustrate an emerging trend within the peacebuilding field. There is now broad recognition that international actors, most notably the US, are rolling back the amount of support and funding available for peacebuilding and humanitarian activities around the world. While the wider implications remain somewhat uncertain, initial scholarly debate has largely focused on how this situation is undermining the ability of indigenous actors to develop and facilitate peacebuilding activities. It is, of course, the case that a sudden termination of funding significantly hinders peacebuilding actors, but this should also be seen as an opportunity, at least in the longer term. By focusing on the Cypriot context, this article has demonstrated how the growing disassociation and absence of international support have provided a space for indigenous actors to more explicitly shape the island’s peacebuilding priorities. We have seen how CSOs are asserting their agency by increasingly setting the agenda of the island’s peace process, specifically by influencing the UN peacekeeping mission’s focus. Although a lot more research is required in this area, we should no longer regard indigenous peacebuilders as secondary actors facilitating unofficial activities, but as central actors increasingly determining the future trajectory of conflict and peacebuilding.

References

Association for Historical Dialogue and Research. 2013. ‘’Policy Paper: Rethinking Education in Cyprus’’. Nicosia: AHDR. https://www.ahdr.info/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/POLICY-PAPER_FINAL-LR.pdf.

Barrow, Mark. 2023. ‘’Enabling Within Constraints: Assessing International Aid's Impact Upon Cypriot Peacebuilding Organisations’’. Journal of Peacebuilding and Development 18, No. 3: 295-309.

Burgess, Heidi and Guy Burgess. 2010. ‘’Conducting track II peacemaking’’. US Institute of Peace. https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/resources/PMT_Burgess_Conducting_TrackII.pdf.

Coufoudakis, Van. 2018. ‘’Cyprus: The Crans-Montana Deadlock and the Next Steps’’, Greek News, April 21, 2018. https://www.greeknewsonline.com/cyprus-the-crans-montana-deadlock-and-the-next-steps/.

Çuhadar, Esra and Bruce Dayton. 2012. ‘’Oslo and Its Aftermath: Lessons Learned from Track Two Diplomacy’’. Negotiation Journal 28, No. 2: 155-179.

Davidson, William. D. and Joseph V. Montville. 1981. ‘’Foreign policy according to Freud’’. Foreign Policy 45, No. 45: 145-157.

Dolinina, Olga. 2025. ‘’US funding cuts hit peacebuilding initiatives in Ukraine’’, Peace Direct, September 09, 2025. https://www.peaceinsight.org/en/articles/us-funding-cuts-hit-peacebuilding-initiatives-in-ukraine/?location=ukraine&theme=refugees-and-idps.

Faguy, Ana. 2025. ‘’USAID officially closes, attracting condemnation from Obama and Bush’’, BBC News, July 02, 2025. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c307zq8ppj6o.  

GIWPS. 2025. ‘’Women Peacebuilders Bear the Brunt of the Funding Freeze: How You Can Help’’, Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, April 30, 2025. https://giwps.georgetown.edu/2025/04/30/women-peacebuilders-funding-freeze-how-you-can-help/.

Home for Cooperation. 2025. About Us page. https://www.home4cooperation.info/who-we-are/.

Jewett, Georgia. 2019. ‘’Necessary but insufficient: Civil society in international mediation’’. International Negotiation 24, No. 1: 117–135.

Kew, Darren and Anthony Wanis-St John. 2008. ‘’Civil Society and Peace Negotiations: Confronting Exclusion’’. International Negotiation 13, No. 1: 11-36.

Kmec, Vladimir and Gladys Ganiel. 2019. ‘’The Strengths and Limitations of the Inclusion of Religious Actors in Peace Processes in Northern Ireland and Bosnia and Herzegovina’’. International Negotiation 24, No. 1: 136-163.

Ladini, Gianfabrizio. 2009. ‘’Peacebuilding, United Nations and civil society: The case of Cyprus’’. Cyprus Review 21, No. 2: 37–61.

Lorentzen, Jenny. 2020. ‘’Women’s Inclusion in the Malian Peace Negotiations: Norms and Practices’’. Swiss Political Science Review 26, No. 4: 406-424.McKeon, Celia. 2004. ‘’Owning the process: The role of civil society in peace negotiations’’. London: Conciliation Resources: https://www.c-r.org/resource/owning-process-role-civil-society-peace-negotiations.

Nilsson, Desirée. 2012. ‘’Anchoring the Peace: Civil Society actors in Peace Accords and Durable Peace’’. International Interactions 38, No. 2: 243-266.

Paffenholz, Thania. 2014. ‘’Civil Society and Peace Negotiations: Beyond the Inclusion-Exclusion Dichotomy’’. Negotiation Journal 30, No. 1: 69-91.

Peace Direct. 2026. ‘’Global Funding Cuts: What have they meant for local peacebuilders?’’. Peace Direct. https://www.peacedirect.org/global-funding-cuts.

Smith, Helen. 2017. ‘'Patience is running out': pressure on Turkey and Greece as Cyprus talks open’’. The Guardian, June 28, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/28/a-best-and-last-hope-talks-begin-over-cypriot-reunification.

Tziarras, Zenonas. 2018. ‘’Pre-conditions for peace: A civil society perspective on the Cyprus problem’’. Nicosia: PRIO Cyprus Centre. https://cyprus.prio.org/Publications/Publication/?x=4266/

United Nations Development Programme. 2009. ‘’Action for Cooperation and Trust in Cyprus’’. https://undp-act.org/default.aspx?tabid=144&it=0&mid=0&itemid=0&langid=1#:~:text=Since%20its%20launch%20in%20October%202005%20the%20United,capacities%20of%20Cypriots%20to%20actively%20participate%20in%20reconciliation.

United Nations Development Programme. 2025. ‘’Support Facility to the Technical Committees’’. https://www.undp.org/cyprus/support-facility-technical-committees.

Interviews

Interviews with the Association of Historical Dialogue and Research Employee 1, conducted by Mark Barrow. In-person interview in Nicosia, Cyprus (18 April 2023 and 20 March 2024).

Interview with Cyprus High Commission Representative 1, conducted by Mark Barrow. In-person interview by Mark Barrow (12 March 2023).

Interview with Hands Across the Divide Member 1, conducted by Mark Barrow. Online Video Call (07 November 2022). In-person interview in Nicosia, Cyprus (27 March 2023, 19 September 2023 and 29 March 2024).

Interview with Home for Cooperation Employee 1, conducted by Mark Barrow. Online Video Call (03 November 2022). In-person interview in Nicosia, Cyprus (22 March 2023 and 20 March 2024).

Interview with UNFICYP Employee 1, conducted by Mark Barrow. Online Video Call (25 November 2022). In-person interview in Nicosia, Cyprus (24 March 2023, 03 October 2023 and 02 April 2024).

Interview with US Agency for International Development (USAID) Employee 1, conducted by Mark Barrow. Online Video Call (12 January 2023).

Interview with UNFICYP Gender Affairs Officer 1, conducted by Mark Barrow. In-person interview in Nicosia, Cyprus (01 April 2024).

Mark Barrow has recently completed his PhD in Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on the role and effectiveness of indigenous actors in peacebuilding. He is currently working  as a Lecturer and Teaching Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University; University College London; SOAS; and Queen Mary, University of London.

The drone strike on RAF Akrotiri has pushed the UK’s Sovereign Base Areas (SBAs) in the Republic of Cyprus to the forefront of the news and raised questions about their continuing status as a British Overseas Territory (BOT). On 1 March, a Shahed‑type drone believed to have been launched by Hezbollah struck the runway at Akrotiri, causing minimal damage. This was followed by the interception of two further drones heading towards the base. In response, the nearby Akrotiri village was evacuated and families living at the base were moved to temporary accommodation in Cyprus. On 3 March, UK Prime Minister Kier Starmer revealed that the UK was deploying two Wildcat helicopters equipped with counter-drone systems and sending the air‑defence destroyer HMS Dragon to the region.

E-International Relations is free to read. We rely on reader support to make this possible.

Subscribe now

The attacks on the base provoked two-fold criticism of the UK by the Cypriot government. Firstly, the Cypriot High Commissioner to the UK said his government was “disappointed” at the amount of information shared with residents in the SBAs (who are Cypriot) after the drone attack. Secondly, the Cypriots were unhappy that the base was being used for military purposes, arguing that an earlier statement by Starmer on 1 March lacked clear assurance that the SBAs would be used only for humanitarian purposes. According to reports, Cyprus had asked that the UK restrict the use of the bases to humanitarian activities only. In response to a question as to whether Cyprus would seek to renegotiate the status of the bases, the Cypriot spokesperson said, “in this context, we not ruling anything out”. So, the key questions are why does the UK have bases in Cyprus, how do they operate, and is there a risk that Cyprus might request that the land be returned?

When Cyprus became independent in August 1960, the UK retained Akrotiri and Dhekelia under full British sovereignty, together covering just under 100 square miles (approximately 3% of the island). This arrangement was a non‑negotiable British requirement in the independence talks, intended to secure a continuing UK strategic presence in the Eastern Mediterranean. The Treaty of Establishment remains the key document setting out the legal status of the SBAs and how it operates. The UK’s approach to governance set out in ‘Appendix O’ of the Treaty, emphasises three principles: ensuring the effective use of the SBAs for military purposes, cooperating fully with Cyprus, and protecting the interests of those who live or work within the Areas.

Originally, the boundaries of the SBAs were drawn to incorporate the military installations while avoiding towns and villages. However, three Cypriot enclaves are located within the Dhekelia SBA, and approximately 12,000 Cypriots now live inside the Areas. Around 60% of SBA land is privately owned and intensively farmed, while only 20% is owned by the Ministry of Defence and another 20% is SBA Crown land, which includes forests, roads, rivers and the Akrotiri Salt Lake. There are around 6,000 UK service personnel and their families on the military bases, but they are not permanently resident. So, there is the unusual situation that in a British sovereign territory, the only permanent residents are Cypriots.

As a result, there is close cooperation between the two countries in relation to civilian matters. Cypriots have unrestricted access to and through the SBAs, and this is reflected in ‘Appendix O’, which bars customs posts or frontier barriers and allows free movement between the Republic and the Bases. The UK also commits that, as far as possible, Cypriots in the SBAs live under laws equivalent to those of the Republic—an obligation that guides SBA Ordinances and keeps them closely aligned with Cypriot legislation. Alongside assurances on property rights, the UK asks the Republic to deliver a broad range of public services in the SBAs. This is formalised in the 2007 Delegation of Functions Ordinance, enabling Cypriot authorities to handle education, health, welfare, taxation, postal services and other administrative tasks on behalf of the SBA Administration. As a result, daily life for Cypriots living or working in the SBAs mirrors that in the Republic, with Cypriot institutions carrying out most civilian‑facing responsibilities.

This bespoke relationship was supported for two decades by both the UK and Cyprus being EU-member states, but Brexit posed a challenge (as it did for Gibraltar, where finally a draft agreement between the UK, Spain, and Gibraltar has been published). Brexit raised concerns that new customs rules could breach the 1960 treaty not to create frontiers between the SBAs and Cyprus. Thus, the UK–EU Withdrawal Agreement included a dedicated protocol on the SBAs, which preserved the status quo. The protocol allowed the SBAs to remain within the EU customs territory, with Cypriot authorities handling customs and indirect taxation for civilian goods, with oversight from the European Court of Justice. Military goods and personal effects of UK personnel stayed under UK control. So, governance of the SBAs is a patch-work, with arguably most of the day-to-day civilian activities being undertaken by the Cypriots under the framework of EU law.

Relations between the UK and Cyprus over the Sovereign Base Areas (SBAs) have generally been good since 1960, but disputes have periodically flared up—often shaped by a triangular dynamic involving the US. One of the earliest and most significant examples occurred in 1973, when Prime Minister Edward Heath refused a US request to use RAF Akrotiri to supply Israel during the Yom Kippur War. The refusal illustrated the fact that, although the SBAs were a cornerstone of Britain’s strategic presence in the region, London did not always permit US military activities from Cypriot territory, setting an early precedent for fluctuating patterns of coordination between the two allies.

Such tensions re‑emerged in later decades. In 2002, controversy broke out when the Blair government used the SBAs in its so‑called ‘dodgy dossier’, claiming that Saddam Hussein’s missiles could reach Cyprus. These claims, amplified by sensationalist UK tabloid coverage, caused unease on the island. Further, a 2015 article by Richard Clogg discussed events from 2008, when leaked US diplomatic cables revealed that secret American U‑2 reconnaissance flights over Lebanon and Iraq were being operated out of Akrotiri. Although the missions were run by the US, they raised concerns in London about potential complicity in unlawful actions. When the UK sought tighter oversight, Washington objected, calling the proposed restrictions “burdensome” and “unrealistic”. There were also worries about how the Cypriot government might react if they learned about the flights.

Against this backdrop of intermittent collaboration and disagreement, the UK’s political approach to the SBAs has shown a degree of flexibility. Britain’s repeated offers in 2003, 2009, and 2015 to return approximately 45 square miles of SBA land in the event of a settlement to reunify Cyprus suggest that, despite formal claims of perpetual sovereignty, the territory surrounding the bases is not inherently inviolable. Rather, it can be placed on the negotiating table when wider diplomatic considerations are in play.

Another influence is the 2019 International Court of Justice’s ruling on the Chagos Archipelago, which I have discussed previously. Cyprus supported seeking the opinion and later called it a “legal tool” for reassessing the SBAs. Its submission emphasised parallels: UK insistence on retaining sovereign enclaves; limited Cypriot participation in the 1959 Zurich/London negotiations; and independence conditioned on British bases. However, important differences remain—including, Cypriots formally consenting to the SBAs’ creation, no forced displacement of the local population, and the areas operating within strong UK-Cyprus administrative cooperation. Nevertheless, at a time when the Chagos handover is causing much political division, it is important to note Cyprus’ interest in how it will conclude.

The recent drone strike on Akrotiri was momentous, as it was the first time since 1986 that the base had been attacked. In 1986, a Lebanese guerrilla group, the United Nasserite Organization attacked the base with mortars, grenades, and small-arms fire. After the attack, a Beirut‑based newspaper claimed: “[It] is a strong blow to Margaret Thatcher. The attack was never targeted against the Government of Cyprus or the friendly Cypriot people”. It was in response to US aircraft using Akrotiri to bomb Libya as part of Operation El Dorado Canyon. Therefore, it is not surprising local Cypriot reaction to the drone strike has been critical. Local criticism has centred on fears that the island’s future security is being shaped by decisions made in London (and Washington) rather than Nicosia. Protesters argue that the British presence leaves Cyprus exposed to regional conflicts and that the long‑standing arrangements no longer reflect the island’s interests or sovereignty.

While the fallout from the Akrotiri drone strike has sharpened Cypriot criticism of the SBAs, such tensions are not unprecedented. The UK’s continued presence on the island has long been contested at moments of political stress, and history suggests that relations often stabilise once immediate pressures subside. Yet the episode underlines a central truth: for the SBAs to function effectively, they must rest on cooperation, transparency, and the consent of Cyprus. London’s previous willingness to place significant portions of SBA land on the negotiating table shows that compromise is possible, even if—amid the domestic political sensitivities surrounding the Chagos handover—any substantive concession currently appears unlikely. At the same time, recent events, combined with the altered geopolitical environment after Brexit, have exposed the vulnerabilities of these unusual sovereign enclaves.

British sovereignty over the SBAs is not in imminent jeopardy, but the episode serves as a reminder to the UK, Cyprus, the US, and EU that these distinctive remnants of the post‑colonial settlement cannot be taken for granted: they remain strategically important, politically sensitive, and deeply interconnected with the island’s security and governance.

Professor Peter Clegg is Head of the School of Social Sciences at the University of the West of England, Bristol. He has been a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES) at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica.

E-International Relations is free to read. We rely on reader support to make this possible.

Subscribe now

On 7 November 2025, Jakarta was shaken by a series of explosions. Anti-terror police located seven explosives, of which four were said to have detonated, leading to the injury of 96 people at a mosque in the SMAN 72 state high school located in the city’s north. The alleged attacker has been reported as a 17-year-old student who, in an unusual turn, ostensibly idolised past acts of white nationalist terrorism. The individual in question was allegedly found in possession of a toy gun littered with inscriptions that make reference to white supremacist terminology and past extreme right-wing attackers. Indeed, strewn across the toy are express references to the perpetrator of the 2019 Christchurch massacre, alongside far-right terrorist Luca Traini, and the culprit behind the 2017 Quebec City mosque shooting, Alexandre Bissonnette.

In the aftermath, it has been widely reported in local media that Indonesian policymakers are contemplating the imposition of greater regulation over online video games, with this interpreted variously as implying some form of restriction, or even a ban, on particular games. After receiving updates on the investigation from National Police Chief General Listyo Sigit Prabowo, President Prabowo Subianto requested that his cabinet explore options on how to tackle the supposed negative impacts that online games have on youth. PUBG (previously PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds), an immensely popular game developed by South Korea’s Krafton Inc., has been singled out by minister of the state secretariat Prasetyo Hadi. Beyond PUBG, however, there remains no information about what other games may be considered for restrictions. In what shape this regulatory move will materialise, if at all, remains unclear. In any case, this simmering moral panic is, as I argue below, misplaced. It is grounded in a faulty logic and misdirects attention from the real drivers of radicalisation.

While information on the proposed move remains patchy, a number of policymakers have expressed support. Amelia Anggraini, Member of the Indonesian House of Representatives, has suggested that any such restrictions should not serve as a mere slogan, but be coupled with actual controls established through stakeholder engagement and, in a more fruitful addition, supplemented by digital literacy programmes. The proposed restriction of PUBG has likewise been welcomed by Margaret Aliyatul Maimunah, chairperson of the Indonesian Child Protection Commission (Komisi Perlindungan Anak Indonesia, KPAI). KPAI Commissioner Aris Adi Leksono has similarly indicated that such a move, while insufficient alone, is a positive step. For him, “[t]he impact [of online content for youth] has become increasingly evident. It’s not just what happened at SMAN 72 in Jakarta. There have been several incidents where exposure to what they watched in their games and on social media has had an impact”. Minister of the state secretariat Hadi has also endorsed the call, suggesting that it may be necessary because such games could negatively influence future generations of youth. With reference to PUBG, Hadi continued on to add that “[p]layers can easily learn the types of weapons. And they will start to normalize violence”.

It should be added that this is not the first occasion in which Indonesian authorities have contemplated banning a battle royale-style game like PUBG on similar grounds. In mid-2024, reports circulated that Indonesia’s minister of tourism and creative economy, Sandiaga Uno, threatened to prohibit Free Fire, another highly popular video game. While it seems that this ban did not materialise, the stated rationale for its consideration included vague claims about the game’s “negative effects” on children and alleged cases where the game caused “child violence”.

Of course, it is entirely within the sovereign prerogative of a government to restrict a game, and many reasons have been touted in past instances around the world. India, for example, notoriously banned PUBG on alleged data privacy grounds due to the game’s links to Chinese company Tencent Games. For some states, particular games may be prohibited because they are seemingly deemed ‘morally’ suspect. Indonesia, for one, banned Mortal Kombat 11, the 2019 addition to the classic, gore-laden ‘fighting’ game franchise. It was not alone in this decision: Japan and Ukraine have prohibited the game on similar grounds. Likewise, and while worlds-apart from the violence of Mortal Kombat, Jordan and Iraq banned PUBG due to alleged concerns about its impact on youth. Importantly, such decisions are ostensibly grounded in a normative supposition about the moral value of the content depicted in said games.

Crucially, though, the most recent policy debate in Indonesia does not readily fit into the above categories. The justification animating this scrutinising of online gaming is not based on a higher ethical appeal, such as religious sensibilities. Rather, it is predicated on claims to a causal logic that has scant factual grounding; that is a long-discredited myth. As scholars all-too-often remind journalists and policymakers, there is no sound evidence to suggest that violent video games increase the propensity for individuals to engage in violence. As summarised by Rachel Kowert, a psychologist and expert on the effects of video games, “people really just desperately want to hold on to an easy solution to all of the world’s complex problems like mass shootings, juvenile delinquency—they just want to blame something”. As Kowert adds: “We’ve been studying it for 20 years, and there’s been no consistent findings that would suggest at all that they’re in any way directly linked”. To therefore restrict games because it could “start to normalize violence”, as minister of the state secretariat Hadi suggests, lacks any basis in prevailing evidence.

Directing attention towards the content of a mainstream game, such as PUBG, is thus a red herring. However, that is not to say that there are not pertinent questions to be asked about the harms of online video games, including seemingly banal ones like Roblox or Minecraft, as it relates to radicalisation and violent extremism. As a swathe of scholarly literature and expert opinion indicates, it is not mainstream games themselves that cause violence. However, pursuant to existing scholarship, where practitioners and regulators may productively direct their attention is towards probing and addressing the ways in which extremists peddle harmful content and groom vulnerable individuals through games and gaming-adjacent spaces.

In this vein, rather than fixating on the non-existent link between real-world violence and the stylised violence displayed in PUBG, a game played by tens of millions daily, the pertinent question is what led an Indonesian youth to allegedly opt for mass violence and, crucially, why did they reportedly profess sympathies towards far-right terrorists? To put it bluntly, and if the inscriptions on the alleged perpetrator’s toy firearm are to be taken seriously, why did a lonely Indonesian teen profess a commitment to the oft-repeated white nationalist mantra of the 14 words (i.e., “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”).

Such questions are harder to answer and undoubtedly more uncomfortable. Yet addressing them may well lead policymakers towards scrutinising the serious impact of online extremist communities and the content they promote (including through games and gaming-adjacent platforms), rather than the content of games themselves. In fact, if investigators confirm that this youth was drawn in by extreme-right wing ideologies, then this would be an unusual, yet not necessarily unique, case. It was only in February that an 18-year-old Singaporean, Nick Lee Xing Qiu, was detained after planning an anti-Muslim terrorist attack. As Sonia Sarkar explains: ‘Despite being a Singaporean of  Chinese ethnicity, who believed in the superiority of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese ethnicities, he supported white supremacy as he considered Islam to be a threat to ‘white culture.’” As other researchers have shown too, extreme right-wing meme subcultures have demonstrated a ‘creeping’ online influence within Southeast Asia. Likewise, and to quote Munira Mustaffa, who has offered one of the earliest expositions on this phenomena,

[t]he idea that neo-Nazi thoughts, white-supremacist politics and red pill victimhood have been adopted by Asian youths who are active online users unbounded by geographical borders but are neither white nor Aryan themselves can be mystifying to outsiders. After all, the concept of neo-Nazism lies in the assertion that the white race, or the Aryan race, reigns supreme in the racial hierarchy. But these ideas are easily adaptable into local context, and the Internet has made them easier than ever for the latent fascist to access.

To impose an outright ban or restrict games liked PUBG would thus be misplaced: an exercise in missing the forest for the trees, except that the supposed trees in this case are nothing more than shrubs on the periphery of the real problem. Indeed, as an instrument in tackling extremism, restricting online video games are likely to be either ineffective insofar as there is no direct causal link between playing video games and perpetrating violence, or inadvertently useful only to the extent that a blanket ban of a game or otherwise restricting youth from accessing it may foreclose some opportunities for extremists to groom vulnerable individuals.

Ironically, then, such a move could plausibly have some mitigatory effect, albeit not for the reasons proffered by some policymakers in Indonesia. Yet any positive benefits should be weighed against several counterpoints. The first is the purely speculative nature of my comments immediately above (and such a ban, in any case, is not a course of policy that I would endorse). Furthermore, such an indiscriminate option would carry considerable collateral damage; that is, by banning or restricting access to first person shooters and battle royale games like PUBG, it is not only malign communities that may operate on said games that would be denied platform. So too would this banish the overwhelming majority who find enjoyment and positive community through online play. Moreover, I would be remiss not to add that such a policy course may risk hampering Indonesia’s gaming market, which is the largest in Southeast Asia. As one commentary also noted, “Indonesia is a major market for mobile games, particularly the likes of Free Fire, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang, and PUBG Mobile”. None of this is to mention the impact that such restrictions may have on the local esports community (in fact, the Alter Ego Ares team, an Indonesian esports organisation, qualified for the 2025 PUBG Mobile Global Championship no less, taking home $150,000 USD in prize money after securing 8^th place in the grand final).

Additionally, if the government was to restrict PUBG on the false assumption that it normalises violence and therefore contributes to real-world violence, it would logically dictate that innumerable other games which are objectively more violent ought to suffer a similar fate. This may strike the reader as a sure route to either an overly blanket moratorium on shooting games or, more likely, an illogically inconsistent approach to regulating a national gaming market, essentially restricting one game but not a comparable product.

Ultimately, ongoing discussion amongst Indonesian policy circles is the most recent instance in which egregious violence, or attempts at its orchestration, have given rise to a blame game centred around video games. Unfortunately, it will not be last. As Anna Mahtani remarks, this is once again “an example of policymakers focusing too much on the content of games rather than the context of extreme communities that co-opt the medium. This leads to policies that are equivalent to suggesting that changing the offside rule would end football hooliganism.” To clarify, regulation of the gaming industry, particularly for the benefit of child safety, is paramount. But policy must be informed by evidence. If Indonesian policymakers can learn anything from past acts of extreme right-wing violence that have riven Western states, or America’s tragic modern history of preventable school shootings for that matter, it is that neither the causes of such acts nor sound policy are to be found in blaming the content of mainstream games.

Beyond faulting games, though, it should be said that some policymakers, including those listed above,  have alluded to the potential role that bullying may have had in precipitating the bombing, and the consequent need for greater anti-bullying programmes in the schooling system. This points in a more productive direction. Yet so too should policymakers and authorities pay attention to the perverse influence that extreme right-wing views and meme subcultures may carry online. This could well necessitate exploring the nexus between radicalisation and gaming spaces, but the crucial takeaway is that any such inquiry must move beyond long-discredited myths.

Kye J. Allen holds a doctorate in International Relations from the University of Oxford. His primary research interests focus on far-right extremism, both historical and contemporary, and the intersection between modern technology, political violence, and extremism.

After 14 years of ceaseless efforts, Timor-Leste, one of the youngest democracies in the region, became the 11th ASEAN member on October 26, 2025. “For the people of Timor-Leste, this is not only a dream realised, but a powerful affirmation of our journey – one marked by resilience, determination and hope,” said Xanana Gusmao, the current Prime Minister of Timor-Leste. This journey has not been easy. Timor-Leste began its journey towards ASEAN membership by formally applying in 2011, demonstrating its intent to become fully integrated into the regional bloc. In 2022, ASEAN leaders agreed in principle to Timor-Leste's admission, granting the country observer status, which enabled it to attend all ASEAN meetings and all summits. In 2023, ASEAN adopted a dedicated roadmap to guide Timor-Leste's preparations for membership. Timor-Leste's accession culminated in 2025, when it was officially admitted to ASEAN during the 47th ASEAN Summit. The president, Jose Ramos Horta, noted this multi-phased and long process of accessing ASEAN: “It seems like the road to heaven —to reach the perfection of heaven— is easier than to reach the gates of ASEAN.”

E-International Relations is free to read. We rely on reader support to make this possible.

Subscribe now

Despite the laudable achievements and benefits of investment and trade opportunities from ASEAN’s 680 million people and $3.8 trillion economy, some concerns about institutional weaknesses, challenges to vulnerable sectors and people, and human security risks, highlighted by accessing the bloc, remain unresolved. Furthermore, Timor-Leste joined ASEAN during a time of uncertainty, such as democratic backslide and power struggle, which may test a bloc composed of diverse political ideologies with its persistence on human rights and democracy. While some analysts argue that Timor-Leste acceded to ASEAN out of geopolitical and geoeconomic calculations, this article claims that Timor-Leste's joining ASEAN is more a deliberate move to collective and sustainable peacebuilding rather than a national survival strategy. Timor-Leste joined ASEAN to prevent conflict and violence, as well as to transform existing structures, relationships, and identities through economic integration and security cooperation to create long-term, sustainable peace in the region and beyond.

ASEAN’s economic integration, represented by the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), helps facilitate the emergence of a free market and free movement of goods, services, investments, and skilled labor, paving the way to eliminate structural violence and inequalities within the bloc. Through expanded free trade, investment flows, and regional development initiatives, integration improves living standards and reduces poverty, fostering a more just and stable society. In addition, ASEAN membership allows Timor-Leste to access some free trade markets, such as the ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA) and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the world’s largest free trade agreement, encompassing approximately 28 percent of the global GDP. Deepening economic cooperation and interdependence among member states also decreases the likelihood of war and conflict, encouraging repeated cooperation and lasting peace.

For Timor-Leste, participating in the ASEAN market offers opportunities to increase employment, boost exports of local products such as coffee, tourism, and fisheries, and attract essential foreign investment. Accession to the ASEAN economy offers Timor-Leste critical pathways to address some of its most persistent development challenges, including widespread poverty, underdeveloped infrastructure, the divide between urban and rural areas, limited digital connectivity, and the need for human capital development (HCD). Timor-Leste has struggled to address multiple social and economic issues: 40 percent of the population has lived below the poverty line since 2014; there is overdependence on the oil sector and imports; the digital divide remains huge among areas and genders; and almost half of young people are not in Education, Employment, or Training (NEET).

With ASEAN membership, Timor-Leste not only gains access to a market of over 600 million people but also targeted development initiatives, such as the Initiative for ASEAN Integration (IAI), which helps it address institutional and infrastructure gaps while enhancing economic diversification and bridging the social and digital divide with an eye on more inclusive and balanced development. Furthermore, Timor-Leste’s participation in ASEAN increases investment and trade opportunities, fosters innovation, and links the country more closely to regional supply chains, which can spur job creation and expand the market for exporting local products and generating income. Furthermore, the transnational education and training programs help develop a skilled labor force, thus positioning Timor-Leste, where more than 60 percent of the population is under 35 years old, more competitively in the regional economy and advancing inclusive and sustainable development for its people. Overall, economic integration is a vital tool for reducing structural inequality and barriers, paving the way for long-term peace and prosperity in the region.

Meanwhile, regional security cooperation helps prevent conflict and rising tension among member states and creates favorable conditions for human security.ASEAN’s security architecture, including the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF), ASEAN Defence Ministers’ Meeting (ADMM), ASEAN Political-Security Community (APSC), ASEAN Agreement on Disaster Management and Emergency Response (AADMER), and ASEAN Coordinating Center for Humanitarian Assistance (AHA Center), promotes peace by constructing multilateral cooperation and shared rules and norms to reduce the risk of violence and conflict. For example, joint patrols through regular meetings, shared information, and coordination between neighboring countries reduce border tension. In addition, diplomacy and shared norms contribute to the minimization of interstate conflict by reshaping shared values and interests, while AADMER and the AHA Center respond to conflict-related risks and tensions during disasters and humanitarian emergencies.

Timor-Leste may benefit from being involved in regional security mechanisms to strengthen bilateral border management with neighboring states or counter-trafficking and other transnational organized criminal activities through collective and continuous efforts. Furthermore, security cooperation leads to building mutual trust and shared norms, which are key to nurturing and deepening trustworthy and reciprocal relationships beyond state-to-state relations, which are central to peacebuilding. ASEAN prioritizes the “non-intervention principle” and consensus among its members. As a member, Timor-Leste can institutionalize cooperation and partnership with other neighboring states in priority areas and issues, increase its bargaining power, and acquire diplomatic recognition and support. This is especially important for a small state like Timor-Leste in the face of power struggles within and beyond the region, such as the escalating tensions between China, Japan, and the US.

In addition to direct and indirect conflict prevention, security cooperation can extend to different pillars of broader human security by addressing intersecting and overlapping non-traditional security threats, such as gender-based violence, trafficking in persons (TIPs), cybercrime, and environmental security. This means that Timor-Leste could enhance its national and human security by aligning its agendas and plans with the top security concerns of the bloc, such as the Women, Peace, and Security agenda, safer labor migration, stronger cybersecurity, and climate resilience, as they require collective, rapid, and effective responses. One urgent issue to be addressed is Trafficking in Persons (TIPs), often assisted by technology. The recent case of online scam centers in the Oecusse enclave proved the connection with the larger Southeast Asian scamming industry, alarming threats of transnational criminal activities, such as TIPs and money laundering, against local communities, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) report.

Taken together, Timor-Leste's participation in economic integration and security cooperation is a way to move towards sustainable peace through institutional cooperation and inclusive development, shared norms and values, and relationship transformation. At the institutional level, economic and security cooperation enables Timor-Leste to address structural inequalities and violence by promoting collective security and inclusive development. Through regular formal and informal dialogue, interaction, and mutual learning, economic integration and security cooperation help establish shared norms and values between state and non-state actors, promoting a culture of peace, cooperation, and non-violence. By opening up space for gradual institutional and normative change to build and deepen trust, solidarity, and identity embedded in interdependent and interconnected communities, state-non-state relations will further shift from conflict to more cooperative and coordinated relationships.

Engaging with ASEAN will help Timor-Leste achieve sustainable internal and external peace. Timor-Leste's economic uplift through ASEAN integration has brought transformative peace benefits, especially through access to regional markets, investment and capital, and development support, reducing structural inequality and poverty. Simultaneously, enhanced security cooperation within ASEAN helps stabilize land and maritime borders, promote a more peaceful and non-violent culture, and promote broader human security beyond the political and military spheres. ASEAN-led initiatives and tools, such as the ASEAN Convention against Trafficking in Persons, particularly the Convention on Women and Children (ACTIP), focus on protecting vulnerable populations, such as women, migrant workers, and underprivileged youth, further strengthening social and economic resilience and helping to alleviate vulnerability. Diplomatic inclusiveness within ASEAN has reduced Timor-Leste's international isolation and political dependence, allowing it to participate in key discussions and benefit from collective resources and discourse, thereby enhancing its international influence and negotiating power.

Some imminent challenges must be addressed along the way. First, ASEAN accession generates a set of peace-relevant risks and frictions for Timor-Leste, as weak domestic institutions may struggle to configure the dense body of ASEAN rules, technical standards, and policy commitments while maintaining transparency and meaningful public participation in the short- and medium-term. Moreover, the ratification of ASEAN legal agreements and instruments does not guarantee implementation. Limited bureaucratic capacity and uneven regulatory reform, compounded by political instability, can delay or distort implementation, enlarging the gaps between formal compliance and actual practice, which eventually undermines public trust and optimism in regional integration. Second, intensified economic competition within a free regional market may pressure and marginalize local industries, vulnerable sectors and groups, and small enterprises, threatening job markets and exacerbating economic, social, and ecological vulnerabilities rather than shared prosperity and well-being. Finally, some regional security norms and practices, such as non-interference, counter-terrorism frameworks, or migration control practices against refugees, may sit uneasily with Timor-Leste’s political identity, which is shaped by a long history of resistance, human rights, and solidarity, such as the violent suppression and rule of the military junta on its dissent and people in Myanmar, resulting in friction and tension between Dili and Yangon. Timor-Leste’s access to ASEAN raises questions about how far the state can align with ASEAN security agendas and arrangements without trading its hard-won normative commitments to justice.

ASEAN’s strong economic and security communities serve a dual purpose in promoting both negative and positive peace within the bloc, including in Timor-Leste. For Timor-Leste, joining ASEAN represents not only a diplomatic milestone but also a strategic peacebuilding effort aimed at reducing violence and conflict while establishing a just and equitable foundation for long-term stability and order within and beyond the state’s borders. In addition to state-based frameworks, ASEAN encourages multi-track diplomacy, opening space for consultation and participation by non-state actors. Therefore, Timor-Leste's indigenous practices and customary laws, highlighting consensus and collectivity, as well as experiences of peacebuilding and democracy in the aftermath of war, could extend and connect to other states, cultures, societies, and peoples, enhancing communal and international peace by promoting participatory dialogue, shared identities, and collective responsibility between people and the state.

Expanding access to ASEAN’s economic, security, and socio-cultural cooperation mechanisms, especially through the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community (ASCC), enables Timor-Leste to strengthen its institutional capacity and resilience, pursue equitable and inclusive development, and promote regional peace, stability, and prosperity across sectors and issues at the communal, national and regional levels. Recognizing economic interdependence, social connectivity, and security cooperation through the inclusion of Timor-Leste is indispensable for consolidating sustainable peace in Southeast Asia and the broader international arena, especially amid a rapidly changing and unpredictable geopolitical and geo-economic landscape.

Lili Chen is a lecturer at the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, Universidade Nacional Timor Lorosa’e of Timor-Leste. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Florida in 2018. Her research interests include the dynamics of peacekeeping, gender and development, women and LGBT rights, as well as politics in Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on Timor-Leste.

In an era characterised by the urgent necessity to transition to cleaner, more sustainable energy systems and to achieve climate-neutral, digitalised economies, both Chile and Indonesia occupy strategic positions on the global stage (IEA 2022). In a context where urgent sustainable shifts must be implemented, the global map of energy and material flows is being redrawn (Post and Le Billon 2025). As leading global suppliers of critical minerals—Chile with lithium and copper, and Indonesia with nickel—these countries have become indispensable to the production chains for the manufacture of low-carbon-emission technologies, such as electric vehicles and renewable energy infrastructure (IEA 2022). Yet they also face a deep paradox. Under what Bringel and Svampa (2023) call the Decarbonisation Consensus—a global tacit agreement to substitute fossil fuels with renewable energy sources while preserving the long-term extractive logic of a reformed (green) capitalist system—countries in the periphery risk intensifying the burdens of sacrifice zones while contributing to global decarbonisation.

Subscribe now

While framed as sustainable progress, this global shift may be reviving long-standing colonial patterns—now painted green. Thus, for countries like Chile and Indonesia, the energy transition could either reproduce old dependencies or open a window to rewrite them. The question, therefore, is whether they will continue to serve as exporters of raw materials, bearing the socio-environmental costs linked to extractive activity of a transition framed by the Decarbonisation Consensus, or whether they can seize this moment to redefine their roles in the world economy and critically re-examine society’s prevailing social metabolism.

Energy geopolitics encompasses both the geography of supply and demand and the political efforts to secure affordable, reliable, and sustainable energy sources. It highlights interactions between political actors and physical environments. Thus, as the global energy system evolves, so does its geopolitics (Blondeel et al. 2024). Authors, such as Hira (2025), have pointed out that, just as the quest to control petroleum resources influenced the twentieth century and early twenty-first century, critical minerals will also influence the geopolitics of the present and coming decades. Moreover, this current transformation offers critical mineral–producing countries a unique opportunity to build competitive industries. Experience demonstrates that strategic industrial policies, particularly in research and development (R&D), can enhance the growth of competitive sectors.

In 2024, global demand for critical minerals surged. Lithium demand alone rose by nearly 30%, far exceeding the average 10% growth rate of the 2010s. Consumption of nickel, cobalt, graphite, and rare earth elements grew by roughly 6–8%, driven mainly by energy applications such as electric vehicles, batteries, renewables, and power grids. Copper demand also climbed, propelled by China’s large-scale investments in electrical infrastructure (IEA 2025b). While clean-tech developers sit at the core of the world economy, mineral producers remain at the periphery, absorbing the environmental costs of powering someone else’s transition―China is a particular case of a transitioning economy. This dynamic is exacerbating socio-environmental burdens in resource-dependent economies and regions due to mining activities (Poque González 2025a; IEA 2022). It might reinforce global patterns of ecologically unequal exchange under a new (green) colonial frame (Dorninger et al. 2021; Hickel et al. 2022).

Among the new frontiers of extraction, Chile and Indonesia stand out—not only for their mineral wealth, but for the contrasting political strategies they have adopted to govern it. Indonesia produces over 60% of global nickel; Chile dominates copper (24% of world output) and ranks second in lithium (around 30%). Yet their governance models diverge sharply (IEA 2025b; ITA 2023). In Chile, copper mining is dominated by private companies, which control around 72% of production. The State owns the remaining 28% through Codelco. Major private operators come from the United States, Canada, Australia, Europe, and Asia. Lithium extraction is carried out by only two firms: Soquimich (SQM)—partially owned by Tianqi—and Albemarle Chile, a wholly owned subsidiary of Albemarle Corp. Chile is also a leading producer of iodine, rhenium, sodium, and potassium nitrate (ITA 2023). A current point of controversy involves the alliance between Codelco and SQM for lithium extraction in the Atacama Salt Flat, promoted by the Chilean government as a “win-win, cost-effective, public-private accord”. Though nearing final approval, the partnership has faced intense scrutiny due to the absence of an open bidding process, SQM’s historical involvement in political corruption scandals, and concerns regarding potential socio-environmental impacts (Aylwin et al. 2025; Garretón 2025). 

Indonesia, by contrast, has adopted a more interventionist approach. The country ranks among the world’s largest producers of both coal and nickel and also produces copper, gold, tin, and bauxite (ITA 2024). Unlike Chile, Indonesia implemented a ban on the export of raw and unprocessed ores through successive regulations introduced since 2009. The objective was to harness mineral resources for domestic development by expanding processing capacity, increasing value addition, and reducing dependence on raw mineral exports (IEA 2024; ITA 2024). The policy path forces companies to conduct processing and manufacturing onshore before exporting. As a result, Indonesia has attracted substantial international investment to expand its downstream industries. Enterprises are establishing facilities to convert nickel into battery-grade materials suitable for electric vehicle applications; however, socio-environmental concerns have also arisen from foreign companies aligned with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) principles (ITA 2024; Guberman et al. 2024; Anindya 2025). At the same time, the country faces legal proceedings initiated by the European Union (EU)—one of the world’s largest nickel importers—arguing that Indonesia’s policies violate the 1994 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (IEA 2024; Sugihartono 2024; WTO 2025).

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA) Policies Database, over the last decades, Chile has published two national policy strategies: the National Lithium Strategy (2023) and the National Mining Policy (2022). In the case of Indonesia, there are two pivotal in-force policies and regulatory instruments: the Energy Ministry Decree No. 77k/MB.01/MEM.B/2022 (2022) and the Energy Ministry Decree regarding National Planning on Mineral and Coal 2022-2027 (2022). Furthermore, Indonesia has defined 46 critical minerals as strategic to the national economy and security (IEA 2025a).

Chile’s strategy reflects a cautious institutionalist trajectory: the state seeks greater strategic control and value capture but through regulated, contractual and incremental means that preserve investor certainty and integrate social and environmental assessment. Indonesia’s policy and national plans, by contrast, embody a more interventionist, neodevelopmentalist stance: policy instruments (including export restrictions and binding national planning) are used to force downstreaming and rapidly capture value domestically, albeit with higher implementation risk and social–environmental trade-offs (IEA 2025a). Chile has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the EU (2023) to boost sustainable raw materials value chains and build a competitive mining sector. It targets EUR 300 billion in investments from 2021-2027, covering five areas: integrating raw materials through projects and trade; research and innovation; aligning with ESG and international standards; developing eco-friendly infrastructure; and building skills (IEA 2025a).

In 2024, the Indonesian Ministry of Trade established benchmark prices (HPE) to guide export duty valuations for specific mining products, including copper concentrate, laterite iron concentrate, lead concentrate, and zinc concentrate (IEA 2025a). Although Indonesia rescinded the requirement to utilise government benchmark prices as the minimum price for minerals and coal sales in August 2025, production levies and tax obligations arising from these transactions would continue to be determined by those benchmark prices (Reuters 2025). Regarding critical minerals, Chile has largely sustained a model of cautious institutionalism—prioritising regulatory continuity and private-sector participation. In contrast, Indonesia has adopted a more interventionist nationalist or neodevelopmentalist strategy, using export bans and state direction to promote domestic industrialisation. Despite their contrasting governance strategies, both Chile and Indonesia are experiencing socio-environmental tensions that reveal the contradictions of a global energy transition developed under the frame of a Decarbonisation Consensus.

In Chile, copper mining, processing, and transport-related activities have long-term socio-environmental struggles linked in the north of the country (mainly), which might be reproduced with the lithium case in the Salt Flat ecosystems (Poque González 2022; 2025b). Indonesian nickel mining and processing also pose socio-environmental challenges, especially in its tropical ecosystem. Furthermore, its industry is highly carbon-intensive due to its reliance on coal. Civil society groups have raised concerns, for instance, by recent calls for Tesla Company to halt investments due to potential deforestation, water pollution, and impacts on indigenous livelihoods (Guberman et al. 2024).

These trajectories invite us to reflect on the intensity, timing, and pathways through which the world is pursuing decarbonisation beyond domestic or national policy strategies. They highlight the inseparable relationship between environment, matter, energy, and the societies that mobilise them (Poque González 2024). An intensive extractive economy built to satisfy (constantly growing) the material demands of capitalist societies inevitably shifts the burdens onto specific territories, revealing that the “green” transition, as currently configured, does not transcend extractivism — it reorganises it. Questioning the prevailing social metabolism is therefore fundamental. In this context, it becomes clear that critical minerals are embedded in patterns of unequal ecological exchange and in the emergence of a new geopolitical metabolism.

Chile and Indonesia remind us that the “green” transition is not merely about technology—it is about power, sovereignty, and the enduring question of who benefits from global change. However, climate change is a global threat, and its impacts are perceived differently across societies based on each society’s prior vulnerabilities. This point must be considered when thinking about facing the current global scenario and the potential climate catastrophes, and how peripheral countries manage their own resources. At present, the trade relations between Chile and Indonesia are characterised by the export of copper and agricultural products from Chile to Indonesia, and the import of footwear and automobiles produced in Indonesia into Chile (OEC 2025). South-South cooperation consistently presents itself as an alternative to a departure from an extractivist-dependent developmental trajectory, and as an ancient desire in Latin America. However, the current landscape remains opaque when considering China’s prominent role in the development of low-carbon-emissions technology and its geopolitical tensions with the United States and the EU; alternatively, it may represent a strategic opportunity for the resource-rich countries of the Global South. 

References

Anindya, Michelle. 2025. ‘Indonesia, home to the world’s largest nickel reserves, struggles to achieve its EV dreams’. Rest of World, February 3. https://restofworld.org/2025/indonesia-ev-nickel-ban-global-investors/es/

Aylwin, José, Juan Carlos Cayo, and Santiago Correa. 2025. ‘Luces y sombras del acuerdo Codelco SQM’. Columna. CIPER Chile, August 7. https://www.ciperchile.cl/2025/08/07/luces-y-sombras-del-acuerdo-codelco-sqm/

Blondeel, Mathieu, James Price, Michael Bradshaw, et al. 2024. ‘Global Energy Scenarios: A Geopolitical Reality Check’. Global Environmental Change 84 (January): 102781. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2023.102781

Bringel, Breno, and Maristella Svampa. 2023. ‘Del «Consenso de Los Commodities» al «Consenso de La Descarbonización» | Nueva Sociedad’. Nueva Sociedad | Democracia y Política En América Latina, August 1. https://nuso.org/articulo/306-del-consenso-de-los-commodities-al-consenso-de-la-descarbonizacion/

Dorninger, Christian, Alf Hornborg, David J. Abson, et al. 2021. ‘Global Patterns of Ecologically Unequal Exchange: Implications for Sustainability in the 21st Century’. Ecological Economics 179 (January): 106824. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2020.106824

Garretón, Martín. 2025. ‘Acuerdo Codelco-SQM en fase decisiva: ¿Qué condiciones puso China, qué falta y cuándo se concretaría?’ Emol. Emol, November 10. https://www.emol.com/noticias/Economia/2025/11/10/1182802/codelco-sqm-alianza.html

Guberman, David, Samantha Schreiber, and Anna Perry. 2024. ‘Export Restrictions on Minerals and Metals: Indonesia’s Export Ban of Nickel’. Office of Industry and Competitiveness Analysis, Working Paper ICA-104, February. https://www.usitc.gov/publications/332/working_papers/ermm_indonesia_export_ban_of_nickel.pdf

Hickel, Jason, Christian Dorninger, Hanspeter Wieland, and Intan Suwandi. 2022. ‘Imperialist Appropriation in the World Economy: Drain from the Global South through Unequal Exchange, 1990–2015’. Global Environmental Change 73 (March): 102467. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2022.102467

Hira, Andy. 2025. ‘The Geopolitics of the Green Transition and Critical Strategic Minerals’. International Journal: Canada’s Journal of Global Policy Analysis 80 (2): 217–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/00207020251332595

IEA. 2022. The Role of Critical Minerals in Clean Energy Transitions. International Energy Agency.

IEA. 2024. ‘Prohibition of the Export of Nickel Ore – Policies’. IEA. IEA, March 19. https://www.iea.org/policies/16084-prohibition-of-the-export-of-nickel-ore

IEA. 2025a. ‘Critical Minerals Policy Tracker – Data Tools’. IEA. IEA, May 21. https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/critical-minerals-policy-tracker

IEA. 2025b. ‘Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025’. International Energy Agency, January. https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/ef5e9b70-3374-4caa-ba9d-19c72253bfc4/GlobalCriticalMineralsOutlook2025.pdf

ITA. 2023. ‘Chile - Minería’. Trade.gov. International Trade Administration, December 7. https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/chile-mining

ITA. 2024. ‘Indonesia - Mining’. Trade.gov. International Trade Administration, January 9. https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/indonesia-mining

OEC. 2025. ‘Comercio entre Chile (CHL) y Indonesia (IDN)’. Observatorio de Complejidad Económica. https://oec.world/es/profile/bilateral-country/chl/partner/idn

Poque González, Axel Bastián. 2022. ‘Who Pays the Price? -Socio-Ecological Controversies Regarding the Energy Transition in South America’. Sustainability in Debate 13 (3): 72–120. https://doi.org/10.18472/SustDeb.v13n3.2022.44799

Poque González, Axel Bastián. 2024. ‘Por que aprofundar na relação entre energia, ambiente e sociedade - Algumas reflexões desde a América Latina’. Gavagai 10 (2): 111–29. https://doi.org/10.36661/2358-0666.2023v10n2.13849

Poque González, Axel Bastián. 2025a. ‘Claves para entender el rol geopolítico de América Latina en la transición energética global. Una aproximación desde la teoría de la dependencia’. In Prefigurar el futuro. Dinámicas extractivas y energéticas en clave latinoamericana., 1st edn. Miradas Latinoamericanas. CLACSO.

Poque González, Axel Bastián. 2025b. ‘Conflicts Linked to Critical Minerals and Renewables in South America ― The Hydropower and Copper Cases through the Energy Justice Lens’. In Energy Justice in Latin America: Reflections, Lessons and Critiques, 1st edn. Routledge & CRC Press. https://www.routledge.com/Energy-Justice-in-Latin-America-Reflections-Lessons-and-Critiques/Mejia-Montero/p/book/9781032795324

Post, Erik, and Philippe Le Billon. 2025. ‘The “Green War”: Geopolitical Metabolism and Green Extractivisms’. Geopolitics 30 (2): 760–800. https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2024.2385411

Reuters. 2025. ‘Indonesia Cancels Requirement to Use Benchmark Prices in Minerals, Coal Sales’. Energy. Reuters, August 25. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/indonesia-cancels-requirement-use-benchmark-prices-minerals-coal-sales-2025-08-25/

Ripple, William J, Christopher Wolf, Michael E Mann, et al. 2025. ‘The 2025 State of the Climate Report: A Planet on the Brink’. BioScience, October 29, biaf149. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaf149

Sugihartono, Sekarsari. 2024. ‘Indonesia’s Trade Dispute on Nickel Ore in the WTO: Current Progress and Developments’. Modern Diplomacy, October 28. https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2024/10/28/indonesias-trade-dispute-on-nickel-ore-in-the-wto-current-progress-and-developments/

WTO. 2025. ‘WTO | Dispute Settlement - DS592: Indonesia - Measures Relating to Raw Materials’. World Trade Organization (WTO). https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/dispu_e/cases_e/ds592_e.htm

Axel-Poque-Gonzalez is a postdoctoral researcher at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, Chile. He holds a Doctorate in Environment and Society from the Universidade Estadual de Campinas. Additionally, he holds a master’s degree in engineering. An Electrical Engineer by training, his research explores the intersection of energy transition, environmental issues and societal dynamics.

The 2025 North Macedonian local elections constituted one of OSCE’s largest election observations in recent years, reflecting OSCE’s continued commitment to the political stability of the region. Elections were held on 19 October 2025, with run-offs on 2 November 2025.  Regional issues predominated in both polls but the Electoral  Commission reported the lowest turnout since independence. Reflecting ubiquitous 'voter apathy', the ethnic mix of North Macedonia also reveals a surprising complexity. This ethnic diversity is often under-identified in a territory which for several years after the fall of Yugoslavia was known as the Federal Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM). North Macedonia is a landlocked country without internationally recognized, sovereign 'enclaves', yet it contains great demographic diversity. The entire country is effectively an 'enclave' of the wider Balkan region, now neighbour to five different new states.  I remember during my first visit as a teenager, Marshall Tito’s ubiquitous portrait smiling everywhere in a united Yugoslavia that said several communities within North Macedonia are also 'enclaves' in a cultural, ethnic, or religious sense. Take Vevčani, often dubbed the "Republic of Vevčani". A self-declared “micro-nation” during the breakup, it remains an Orthodox Christian enclave whose surrounding villages are predominantly Muslim.

Then there is Skopje’s Old Bazaar or "Turkish enclave" with its Ottoman architecture. Financial support from Ankara and Gulf states has funded renewal of local facilities and mosques. These ethnically diverse areas are integral parts of North Macedonia's territory, not sovereign geographical enclaves. However, in many ways, the local elections amplified their ethnic diversity.  In the first round, the ruling VMRO-DPMNE won the most mayoral spots (33) while VLEN won 5 municipalities, SDSM (3) and NAI (3) In the second round, the ruling conservatives achieved just over two-thirds of the mayoral contests, leaving opposition Social Democrats far behind. Working within this pattern, ethnic communal interests were only partially satisfied. This has heightened the desire of Macedonia’s ethnic groups to obtain better representation. They have individually seen their aspirations for greater self-government hastened by the evidence of what they might achieve outside the VMRO-DPMNE camp.

There are no distinct Russian-speaking areas in North Macedonia. Russian speakers are part of a small minority population. North Macedonia does, however, possess a community far more locally powerful than any of the distinctive communities mentioned above. One might argue that North Macedonia possesses a distinctively Roma 'enclave', increasingly distrustful of the failure of “big government” in Skopje to deliver for its residents. The 2025 local elections, despite all the hurdles of political representation, depict the Roma community in comparative political ascendancy. This may well be the last election where its representation will be anything but solidly Roma. Shutka (Šuto Orizari), a municipality within Skopje with the world's largest concentration of Roma people, is the only municipality with a Roma-run local government. It is effectively a Roma 'enclave'. Roma people likely arrived in Europe from northern India a thousand years ago. In Europe, there are 12 million Roma — making them the continent’s largest minority — over half of which live in the EU. The Council of Europe estimates 200,000 live in Macedonia.

Over 80% of Suto Orizari’s population is Roma. The Shutka municipality uses Romani as an official language, making it a unique case in Europe. Suto Orizari’s residents enjoy several TV channels in Roma and proudly hang its colourful flag featuring the symbolic Roma wheel. Its principal streets – Che Guevara and Garcia Lorca – lead unto a sprawling bazaar festooned with traditional Roma music and entertainments. While racist attacks on Roma are common in Europe, there is a level of security and autonomy in Shutka that is lacking elsewhere. Across the Balkans many Roma were displaced and disenfranchised as a result of the Yugoslav wars. Many remain stateless, including some in Shutka.

This 'enclave' of southern Europe is a rare example of Roma “relative autonomy”, Sead Ismail, President of Shutka’s municipal council, explains:

We Roma feel safe and protected by Shutka’s municipal council. This is the only place where Roma are organised politically and economically and fill their lives for themselves and one another.  I’ve visited Roma communities in Romania, Slovenia and Slovakia…And in many of those settlements, they don’t have representatives, or electricity, or sewer systems. And they’re in the EU! Here we have left behind the atrocities we experienced during the Balkan conflict of the 1990s. We have put our lives back together and we increasingly want our own political leaders.

Roma have lived in Macedonia since the 15th century, and congregated in Shutka (somewhat accidentally) after the earthquake in 1963 which destroyed much of Skopje. Prior to that, Suto Orizari was a desolate zone– the name literally means “barren fields.” As part of Skopje’s new urban plan, combining brutalist architecture and social engineering, the Roma were relegated to the area. It boomed. Local resident (Meneshka Umjer) describes the post-earthquake growth of the enclave:

We had nowhere else to go but we gave it our best. It was like a Roma-homeland. Now we are maybe 50,000 Roma with our own Mayor, our own decision-making and essential services, and our own identity. To some extent we are impervious to the wider politics of the local elections because we make everything for ourselves. It is Shutka first and Skopje second… Unfortunately, we are not well favoured in jobs, and we do not yet have powers to raise our own taxes.

Macedonia (as FYROM) became independent in 1991 and in 1996, the Roma living in Shutka began to govern themselves. In 2001, Macedonia narrowly avoided civil war between ethnic Macedonians, who are Slavs, and ethnic-Albanians, who make up 25% of the population. The peace agreement guaranteed minorities, including Roma, a role in the government. Zeljko Jovanovic, Director of the Roma Initiatives Office of the Open Society Foundation explains the evolution of this “state within a state”:

Macedonia is unique in the sense that it has the most stable, numerous representations of Roma in politics anywhere in Europe. Political participation can be better, but it is not a major issue. There are now several Roma members of parliament, even ministers; and high-level officials serving in the government. We object that not as many of us are admitted to government as is required by the quota system for the Macedonian civil service. Increased civil service participation doesn’t automatically translate into benefits for ordinary people.  However, we campaign for improvement.

By the 2002 census, Roma were 2.7% of the total population, and current government representation is at 1.4%, with 1,698 public officials, marking significant progress. However, one can see that Zeljko Jovanovic’s demands are reflected in frustration with the sluggish nature of some political changes. Only 0.2%  of these Roma civil servants are managers, and only 0.3% hold elected positions, in figures provided by Macedonia’s Ombudsperson. Mayor Elvis Bajram observes:

Shutka is one of the poorest municipalities, in one of Europe’s poorest countries. There has been no census since 2002. In the summer, we don’t have any water in our public fountains. The municipality was gerrymandered so that all but one of the factories abutting Shutka, officially belong to other jurisdictions, but only four of 400 employed are Roma at the factory in their jurisdiction. Without any tax revenue from the factories or the market, it is hard to provide services to our constituents. This is a tremendous opportunity for Roma to experience self-government, and I see it as an opportunity to show that if Roma are given a chance, they will exercise their own political power.

Shutka depends on the central government to redistribute funds from the national budget, therefore the parties in power largely control Roma votes. Indeed, of six political parties in Shutka, five are part (de facto proxies) of the country’s ruling coalition. Critics of the government complain about the way “machine politics” work in the municipality. Quality-of-life indicators for the Roma community in Macedonia are poor. Open Society Foundation economy figures are stark. Only 11% of Roma complete high school, compared with 60% of the general population. Roma in Macedonia have a lifespan 10 years shorter than the 76-years Macedonian average. Many cannot access healthcare because of prejudice and lack of documentation, with some 10% of Shutka residents are undocumented. Residents complain about the government’s lack of assistance, in juxtaposition with the state’s $730m investment in the city-centre of Skopje, which controversially brought about gargantuan statues and neo-classical facades. Partially, these “Potemkin” adornments are an antagonistic gesture at Greece, currently blocking North Macedonia’s EU/NATO membership. However, it also expresses Macedonian nationalism and may not sit well with the workaday aspirations of its divergent ethnic communities. Their mayors want spending on their own municipalities.

In Shutka – an enclave of Roma self-governance, residents are largely protected from the discrimination that exists in other Macedonian districts where Roma live. Nevertheless, Shukta’s challenges are immense, and the practical demands of Roma and other ethnic groups will be more visible in future North Macedonian elections. North Macedonia’s 2025 local elections are in many ways as significant as any parliamentary vote. They point to an emergent ethnic-identity, translating into “enclave-politics”, a trend which is likely to accentuate into national election patterns.

Martin Duffy has participated in more than two hundred international election and human rights assignments since beginning his career in Africa and Asia in the 1980s. He has served with a wide range of international organizations and has frequently been decorated for field service, among them UN (United Nations) Peacekeeping Citations and the Badge of Honour of the International Red Cross Movement. He has also held several academic positions in Ireland, UK, USA and elsewhere. He is a proponent of experiential learning and holds awards from Dublin, Oxford, Harvard, and several other institutions including the Diploma in International Relations at the University of Cambridge.

The transformative impact of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on virtually every facet of human society presents unprecedented challenges and opportunities for the international system. The Routledge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence and International Relations, expertly edited by Diego Brasioli, Laura Guercio, Giovanna Gnerre Landini, and Andrea de Giorgio (2025), arrives as a seminal and comprehensive volume dedicated to systematically exploring this critical intersection. Bringing together a diverse array of international scholars, the handbook undertakes the ambitious task of mapping the multifaceted ways in which AI technologies are reshaping the core concepts, practices, and structures of International Relations (IR). This review provides a detailed overview of the handbook's structure, content, and its significant contribution as a foundational resource for understanding the AI-IR nexus.

The editors position the handbook as an essential resource for scholars, students, and practitioners navigating the complex terrain where rapidly evolving AI technologies meet established and emerging dynamics of global politics. Its primary objective is to provide a broad, multidisciplinary examination of AI's implications across the spectrum of IR concerns. Recognising the inherent interdisciplinarity of the subject, the volume explicitly incorporates perspectives beyond traditional IR, drawing from law, ethics, security studies, political economy, sociology, and elements of computer science. The editors emphasise grounding the analysis in critical IR theory, seeking to understand AI not merely as a neutral tool but as a phenomenon deeply embedded in social, political, and economic power structures, capable of reconfiguring agency, sovereignty, security, governance, and global inequality.

The handbook is meticulously organised into six coherent parts (each examined below), including 29 thematic encompassing chapters, each addressing a distinct dimension of the AI-IR relationship.

Conceptualising AI and IR – Foundations and Frameworks

The foundational section establishes the conceptual bedrock for the entire volume. It explores the fundamental nature of AI and its core technologies (machine learning, neural networks, etc.) in terms accessible to an IR audience. Here, chapters rigorously examine how AI challenges and potentially redefines core IR concepts such as power (hard, soft, structural), sovereignty (state capacity, territoriality, informational control), agency (of states, non-state actors, and potentially AI systems themselves), and the nature of the international system. It delves into the epistemological and methodological challenges AI poses for IR research and theory-building, discussing how big data and algorithmic analysis might inform or transform the study of global politics. Foundational ethical considerations and the integration of critical theoretical perspectives (e.g., postcolonial, feminist) into the analysis of AI are introduced here, setting the tone for subsequent sections.

AI, Global Economy, and Development – Shaping Prosperity and Inequality

The book analyses AI's transformative role in the global political economy and its implications for development pathways. Chapters survey the dynamics of global AI competition, focusing on the strategies of major powers (US, China, EU) and the quest for technological leadership and economic advantage. The significant impact of AI on labour markets globally is explored, including automation trends, job displacement, the creation of new roles, and the imperative for workforce reskilling. AI's potential contributions to economic growth, productivity enhancements across sectors, and innovation are discussed, alongside the risks of exacerbating existing inequalities – both within and between nations (i.e., the "digital divide"). It examines the specific opportunities and challenges AI presents for developing countries, considering its use in areas like public service delivery, agriculture optimisation, and healthcare, while also addressing barriers such as infrastructure limitations, skills gaps, and data scarcity, with Big Tech’s influence (as a powerful actor shaping the global AI economy and its governance) being a recurring theme.

AI, Security, Military and Warfare – Transformations in Conflict and Defence

The book comprehensively addresses the profound impact of AI on international and national security, with detailed analysis provided on the revolution in military affairs, including autonomous weapons systems (AWS), their strategic implications, and the intense debates surrounding their regulation and potential ban (e.g., discussions on meaningful human control). The role of AI in intelligence gathering, processing, analysis, and prediction is thoroughly explored. Here, cybersecurity emerges as a critical theme, examining AI's dual role in enhancing cyber defences (threat detection, response automation) and empowering novel, sophisticated offensive cyber operations by state and non-state actors. Furthermore, the implications of AI for nuclear command and control, strategic stability, arms races (particularly the US-China dynamic), arms control verification, and the changing nature of deterrence are investigated alongside the evolving landscape of hybrid warfare, disinformation campaigns powered by AI, and the security challenges posed by non-state actors leveraging accessible AI tools.

Security of Data in Cyberspace

The chapter "Security of Data in Cyberspace" establishes that the pervasive digitisation of global society has transformed data into the central currency of power in international relations, positioning its security as a paramount national security concern that is inextricably linked to a state's economic vitality, military superiority, and geopolitical influence. It meticulously argues that AI serves as the pivotal force amplifying every facet of this new reality, functioning as a profound dual-use technology that, on the one hand, offers revolutionary defensive capabilities — such as predictive analytics for pre-empting threats, automated systems for real-time neutralisation of attacks, and advanced encryption techniques like homomorphism encryption that preserve privacy — while on the other hand, furnishes adversaries with an unprecedented offensive arsenal capable of launching AI-driven cyber-attacks that adapt in real-time, orchestrating hyper-scale disinformation campaigns with deep fakes, and automating the discovery of critical vulnerabilities, thereby creating a perpetually evolving battlefield.

AI, Global Governance, and Law – Navigating the Regulatory Maze

The book also confronts the complex challenge of governing AI technologies at the international level. It surveys the current fragmented landscape of AI governance initiatives, involving a multitude of actors: states, international organisations (UN, OECD, UNESCO, EU, Council of Europe, GPAI), industry consortia, and civil society groups. The development and contestation of international norms, principles, and ethical frameworks for "responsible AI" (e.g., fairness, accountability, transparency, human oversight) are central topics. Chapters analyse the significant challenges in regulating AI internationally, including the difficulties of defining AI, achieving regulatory harmonisation across jurisdictions, balancing innovation with risk mitigation, and enforcing standards. The adequacy of existing international legal frameworks (International Humanitarian Law, Human Rights Law, arms control treaties) in addressing AI-specific issues, particularly autonomous weapons and algorithmic bias, is critically examined, as well as the role of international organisations as forums for norm-setting, coordination, and technical assistance in AI governance.

AI and Societal Challenges – Broader Impacts and Ethical Dilemmas

The book’s final section widens the lens to consider the broader societal implications of AI with significant international dimensions. The pervasive challenge of AI-driven misinformation and disinformation campaigns ("deepfakes," algorithmic amplification) and their impact on democratic processes, social cohesion, and international relations, is extensively covered. Furthermore, the expansion of surveillance capabilities through AI (facial recognition, predictive policing, social scoring) and its profound implications for privacy, civil liberties, and human rights on a global scale are investigated. Here, the chapters specifically address the gender dimensions of AI, exploring issues of bias in datasets and algorithms, AI's impact on gender equality and work, and the gendered aspects of AI development and governance. Broader ethical considerations surrounding bias, discrimination, accountability for algorithmic decisions, transparency ("black box" problem), and the potential long-term societal transformations driven by advanced AI are woven throughout as well as the environmental footprint of AI like energy consumption of large data centers, and its potential role in mitigating climate change (optimisation, modeling) are discussed, highlighting the sustainability challenge.

Evaluating the Central Theme

Across the diverse contributions within the handbook, several overarching and deeply interconnected themes emerge, painting a complex portrait of AI as a transformative force in international relations. The analysis consistently positions AI not as a neutral tool, but as a potent amplifier of existing power dynamics. This manifests in its capacity to exacerbate entrenched economic, digital, and geopolitical inequalities, reinforcing the dominance of powerful states and massive technology corporations, while creating new vectors for stratification within societies themselves, such as through biased algorithmic decision-making in justice or social services. This concern over concentrated power and its discontents directly fuels a central tension between the enduring concept of state sovereignty and the inherently transnational nature of AI technologies, data flows, and the corporate entities that control them. This clash raises profound questions about the future of effective global governance, as national regulatory frameworks struggle to keep pace with borderless technological advancements, necessitating unprecedented international cooperation.

In response to these formidable challenges, a foundational ethical imperative is championed throughout the volume, arguing that the protection of fundamental human rights — from privacy and non-discrimination to freedom of expression — must be proactively embedded into the very architecture of AI systems, their development, and their governance frameworks. Crucially, the handbook demonstrates that grasping this intricate AI-IR nexus demands an essential multidisciplinary imperative. It requires the integration of insights from computer science to understand the technology’s capabilities, law to craft responsive regulations, sociology to assess societal impact, and ethics to provide moral guidance, moving far beyond the traditional confines of political science. Underpinning this entire examination is a strong, unifying critical perspective. This lens encourages rigorously questioning dominant, often technologically deterministic narratives, exposing the hidden power structures and value judgments baked into AI systems, and consciously integrating marginalised voices and impacts to deconstruct power and ensure a more holistic, equitable, and just understanding of our algorithmic future.

The Routledge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence and International Relations (2025) stands as a monumental achievement and an indispensable resource. Editors Brasioli, Guercio, Landini, and de Giorgio have successfully curated a volume of remarkable breadth and depth, offering unparalleled coverage of how AI is reshaping the theory and practice of international relations. By bringing together diverse scholarly perspectives and rigorously examining AI's impact across security, economics, governance, law, and society, the handbook provides a vital conceptual map for navigating this complex and rapidly evolving landscape. Its strength lies in its comprehensive scope, systematic organisation, and commitment to a multidisciplinary and critically engaged approach. The volume effectively illuminates the profound challenges — ethical, legal, security-related, economic, and societal — posed by AI, while also acknowledging its potential benefits. It serves as an authoritative foundation for students embarking on studies in this area, an invaluable reference for scholars across IR, law, ethics, and related fields seeking to understand the multifaceted AI-IR nexus, and a crucial source of insights for policymakers and practitioners grappling with the realities of AI integration into global affairs. This handbook is not merely a snapshot of a moment; it establishes the essential frameworks and identifies the key questions that will guide research, debate, and policy responses in the critical years to come as AI continues to transform the international system.

In Their Own Words: How Russian Propagandists Reveal Putin’s Intentions
By Julia Davis
Columbia University Press, 2024

Julia Davis book brings together 104 of her articles published in media outlets that analyse de-humanisation of Ukrainians on Russian television. The book has a foreword by Yale University’s Timothy Snyder and a preface and afterword by Davis. This is the first book that brings together a detailed insight and analysis of how Russian television prepared the Russian public for the full-scale invasion through the de-humanisation of Ukrainians, and how Russian media has continued to mobilise public support for Russia’s war against Ukraine.

Peter Pomerantsev has written of ‘The challenge for anyone trying to bring propagandists to trial has always been connecting vile words to horrific acts.’ In June 2024, the FIDH (International Federation for Human Rights) submitted a Communication to the ICC (International Criminal Court) on hate speech in the Russian media that they believe had mobilised war crimes in Ukraine. Thus, it is surprising that of the six indictments of Russians by the ICC (International Criminal Court), none of them are for journalists.

FIDH had analysed over 2,000 video segments with statements made in the Russian media between 24 February 2022 and 24 February 2024.  The Communication targeted former President and Deputy Chairman of the Russian Security Council Dmitri Medvedev, Vladimir Solovyov, Russia-1 TV channel host; Editor of Russia Today Margarita Siimonyan; director of the state-owned media group Rossiya Segodnya Dmitry Kiselyov; popular radio and television presenter Sergei Mardan; and first deputy to the Chief of Staff of the presidential administration Alexei Gromov.

Independent media in Russia was closed down in 2021-2022, and has since only existed in exile. Simonyan, head of the Kremlin propaganda television channel RT (formerly Russia Today), called for the repression of the opposition in Russia by 1 May 2021 which, she believed, would prepare the ground for the ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine (Davis, pp.82-83).

Russia’s constitution was changed in 2020 to allow Vladimir Putin to remain president until 2036, in effect making him president for life. Since 2020, Russia has transitioned from an authoritarian political system with a collective leadership to a dictatorship. Political repression has become widespread in Russia, and Putin’s dictatorship imprisons a higher number of political prisoners than in the post-Stalin Soviet Union.  In a volume edited by Ian Garner and myself, eleven scholars analyse how Russia has become a fascist dictatorship, based on an ideology of Russian imperial nationalism, where internal repression is intimately connected to external military aggression.

Davis analyses Russian state media which reflects the Kremlin’s official position. In these TV debates and news reports, Russia journalists, political technologists (consultants), academics, think tank ‘experts’ and state officials have been given opportunities to lay out their disdain for Ukraine and Ukrainians and call for war crimes and genocide against Ukrainians who are resisting Russia’s ‘liberation’.

The Russian media has never hidden Russia’s goal of destroying the Ukrainian state and installing a Russian puppet state and replacing Ukrainians with Little Russians (one of three branches of a pan-Russian people, the others being great Russians and white Russians). Russia’s so-called ‘special military operation’ was supposed to be a quick operation that would bring about regime change. The Russian media and Russian leaders have also never hidden its territorial revanchism and imperialism towards Ukraine. Russian TV routinely referred to Ukraine as “the territory formerly known as Ukraine” (Davis, p.188).

Davis’ (2024) study of Russian state media should be placed within context.  The disintegration of the USSR in 1991 into fifteen republics was, as Putin explained, the demise of ‘Historic Russia.’ Russians never viewed the Russian SFSR as their homeland, which was the entire Soviet Union.  Unlike fourteen non-Russian Soviet republics, the Russian SFSR did not possess republican institutions such as a communist party, and therefore Russian and Soviet identities were de facto the same. Unlike Ukraine and even Belarus, the Russian SFSR did not declare independence from the USSR. This is why Alexander Motyl wrote that Russian nationalism is a ‘myth’ as Russian nationalists had never sought to separate from the USSR or build an independent nation-state (Motyl, 1990, pp.161-173). Russian nationalists prefer empire over nation-state; indeed, Putin describes Russia as a ‘state-civilisation’ without borders. One of the fundamental requisites for a nation-state is a territory surrounded by defined borders.

The Russian image of ‘Russia’ was therefore always bigger than the Russian SFSR (Soviet Federated Socialist Republic) or Russian Federation. Depending on their political persuasion, Russians identify ‘Russia’ as the Tsarist Empire, USSR, CIS (Commonwealth of Independent States), Eurasia, Russian World or Holy Rus (or a combination of them). As Richard Pipes wrote more than half a century ago, unlike England and France, Russia never built a nation-state before it expanded into an empire, and therefore the two are always co-terminus in Russian identity.

Russian irridentism and imperialism towards Ukraine also has long roots. White Russian emigres, followers of the ‘White’ anti-Bolshevik forces who were defeated in the Russian civil war, Russian nationalist dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and other Russian nationalist forces always denied Ukraine’s right to Crimea and ‘New Russia’, the Tsarist term for southeastern Ukraine. They also could never accept a Ukrainian state fully independent of Russia; that is, the only option they would agree to is a Little Russia closely aligned with and tied to Russia (Kuzio, 2022, pp.99-128); that is, a Ukrainian version of Alexander Lukashenka’s Belarus.

The entire Russian political spectrum has laid territorial claim to Crimea throughout the post-Soviet era, ignoring Russia’s agreement to respect to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity which was enshrined in the Budapest Memorandum (signed after Ukraine agree to give up the world’s third largest nuclear arms arsenal) and 1997 Russian-Ukrainian treaty. From 2008, and especially after Russia’s first invasion in 2014, Putin added to Crimea territorial claims towards Ukraine’s southeastern region. In April 2014, Putin revived use of the term New Russia.

At the heart of Russian understanding of what constitutes ‘Russia’ are three eastern Slavic countries — Russia, Ukraine and Belarus — who had constituted two thirds of the Soviet population and most of the USSR’s political, military and security elites. Putin’s goal of rebuilding a new Eurasian union required the reconstitution of this eastern Slavic core that is described as the Russian World or, by the Russian Orthodox Church, as Holy Rus.

Since 1994, Lukashenka has rebuilt the Russian-Belarusian relationship of elder brother (Russians)-dependent (Belarusian) state that resembled their relationship in the USSR. In 2020, the Kremlin’s control was threatened by mass protests in Belarus against election fraud, which were brutally repressed with the assistance of Russia. Since then, Belarus has become a full Russian puppet state. In February 2022, Belarus was used as one of Russia’s invasion routes into Ukraine.

With Belarus firmly under Russian control, Ukraine was next in line. Russian attempts to ‘Bosnianise’ Ukraine in 2014-2021 had failed; Ukrainian Presidents Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelenskyy had both rejected implementing the Russian understanding of the Minsk peace accords that would have created a federalised and weak Ukraine within Russia’s sphere of influence. Three months before it took place, Vladimir Zhirinovsky, former leader of the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (in fact a pro-regime nationalist party), predicted on Russian TV the exact day (24 February 2022) and time (4am) of the Russian full-scale invasion (Davis, p.140).

In 2020-2021, the Russian media (especially TV) prepared the Russian public for the upcoming full-scale invasion that it claimed would be quickly victorious in defeating Ukraine and returning Ukrainians to their Little Russians roots.  The US and NATO were blamed for the escalation — not, of course, Russia (Davis, p.136).

Putin’s long essay, published in July 2021, which should be understood as the Russian full-scale invasion’s manifesto, denied Ukraine’s right to exist as an independent state and declared Russians and Ukrainians to be ‘one people.’ Putin’s invasion force of only 170,000 rested on Russian imperial nationalist myths that Ukraine was an artificial construct and US puppet state, Russian speakers were oppressed by Nazis who had come to power in 2014 in a putsch during the Euromaidan Revolution, and Little Russians would greet the Russian army as ‘liberators.’ In comparison, in 1968, the Warsaw Pact troops that invaded Czechoslovakia, a country with a quarter of Ukraine’s population, using 250,000 troops.

Davis documents how numerous state officials, journalists, academics and ‘experts’ confidently claimed on Russian TV that Ukraine would be defeated within 1-2 days — some even claimed that it would only take a few hours. This view of a quick Russian military victory was also predominant in the West, and influenced the decision to initially only supply military aid useful for a guerrilla war. Western policymakers and think tank ‘experts’ had under-estimated Ukraine’s resilience and had believed the myth of Russia possessing the ‘second best army in the world.’ Ukrainians did not, however, welcome Russian troops as ‘liberators’, and instead their fight back has led to over one million Russian casualties and a global conflict. Russia is no longer optimistic of defeating Ukraine within hours or days.

Davis (p.2920) writes that state media “has played a central part in prompting, encouraging, rationalizing and normalizing the Kremlin’s massacre of its next-door neighbours.” Russian media propaganda since the mid-2000s has de-humanised Ukrainians and prepared the ground for what by mid-2025 totalled 170,000 war crimes committed by Russian military and security forces in Ukraine. This has included the mass murder, torture and raping of civilians (children, women, men), deportation of two million Ukrainians to Russia and kidnapping of 35,000 children. Russian media routinely calls for the destruction of the Ukrainian state and mocks the Ukrainian language, culture and traditions (Davis, p.292). The Ukrainian language was recognised by the Soviet regime; it is now decreed not to exist. Indeed, a huge 11-volume Dictionary of the Ukrainian Language was published in Soviet Ukraine from 1970-1980. Political scientist Sergei Mikheyev said the Ukrainian language does not exist and Ukraine needs to be destroyed (Davis, p.185). Denial of the Ukrainian language returned Russian nationalism to the views they had held in the Tsarist Empire which had banned use of Ukrainian in the nineteenth century.

Well known Russian TV host Vladimir Soloviov said, referring to Ukraine: “When a doctor is de-worming a cat for the doctor, it’s a special operation, for the worms it’s a war, and for the cat its cleansing” (Davis, p.292). Anton Krasovsky, director of broadcasting at RT, called for the drowning of Ukrainian children, burning of homes with Ukrainians inside, and grandmothers to be gang raped by Russian soldiers.

Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT, said she had been waiting eight years since 2014 for the “special military operation” to happen, adding after it was launched: “This is true happiness” (Davis, p.291). Simonyan called Ukrainians “ungrateful” for the “gifts” they received from Russia in the USSR. They have “become traitors towards us” and, she points out, Russia knows what to do to traitors (Davis, p.137).

Simonyan’s regular appearances on Russian TV are always incendiary, Ukrainophobic and xenophobically anti-Western. The West are “hypocrites, armed with Hitler’s fascist rhetoric, plans and methods,” she said (Davis, p.237). Simonyan said Russia’s war with the West began in Ukraine, a traditional Russian nationalist argument denying Ukraine agency by depicting it as an ‘Anti-Russia’ puppet state of the US.

As Davis (p.294) writes, genocidal discourse is not solely confined to journalists and state officials. Academics and think tank experts are routinely invited to state TV, and they participate in similar genocidal discourse. “Russan academics are happy to explain the logic of Kremlin-directed violence and to provide an intellectual gloss” (Davis, p.294). Ukraine is a Russian land and Ukrainians are hoodwinked Russians (Davis, p.200). Henry Sardaryan, Dean at MGIMO (Moscow State Institute of International Relations), described Ukrainians as in fact Russians who refuse to admit this: “These are absolutely Russian people, who speak the Russian language, but who are convinced that they represent anti-Russia and an anti-Russian element” (Davis, p.184).

Russian imperial nationalist Pavel Gubarev described Ukrainians as Russians possessed by the devil.  Russia would aim to convince them they are in fact ‘Russians,’ but if this failed, they would be killed. Russia, Gubarev warned, could kill one or five million Ukrainians: “we can exterminate all of you.” State Duma deputy Aleksey Zhuravliov called for the killing of five percent of Ukrainians, or two million, to “solve the Ukrainian question” (Davis, p.184).

Simonyan has called for Ukrainian troops resisting Russian forces, including prisoners of war, to be killed. Davis (p.201) has asserted there is no Russian-Ukrainian war, just a ‘special military operation’ between anti-Russian, fascist, Russophobic Ukrainians who are seeking to murder other Ukrainians who consider themselves to be ‘Russians.’ Surveys of the Ukrainian population since 2014 have found only 2-5 percent claiming to be ethnic Russians and 92-95 percent stating they are Ukrainians (Kuzio, 2022, p.235). As has often been the case with Russian imperial nationalists, they believe only they have a right to decide what constitutes reality inside Ukraine.

The ‘special military operation’ goal of ‘de-nazification’ ‘means mass murder’ of Ukrainians. De-nazification is openly described in the Russian media in genocidal terms. Soloviov described the need for public hangings and executions and war crimes trials after Ukraine is ‘liberated’ (Davis, p.161). Davis (p.188) writes that Russian TV often talks of the need to murder millions of Ukraine during the de-nazification process. Initially, Russian officials and journalists assumed de-nazification would be a quick process, but with Ukrainians putting up a stiff resistance to Russia’s full-scale invasion, this time frame has been extended to 15-20 years.

Russian state officials and journalists deny the ‘special military operation’ is an invasion of Ukraine. “Nobody is fighting against Ukraine,” Simonyan said, “we’re liberating Ukraine” (Davis, p.144). Soloviov said the ‘special military operation’ is not a war against Ukrainians but their de-nazification and de-militarisation that would remove “NATO’s fist that was directed at us” (Davis, p.153).

Simonyan said Russia intervened in an existing ‘civil war’ in Ukraine in support of one side, Russian speakers, who were allegedly being threatened with ‘genocide.’ No international organisation or human rights body has found evidence of ‘genocide.’ Less than two percent of Ukrainians believe Russia’s justification for launching its ‘special military operation.’

In Simonyan’s TV commentaries, she claims Russia is defending Russian speakers against Ukrainian Nazis. Although this has nothing to do with reality, this kind of argument is standard in official Russian discourse. When Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov was asked how it was possible for a Nazi state to be led by a Jewish president (i.e., Zelenskyy), he retorted that Zionists had collaborated with the Nazis in the 1930s and Adolf Hitler had Jewish blood. Of course, these were both falsehoods.

As Davis explains, anybody who opposes Putin is automatically a Nazi and therefore the term when used by Rusia is “devoid of its original meaning” (Davis, p.153). In Russia’s eyes, Ukrainians, US President Joe Biden, EU leaders, US Congress men and women, and the German Chancellor are all Nazis who are attempting to preserve an allegedly Nazi regime in Ukraine (Davis, p.154). Everyone who opposes Russia’s ‘special military operation’ is a Nazi (Davis, p.237).

Davis brings out the extreme anti-Western xenophobia fanned on state-controlled Russian TV. Simonyan described war with the US as “inevitable” (Davis, p.81). Konstantin Zatulin described the ‘special military operation’ as “a war against the West, a war against NATO” (Davis, p.153). Soloviov said Russia was de facto at war with NATO “because all of Ukraine’s military formations are carrying out NATO’s tasks” (Davis, p.152). The defeat of Ukraine will also be the defeat of the Western international order. Sidorov said, “everything will start in Ukraine” and then end up in defeat for the West and Russia’s return as a great power, equal in status to the US (Davis, p.85).

Anti-Western xenophobia has existed and grown in Putin’s Russia since the mid-2000s but there are two reasons why it is on steroids since 2022. The first is there is no other way to explain Ukraine’s resilience. If Ukrainians do not exist as a people separate to Russians, why are they fighting so hard against their so-called Russian ‘liberators?’ To explain this conundrum, Russian imperial nationalists, such as Andrey Sidorov, deputy dean of Moscow State University, claim Russia is fighting “against the collective West” (Davis, p.85). The Kremlin’s belief in a quick military victory was based on the myth of Ukraine as an artificial construct and Little Russians greeting the Russian army.

The second reason is that Russia expected a similarly weak Western response as that of 2014 when Russia first invaded Ukraine, but they miscalculated. Since April 2022, the West has provided a large amount of military assistance to Ukraine, as well as financial assistance to build a Ukrainian defence sector. Today, 60 percent of Ukrainians weapons are built inside Ukraine. In 2022, after Russian forces withdrew from Kyiv, Kharkiv and Kherson, it turned to China, Iran, and North Korea for military support. These four countries are united by a loathing of what they call the US-led unipolar world and the hegemonic discourse of Western liberalism.  Olga Skabeeva, another rabble rouser on Russian state TV, described the ‘special military operation’ as transitioning into World War 3. Russia’s goal is not only the de-militarisation of Ukraine, but also to de-militarise NATO (Davis, p.187).

Davis has produced a formidable and unique analysis of how Russian state media has been, and continues to be, used to mobilise Russian support for a full-scale invasion through the de-humanisation of Ukrainians and its importance in maintaining public support for Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine. The book is indispensable reading for those interested in locating the roots of genocidal discourse in Putin’s fascist dictatorship.

Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy
by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman
MacMillan Publishers, 2023

Farrell and Newman’s Underground Empire is not a declinist story. Rather, it is the story of the United States having too much power, power channeled through an infrastructure so entwined in the global economy that it has come to be viewed as both natural and invisible. Yet, these instruments of power — payment systems, data cables, regulatory regimes, technological chokepoints — are not neutral or benign. On the contrary: they are coercive, brittle, and susceptible to boomerang effects. As Farrell and Newman argue, the more the United States uses them to control the world economy, the faster it speeds up the corrosion of its own hegemonic order.

This is not a polemic. The authors have no interest in engaging in moral condemnation or indulging in nostalgia for a vanished liberalism. Instead, they offer a forensic, historically grounded account of how America came to rule the world, not just through military might or soft power but through the pipes, wires, and code that power the global economy. Tracing how an “underground empire” has emerged in the post-Cold War decades, they show how U.S.-centered financial networks, digital systems, and supply chains have spread across the world. Ostensibly open and rules-based, these networks were quietly designed to route through American institutions, legal jurisdictions, and corporate platforms.

The book’s key insight is that infrastructure is power — not just material power but informational, regulatory, and strategic power. America’s ability to impose sanctions, monitor global capital flows, restrict technology transfers, or throttle adversaries like Huawei is rooted not in diplomatic persuasion or military deterrence but in the fact that the world’s systems — the global economy’s payment rails, semiconductor fabs, chip design architectures, cloud platforms — run through chokepoints the United States controls.

The authors document how U.S. agencies have learned to exploit this position with increasing sophistication. What began as ad hoc enforcement of sanctions has evolved into an integrated toolkit of geoeconomic coercion. From freezing Russia’s central bank assets to banning high-end chips to China, American officials can now disrupt the functioning of entire economies with the stroke of a pen. The global economic system, once designed for promoting efficiency and interdependence, has been repurposed into a lattice of digital and financial tripwires — silent until pulled, devastating once set in motion.

But the book is not about American strength. It is about overreach. With remarkable clarity and precision, the authors argue that this system, so effective in the short term, is now being hollowed out from below. Every time the United States uses its economic arsenal to punish or pressure, it gives other powers a stronger incentive to build workarounds. China, Russia, Iran, and even friendly states like India, France, and Germany are searching for alternatives to SWIFT, to the dollar, to U.S.-dominated tech stacks. What was once a hub-and-spoke model of globalization centered on America is slowly turning into a fragmented, multipolar landscape of parallel systems.

The irony is devastating: The very interdependence that has given the United States leverage is now powering a dynamic of disintegration. Every weaponized sanction, export ban, and extraterritorial fine nudges the world a step further away from the American system. What used to be a trusted set of institutions is increasingly seen as a threat to be hedged against or escaped.

Farrell and Newman are careful not to overstate this trend. They do not predict the imminent collapse of U.S. economic primacy. But they do show how repeated use of economic coercion — especially without multilateral legitimacy or strategic coherence — undermines trust, alienates allies, and accelerates the search for alternatives. The result is not a clean break, as some declinists imagine, but a slow erosion of the plumbing that made America’s global role possible in the first place.

What makes Underground Empire so powerful is that it connects the dots across a range of seemingly disparate developments. The weaponization of finance. The use of export controls against Chinese tech firms. The politicization of semiconductor supply chains. The extraterritorial enforcement of American law. Each of these is not just a policy choice. It is a symptom of deeper structural dynamics, in which infrastructure becomes leverage and leverage becomes liability.

The book’s tone is sober, but not despairing. Farrell and Newman are political scientists, not declinists. They recognize that America still commands immense advantages. But they also contend that power without discipline is dangerous. The United States has slipped into a pattern of economic coercion as a first resort, often without thinking through the long-term consequences. Sanctions are imposed without serious consideration of endgames. Export controls are launched without a clear theory of victory. Tools accumulate without strategy, and the system groans under the weight of its own contradictions.

There is a philosophical edge to the book as well. What kind of power is compatible with a liberal republic? Can a democracy sustain its legitimacy while weaponizing the very structures it claims are universal and rules-based? At what point does hegemony curdle into hypocrisy? These are not rhetorical questions. Farrell and Newman raise them quietly but insistently, refusing to let the reader off the hook with platitudes about values or norms.

What’s left unsaid but unmistakably implied? The United States must choose between retrenchment and recalibration. If it wishes to sustain its global position, it must discipline its use of economic tools, rebuild trust in its networks, and re-anchor its statecraft in diplomacy rather than unilateral coercion. If it cannot, then the underground empire will become a hollow one — intact in form but rotting from within.

The warning signs are already there. BRICS is expanding. China is rolling out its Cross-Border Interbank Payment System. European states are testing non-dollar channels to buy energy. Even U.S. tech giants, once reliable instruments of soft power, are being dragged into sovereign regulatory battles. The plumbing is no longer invisible. Everyone sees it. And everyone is planning their exits.

What Underground Empire ultimately reveals is not just a new chapter in U.S. foreign policy. It is a turning point in the global order. The age of unipolar economic dominance, underwritten by U.S.-centric infrastructure, is ending. What comes next is not certain. But the authors leave no doubt that if Washington continues to treat the global economy as a battlefield, it may soon find itself fighting alone.

This is a necessary book. Clear, lucid, and unsettling in its implications. It does not peddle easy solutions, nor does it lapse into fatalism. Instead, it offers a clear-eyed account of how we have arrived at this moment and what the costs will be if we fail to adjust course. For policymakers, strategists, and anyone interested in the future of American power, Underground Empire is required reading. It does not tell you what to think. It forces you to confront what already is.

Liberal thought is quite diverse. Much of it has also been traditionally quite sceptical of democracy despite its frequent modern association with it. However, the various liberal perspectives all share some key aspects in regard to what is needed for stable liberal political orders at any level to endure. Firstly, the rule of law must bind both the rulers and the ruled. Secondly, significant external constraints on the leader (or leaders’) ability to act, such as, for example, the separation of powers, or the limitation on the leaders’ ability to enact many types of policies without gaining the support of some other political actors independent of them in some manner.

When the liberal rule-based international order emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the world failed to design an international system in line with liberal principles on these most crucial aspects. The U.S. became an uncontested global hegemon with no other power able to contest or balance it. The U.S. has had, in the Post-Cold War era, more freedom of action abroad than almost any great power has ever had in human history. French foreign minister Herbert Vedrine’s reference to the U.S. in 1999 as a “hyperpower” captured how far the United States exceeded past superpowers. Indeed, save for nuclear deterrents, there were no significant external constraints on the U.S. government's ability to act abroad – even if the results were often not what Washington wanted.  The restrictions on the U.S. ability to act around the world were largely internal;  namely, its own decision-makers’ (and publics’) moral preferences and, more importantly, domestic constraints derived from its own publics’ sometimes limited willingness to bear the actual or potential burdens some U.S. actions abroad potentially entailed.  

Having an illiberal global power structure to manage a supposed liberal world order led exactly to the outcome that liberal thought itself would predict. The United States did initially promote some important liberal values, such as free(r) trade, stronger international institutions, and a major expansion of international law, building a more liberal international system in practice at the start of the post-Cold War era. However, without major external constraints to stop it, there was nothing to stop the U.S. whenever it had the whim, or a shift in U.S. domestic public opinion, to damage and destroy the liberal structures it itself had helped to strengthen or build.  

For example, after the September 11 attacks temporarily shifted U.S. public opinion to be much more supportive of the use of force against terrorism in general and for efforts to transform countries perceived as incubuses of terrorism in particular, the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 with neither a clear self-defence rationale nor a UN Security Council authorisation. The Bush administration did so after implicitly admitting the international legal need for a special international authorisation in this case by unsuccessfully seeking a UNSC resolution authorising the war, but felt free to ignore legalities, even as the rest of the world largely opposed the invasion. As part of this war and the wider war on terror, the U.S. blatantly violated the 1984 convention against torture through the mass torture of actual and suspected terrorists. These high-handed U.S. behaviours weakened both the UN Security Council and key aspects of international law that the U.S. government had spent years promoting.

Likewise, usually due to opposition of the U.S. public or some key domestic interest groups, the U.S. frequently failed to sign or ratify various significant international agreements ranging from the Convention on the Law of the Seas to the Arms Trade Treaty, leaving itself free from all of their constraints. This refusal to sign or ratify occurred many times after U.S. representatives shaped much of these treaties’ content when they were being drafted. Furthermore, the U.S., in multiple cases, insisted that other countries nevertheless abide by these very international treaties that the U.S. had exempted itself from. Such U.S. behaviour further weakened the strength and credibility of international law.

Similarly, when U.S. public opinion on international trade began to shift in the 2010s, multiple U.S. administrations, starting with Obama’s actions against the WTO’s appeals board and a massive multi-decade increase in highly potent forms of unilateral U.S. sanctions, were easily able to unilaterally weaken and eventually demolish much of the WTO and the global free trade system that it itself built. This is despite much of the world’s staunch opposition to many of these unilateral U.S. moves. In neither case have other major world powers even been able to do much more than, at best, partially protect themselves from the consequences.

With such an unstable structural basis for a liberal world order, its collapse or entry into a severe crisis in the medium term was just a matter of time until some chance event affecting the U.S., or new domestic policy demand, would emerge that would cause the U.S. government, advertently or inadvertently, to give it the final blow. Even in an alternate universe in which Trump had never become president would probably see the liberal order by around now either dying or experiencing a severe crisis due to a different chain of events.

Accordingly, any post-Trump attempts to resurrect the liberal rule-based order, or create a new world order embodying liberal principles in some manner, will need, for its long-term stability, to be structurally more in line with liberal principles- not just some outputs and words. Any international law existing under the new system must equally bind the U.S. in practice as much as it binds other states. Special mechanisms will need to be constructed to ensure such constraints in practice, such as requiring that (as is the case in some other countries) any international treaty the U.S. signs and ratifies becomes automatically equivalent within the U.S. to any domestic law passed by the U.S. Congress.

Global hegemony by the U.S., or any other country, must be rejected. Global leadership instead must be in the plural- composed of multiple strong countries, both democratic and authoritarian, able to restrain the U.S. and each other across the global policy spectrum whenever needed. Only a rule-based world order based on actual liberal structural principles will have a fighting chance of enduring for long.

Dov H. Levin is an Associate professor of International Relations in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong. He received his PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on various aspects of international relations and U.S. foreign policy, with special focus on partisan electoral interventions (foreign election interference) and strategic public diplomacy. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Hong Kong or of the Department of Politics and Public Administration.

The turn of this century was marked by a series of fateful events in world politics such as the Asian financial crisis and the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States (and the subsequent “Global War on Terror”). As most IR scholars were rightly preoccupied with understanding such challenges, two leading IR scholars, James Der Derian and Alexander Wendt, had separately begun to cast their eyes on a rather different subject: quantum theory.

Der Derian made his first reference to quantum mechanics in his introduction to The Virilio Reader (Der Derian, 1998). In 2001, Wendt spotted a book in a Chicago bookstore remainder bin: The Quantum Society: Mind, Physics, and a New Social Vision (Zohar and Marshall, 1995). That, as Wendt (2015) wrote later on, was his “aha!” moment. These seemingly unremarkable anecdotes changed the main research trajectory of both scholars. Their initially “separate” encounters with quantum mechanics then became “entangled” as they joined forces on the broad and ambitious project of quantizing IR. One of the fitting products of this collaboration is their co-edited book Quantum International Relations: A Human Science for World Politics.

Expanding on their co-edited Special Issue “Quantizing International Relations” in Security Dialogue (Der Derian and Wendt, 2020), the book seeks to make a case for grounding the study of international relations in quantum approaches, broadly and diversely defined. Being the very first — and still probably the only — edited book dedicated to quantum IR, this volume is a truly welcome and much anticipated addition to this endeavor. Anyone who wonders about how IR can benefit from quantum perspectives should not hesitate to pick up a copy and delve into it (if they have not already done so). The reward would be an incredible intellectual feast like no other.

Despite its bold title “Quantum International Relations”, the book does not call for building “a single grand theory of quantum IR,” or launching “another great debate or a polemical attack on other theoretical approaches” (p. 18). Rather, it has a more modest, but still profoundly important and challenging, goal of fostering “a human science for world politics” (the book’s subtitle), because classical or mainstream IR, based largely on Newtonian worldviews, has been too mechanical, deterministic, reductionist, and abstract. On the other hand, the various “weird” characteristics of quantum reality – such as entanglement, superposition, uncertainty, complementarity, the observer effect, and the wave function – seem better equipped to capture the human face of world politics: often contingent, uncertain, probabilistic, entangled, and fundamentally relational.

The book features an impressive list of scholars in the small and emerging community of quantum IR scholars, ranging from PhD candidates to leading scholars who share an interest in all things quantum. The diversity of both contributors (though as the editors rightly note, there still is room for more diversity) and their chapters means that you are likely to find a topic of your own interest. If you want a historical sociology of knowledge about the entanglement, estrangement, and transposition between quantum mechanics, IR, and philosophy, the first three chapters (by Nicholas Harrington, Jayson Waters, and Jairus Victor Grove respectively) in Part 1 “History and Theory” will offer fascinating reading. If you are interested in questions of how quantum technologies and discourses about them will affect various aspects of international relations, then chapters in Part 2 “Science and Technology”, especially by Shohini Ghose, Jon Lindsay, and Frank L. Smith III, provide expert coverage of such issues. Part 3 “Quantizing IR” focuses on examining the theoretical and conceptual affinities between quantum approaches and a range of alternative, non-classical IR approaches such as a dialectical approach (Thomas Biersteker’s chapter), critical theories (Michael Murphy’s chapter), and systems theory (Mathias Albert and Felix M. Bathon’s chapter), while Part 4 “Bringing the Human back into Science” and some chapters in Parts 2 and 3 apply quantum insights to rethinking issues such as state sovereignty (Mark B. Salter’s chapter), the role of money (David Orrell’s chapter), the role of individuals in climate governance and social change (Karen O’Brien and Manjana Milkoreit’s chapter), consciousness (Leonardo Orlando’s chapter), traumatic memory (K. M. Fierke and Nicola Mackay’s chapter), and Kantian ethics and international intervention (Laura Zanotti’s chapter). And those who are curious about mathematical interpretations of quantum theory can learn much from chapters by Michael Schnabel (focusing on linear algebra and probability theory) and Badredine Arfi (focusing on category theory).

While Der Derian, Wendt and their contributors are well aware of the skepticism around the value of a quantum approach, the book is still seemingly written for the (almost) already converted, or at least for those who have some assumed knowledge of quantum theory. For the less initiated reader, many quantum concepts — despite being introduced in the Introduction chapter and elsewhere — could remain largely mysterious and difficult to understand. And this might be a problem if the book hopes to broaden the appeal of quantum IR, as it no doubt does. After all, the ultimate success of the book is probably not best measured by how sympathetic readers respond, but rather by how the general IR community thinks about it. While I myself have been experimenting with understanding IR from a quantum (holographic) perspective (see, for example, Pan, 2025), and therefore I am hardly a detached, unbiased observer, reading the book as a reviewer has put me in a quantum superposition state of being simultaneously inside and outside of the virtual quantum IR circle. From the perspective of an “outsider”, I get the feeling that the book has yet to fully address a couple of nagging issues often raised about quantum IR.

The first is the perennial doubt about whether quantum is applied literally or metaphorically. The editors call for practicing “an open pluralism” on such questions (p. 9), but judging by some other reviews of the book (see, for example, Jackson, 2023), there is no easy way for quantum IR scholars to let themselves off the hook on this issue. Apparently, the skeptics are demanding an almost impossible task: to be truly convincing, quantum IR has to be actual rather than just metaphorical, but then demonstrating how quantum literally works at the human level would first have to overcome the “scaling-up” and “decoherence” problems when quantum effects get washed out at the macroscopic level. Ironically, as Der Derian and Wendt note, mainstream IR, despite the lack of such a “scaling-up” problem, still relies heavily on metaphors “whose metaphorical nature has been forgotten” (p. 9). There is perhaps a subconscious double-standard here but then mainstream IR, by virtue of being mainstream, can now afford to not worry about it. At the same time, this is a metaphysical challenge that still needs to be more systematically addressed, not only by this book, but also by the broader quantum IR community down the track.

Second, the book seems to fall short of meeting the inevitably diverse expectations of its readership. To physicists, with their perhaps strongly held scientistic conviction about how science in general and quantum mechanics in particular work, the very attempt to transpose physics onto politics and IR would seem inherently problematic. To critical IR scholars, many of the “new” ideas introduced by quantum IR sound rather familiar already, except that such ideas have been given a “quantum facelift.” Some may also regard this appeal to the authority of science as yet another case of “physics envy” (Sjoberg, 2020). And finally, to mainstream IR scholars who are likely to ignore quantum IR altogether, the book may appear to offer them little buy-in to get interested in the first place. Sure, it is unrealistic for a book to try to be everything to everyone, and to the credit of the book, it does include a few physicists (e.g., Shohini Ghose and Michael Schnabel) and has featured dialogue with critical approaches in several chapters. There are also a number of chapters on the key IR topic of security. Still, it seems to me that it would probably be able to draw more attention if it included a chapter or two that explicitly engage some mainstream IR concepts and issues such as power (or the balance of power), war, and the security dilemma from a quantum perspective.  

These concerns about the book might also be a reflection of both the inherent difficulty of translating the counterintuitive ideas of quantum physics (unlike those from classical physics) into IR on the one hand, and the lack of a collective “aha!” moment for the discipline as a whole on the other. Sure, international relations continue to surprise us, but nothing on the scale, for example, of the abrupt end of the Cold War (which partly helped elevate constructivism to the forefront of IR — see Finnemore and Wendt, 2024), seems to be on the horizon to fundamentally disrupt conventional perspectives. Perhaps in this chancy, indeterminate world, quantum IR needs a bit of its own luck to make further inroads into this still largely Newtonian discipline. 

The International Arbitration of Territorial Disputes
By Asaf Siniver
Oxford University Press, 2024

In this new book, Asaf Siniver offers a unique perspective on international arbitration of territorial disputes from a political standpoint. He argues that arbitration has been underutilized in resolving border conflicts compared to third-party mediation, even though in many cases, arbitration appears to be the best available tool for states. To explore the reasons behind this phenomenon, the author invites the reader to view arbitration as a process, examining its “antecedents, occurrence, and outcome.” The goal of the study is to identify the context in which states turn to arbitration for resolving interstate territorial disputes and to understand why states choose to comply with, or defy, the arbitration award.

Siniver's analysis of arbitration is innovative from both international relations and international law perspectives. First, international relations studies have focused on the differences between third-party mediation and legal dispute resolution methods, often based on large quantitative research. Second, international law has generally studied arbitrations through their outcomes, offering legal analyses of the awards issued by arbitral tribunals. Siniver’s book, however, provides a qualitative and comparative analysis centred solely on arbitration. Through a small sample of border arbitrations between states, he draws conclusions about the similarities and differences observed in the arbitrations processes.

The book begins by placing arbitration within the broader range of mechanisms that states can use to resolve disputes peacefully: direct negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and adjudication. Within this spectrum, arbitration is presented as occupying a twilight zone between binding and non-binding methods of dispute resolution. Siniver characterizes international arbitration as a “hybrid method of dispute settlement that combines the most attractive attributes of third-party mediation (party autonomy) and adjudication (legally binding outcome)” (p. 173). Arbitration, therefore, is akin to mediation due to the flexibility it grants parties to shape the process according to their needs and allowing the tribunal to rule based on equity, beyond strict legal considerations. At the same time, arbitration resembles adjudication because its outcome is legally binding for the parties. For the author, this dual nature of arbitration makes it particularly suitable for resolving territorial disputes, as it enables political conflicts to be solved through a legal mechanism based on equity, with a mandatory and final outcome.

According to Siniver, states often prefer other methods of dispute resolution over arbitration for territorial disputes, not due to flaws in the arbitration mechanism itself, but because of how states choose to apply it. For instance, states may limit arbitration in ways that undermine its key features, such as flexibility, party autonomy, and the tribunal's capacity to issue decisions based on equity. This misapplication causes arbitration to lose its hybrid nature and resemble a purely legal mechanism. Consequently, Siniver concludes that the underutilization and shortcomings of arbitration are due to the specific design chosen by states for the cases to be arbitrated.

Siniver then tests his theoretical framework through four arbitrations that took place in different regions: the Rann of Kutch Arbitration between India and Pakistan; the Beagle Channel Arbitration between Chile and Argentina; the Taba Arbitration between Egypt and Israel; and the South China Sea Arbitration between the Philippines and China. For each case, the author examines the national and international political context in which the parties decided to use arbitration, how they selected the arbitration rules, and whether they chose to comply with the award. Interestingly, Siniver concludes that arbitration never occurs in a vacuum; rather, in each case, arbitration is part of a “case management trajectory,” in which different dispute resolution methods are alternated to resolve long-standing conflicts. Arbitration, in these cases, is used by states after previous failures to resolve outstanding disputes.

Another significant conclusion is the importance states place on appearing as actors who abide by the rules of public international law. Siniver demonstrates that even though in half of the studied cases, the losing party chose not to comply with the tribunal's ruling, states were concerned about the reputational costs that their decision could case to their imagen in the international arena. In the studied cases, both Argentina and China justified their non-compliance using arguments rooted in public international law, even though, in practice, their decisions were based on domestic and foreign policy considerations.

On a less positive note, Siniver points out that in the four cases studied, the states have not chosen arbitration again to resolve other pending border disputes. However, this was not the case for Chile and Argentina, which submitted the Laguna del Desierto dispute to arbitration in 1994. Siniver also concludes that, in general, there is a lack of political will to use arbitration to resolve territorial conflicts of greater geopolitical significance. For example, India and Pakistan have not used arbitration to resolve the Kashmir conflict, and arbitration has not been used to settle other aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Similarly, in the South China Sea case, which involved significant economic interests for the parties and was the only case studied in which a global power was involved, China chose not to comply with the award, despite efforts to manage the reputational costs associated with its decision.

Contrary to Siniver’s thesis, the case studies suggest that in disputes involving broader geopolitical interests, states tend to be more reluctant to resort to arbitration due to its inherent characteristics. Arbitration is, by nature, a zero-sum process — necessarily producing a winner and a loser. Moreover, it requires the selection of a tribunal and the drafting of a compromis, both of which can become points of contention and provide grounds for challenging the impartiality of the award. Consequently, governments may be unwilling to bear the domestic political costs of losing a dispute that arouses public sentiment or has long-term economic or security implications.

Perhaps it is precisely these intrinsic features of arbitration that drive states to opt instead for adjudication by permanent courts. What political advantages does a standing tribunal—with permanent judges—offer over arbitration, where parties select their arbitrators?

While Siniver’s study succeeds in contrasting and capturing the comparative advantages of arbitration over mediation under certain political conditions, it falls short by not addressing the differences between arbitration and adjudication. Adjudication has its own benefits. For instance, in territorial disputes between states, the deciding body is typically a permanent court whose members are not appointed ad hoc for a specific case, thereby strengthening perceptions of impartiality and institutional credibility.

Ultimately, the decision to submit a dispute to a particular dispute resolution mechanism is a political one. It would be valuable to explore the conditions under which adjudication is politically preferred over arbitration—ideally through a quantitative study comparing how often states choose adjudication versus arbitration. This could be complemented by a process-oriented analysis of selected adjudication cases. Such an approach would deepen our understanding of when arbitration, given its hybrid nature, becomes the most politically appropriate method for resolving territorial disputes.

It is also important to consider that states are often unable to choose adjudication to solve their territorial disputes, as international courts lack jurisdiction per se and require states to grant it — either for a specific case or through treaty commitments. For this reason, Siniver’s study would also benefit from an analysis of instances where arbitration was chosen because no other adversarial dispute resolution mechanism was available.

Finally, Siniver’s book successfully finds the intersection between international relations and international law in the resolution of border disputes. Through clear and systematic examinations of four case studies, the author demonstrates that the two fields are not mutually exclusive but complementary, and that one cannot be fully understood without the other. While international arbitration itself is a legal process in which the parties involved advance arguments based on public international law, the ultimate decision is driven by political factors, both in choosing arbitration to settle a border dispute and in deciding whether to comply or not with the tribunal’s award.

Russia’s Overlooked Invasion: The Causes of the 2014 Outbreak of War in Ukraine’s Donbas
By Jakob Hauter
Columbia University Press, 2024

Jakob Hauter’s Russia’s Overlooked Invasion is a compelling analysis of the causes of the 2014 outbreak of war in Ukraine's Donbas, challenging narratives that depict the conflict as a mere civil war. Instead, Hauter argues that the events in Donbas were primarily driven by a covert Russian invasion. He finds gaps in the existing literature and confronts its deficiencies regarding the explanation of the conflict that resides in blurry definitions, historical determinism, evasion of the question as they preselect certain aspects of the conflict and predetermine the emphasis on either domestic or foreign causes, lack of regional expertise, the conflation of correlation and causation resulting from an overreliance on public opinion poll data, and insufficient source criticism.

Hauter also correctly implies that most of the extant literature claims that the war in Donbas had both civil war and interstate war elements, stressing the primary role of either Russia or domestic causes (such as Kudelia 2016; Katchanovski 2016; Loshkariov and Sushentsov 2016; Sakwa 2015, 2017; Sotiriou 2016; Matveeva 2016; Melnyk 2020; Mykhnenko 2020; Giuliano 2018). However, he argues that the conflict could be more straightforwardly explained as an act of Russian aggression disguised as a civil war. The book offers a meticulously detailed case study to substantiate Hauter’s thesis that Russia's actions in 2014 constituted an unambiguous interstate invasion, despite domestic factors that the book introduces and explains.

The book also makes a broader contribution to conflict studies by revisiting classical distinctions between civil and interstate conflicts. Hauter critiques existing typologies for failing to adequately address cases like Donbas, where domestic and international elements are deeply intertwined. By disentangling these factors and demonstrating how Russia orchestrated the conflict through covert operatives, military support, and propaganda, Hauter challenges the dominant "civil war hypothesis" embraced by many Western scholars.

Drawing upon a blend of theoretical rigour and empirical evidence, the book not only critiques the academic and political framing of the conflict but also proposes an original methodology — digital forensic process tracing — to navigate the murky informational landscape of modern warfare. The book illustrates how research on war can adapt to the growing importance of modern information technology, as the 2014 Donbas War was arguably one of the first conflicts of the social media age.

One of the book's strengths lies in its innovative methodological approach. Hauter introduces the concept of "digital forensic process tracing," which leverages open-source information, such as social media posts, to reconstruct key events and assess causal dynamics. His approach complements works like Bellingcat’s investigations into the war in Ukraine, which have also used OSINT to uncover Russian military involvement. By addressing the challenges of disinformation and biased narratives, Hauter positions this methodology as a tool to increase clarity in research on modern conflicts. This approach has external validity, as it can be used to study other modern conflicts heavily covered online. This is particularly relevant in the context of the Donbas war, where the abundance of contradictory information has fueled confusion and misinterpretation.

The book is structured around six "critical junctures" that shaped the escalation of the Donbas war between April and August 2014. Each chapter delves into one of these junctures, examining the interplay of local dynamics, Russian involvement, and the broader geopolitical context. Hauter highlights the initial protests and rebellions in Donetsk and Luhansk, demonstrating how these were not spontaneous grassroots movements but heavily influenced by Russian actors. The occupation of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk is presented as a pivotal moment, with Hauter detailing the role of Igor Girkin and other Kremlin-linked operatives in orchestrating secessionist activities. The failed separatist movement in Mariupol is contrasted with other regions to underscore how varying degrees of local resistance and Russian interference affected the conflict's trajectory. Hauter also provides a detailed analysis of Russia's logistical and military support, such as the tank convoys and artillery strikes, which played a decisive role in tipping the scales against Ukrainian forces. By documenting these actions, Hauter refutes claims that the conflict was primarily an internal rebellion and argues for its classification as an interstate war.

Despite its scholarly rigour, the book is written in a clear and accessible style. Hauter avoids excessive jargon, making the book suitable for both academics and general readers interested in the conflict. Hauter’s meticulous use of open-source intelligence and his ability to integrate granular details with broader theoretical insights make this book a valuable contribution to the field. However, the book’s reliance on digital sources, while innovative, raises questions about the reproducibility of its findings. Disinformation and data manipulation in online spaces present inherent challenges, and while Hauter acknowledges these limitations, readers may still find certain conclusions contentious.

Russia’s Overlooked Invasion is an essential read for scholars, policymakers, and anyone seeking to understand the complexities of the Donbas conflict and the broader implications of Russia's actions in Ukraine. Hauter’s rigorous methodology and incisive analysis offer valuable lessons not only for the study of this specific conflict but also for understanding the nature of modern hybrid warfare. By framing the 2014 conflict as an interstate war initiated by covert Russian intervention, Hauter challenges the international community to rethink its approach to Russian aggression and its implications for global security. This book is a timely and significant contribution to the literature on post-Soviet conflicts, the geopolitics of Eastern Europe, and Russia’s ongoing re-invasion of Ukraine since February 2022.

References

Giuliano, Elise. 2018. “Who Supported Separatism in Donbas? Ethnicity and Popular Opinion at the Start of the Ukraine Crisis.” Post-Soviet Affairs 34 (2–3): 158–78.

Katchanovski, Ivan. 2016. “The Separatist War in Donbas: A Violent Break-up of Ukraine?” European Politics and Society 17 (4): 473–489.

Kudelia, Serhiy. 2016. “The Donbas Rift.” Russian Politics & Law 54 (1): 5–27.

Loshkariov, Ivan D., and Andrey A. Sushentsov. 2016. “Radicalization of Russians in Ukraine: From ‘Accidental’ Diaspora to Rebel Movement.” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 16 (1): 71–90.

Matveeva, Anna. 2016. “No Moscow Stooges: Identity Polarization and Guerrilla Movements in Donbass.” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 16 (1): 25–50.

Melnyk, Oleksandr. 2020. “From the ‘Russian Spring’ to the Armed Insurrection: Russia, Ukraine and Political Communities in the Donbas and Southern Ukraine.” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 47 (1): 3–38.

Mykhnenko, Vlad. 2020. “Causes and Consequences of the War in Eastern Ukraine: An Economic Geography Perspective.” Europe-Asia Studies 72 (3): 528–560.

Sakwa, Richard. 2015. Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands. London: I.B. Tauris.

Sakwa, Richard. 2017. “The Ukraine Syndrome and Europe: Between Norms and Space.” The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review 44 (1): 9–31.

Sotiriou, Stylianos A. 2016. “The Irreversibility of History: The Case of the Ukrainian Crisis (2013–2015).” Southeast European and Black Sea Studies 16 (1): 51–70.

Rebel Militias in Eastern Ukraine addresses the difficult question of the relationship between the Russian state and the militias that fought against the Ukrainian Armed Forces in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region in 2014. The book makes the important case that Russia played a key role in the orchestration of the so-called rebellion from the very beginning. At the same time, it effectively rebukes the idea that Russia’s delegated invasion of 2014 followed a carefully designed and executed master plan. Instead, it shows that Russia tried to use a fragmented array of informal militias that entered Ukraine from Russia, as well as members of local radical fringe groups, to gain control over Ukraine’s Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts. Russia's orchestration of this “rebellion” proceeded in an ad-hoc manner. When the Ukrainian military began to push back against Russian proxy forces successfully, the Russian leadership began supplying some of them with heavy weaponry. When these supplies failed to stop the Ukrainian advance, Russia decided to intervene with its regular armed forces, which led to a Ukrainian defeat and the First Minsk Agreement of September 2014. This was followed by Russian efforts to consolidate and simplify the structure of its proxy forces in the Donbas, and, eventually, by their formal absorption into Russian state structures during the full-scale invasion of 2022.  

Particularly useful in this context is the book’s use of the idea of dual delegation as proposed by Karlén and Rauta (2023). The book shows how the Russian regime tried to outsource its armed aggression against Ukraine to Russian actors outside formal state institutions. In turn, these actors tried to further delegate the rebellion to locals to preserve plausible deniability and create the impression of a civil war. However, this second delegation step was largely unsuccessful due to the lack of locals who were willing to lead and sustain an armed conflict. The result was a fragmented array of rebel groups and a reliance on fighters from Russia to lead and sustain the fighting. The book correctly highlights that the most important militias that engaged in armed combat with Ukrainian forces in the spring and summer of 2014 were led by people who had come to the Donbas from Russia. Hence, these groups can be seen as informal organs of the Russian state (see also Hauter 2023).

The book also convincingly explains some of the reasons behind Russia's efforts to destabilize Ukraine. It shows how imperial ambitions in relation to Ukraine had been deeply rooted in large parts of Russia's political elite for many years. As a result, Ukraine's democratization and European integration efforts led to fear and resentment in Russia. The 2014 Revolution of Dignity became a catalyst which left the Russian regime under the impression that it had to act. As a result, it annexed Crimea and began its delegated invasion of the Donbas. Both operations were accompanied by a relentless propaganda campaign. Particularly enlightening in this context is Laryš’s analysis of how the Russian leadership used the label of fascism to mark the new Ukrainian authorities as an anti-Russian evil (pp. 48-50). Reducing the meaning of fascist to anti-Russian allowed the Russian leadership and Russian media to apply this label to the Ukrainian authorities and the Ukrainian Armed Forces while praising extreme-right-wing militias fighting for Russia as antifascists.

Moreover, the book provides a thorough overview and an in-depth discussion of the literature on principal-agent theory and conflict delegation, namely Russia’s outsourcing of military operations through rebel militias to advance its war effort in Ukraine. It also thoroughly reviews the literature on the 2014 Donbas War and Russia's involvement in it. The number and variety of the cited sources are impressive. 

However, the scale of the literature review and the cited source material have an impact on clarity and structure. At times, the book gets lost in the process of recounting the arguments of its sources and loses sight of its own argument. In the empirical chapters, the book would have benefited from referring more frequently and more explicitly to the theoretical and methodological framework it outlines in the beginning. This would have provided some useful pointers to help the reader through the steps of the causal mechanism the book proposes.

The book could be more rigorous with the chronological and spatial details of its analysis and more critical in its treatment of sources. In the discussion of the different Russia-led rebel groups in the Donbas, it is not always made clear when exactly a group emerged, where it was based, and the degree of significance of its fighting power and its contribution to the conflict. The same is the case for additional signs of Russian involvement, such as heavy arms deliveries or the presence of military supervisors or intelligence officers. The book offers a large quantity of names and describes a large number of instances, but a clearer structure that ties this data to specific times and locations in a more systematic way would have been helpful for the reader and given the book’s arguments additional power. Moreover, the book mostly recounts claims made in its sources, without discussing the quality of the evidence provided by a cited source. It sometimes even cites secondary sources’ summaries of primary sources without referring to these primary sources. As Tymofii Brik (2021, p.198) has argued, this kind of referencing is problematic because it has the potential to whitewash low-quality information from unreliable media sources into unquestioned academic knowledge. The book’s frequent use of hedging language, such as “reportedly”, “allegedly”, and “purportedly” is an insufficient way of mitigating this problem.

Nevertheless, the book provides a thorough overview of the different Russian-led militias that were active in eastern Ukraine in the spring and summer of 2014. It also provides an in-depth review of the academic literature on the relevant events and of theories and methods that can be used to analyse them. For these reasons, Rebel Militias in Eastern Ukraine is a valuable addition to the academic literature for scholars who want to better understand the outbreak of war in Eastern Ukraine in 2014. It is an important reminder that Russia's war against Ukraine began in 2014, that it is absurd to blame Ukraine for Russia's actions, and that lasting peace can only be achieved if the country is protected against future Russian attacks with robust security guarantees.

References

Brik, Tymofii. 2021. “The Donbas and Social Science: Terra Incognita?” In Civil War? Interstate War? Hybrid War? Dimensions and Interpretations of the Donbas Conflict in 2014–2020, edited by Jakob Hauter, 191–214. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag.

Hauter, Jakob. 2023. Russia’s Overlooked Invasion: The Causes of the 2014 Outbreak of War in Ukraine’s Donbas. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag.

Karlén, Niklas, and Vladimir Rauta. 2023. “Dealers and Brokers in Civil Wars: Why States Delegate Rebel Support to Conduit Countries.” International Security 47 (4): 107–46.

It was during my first visit to Istanbul, Turkey, for a conference last year that I got to personally experience the existential dilemmas of a country at a crossroads in its eternal quest to define and redefine itself. The contradictions were evident and appeared as stark binaries –– night clubs serving alcohol, burqa-clad women walking right past them, jersey-wearing teens cheering for the Turkish national football team, and Syrian refugee moms with kids, begging for their survival. But in the midst of all these apparent contradictions, there somehow was a sense of mutual conciliation and harmony that kept the pluralistic nature of the city alive and thriving.

It is this puzzle that Nora Fisher-Onar attempts to make sense of in her recent book, Contesting Pluralism(s) (2025). The book challenges the conventional wisdom that a binary contest between ‘Islam’ vs. ‘democracy’ or ‘secularism’ is the driving force in Turkey’s politics. Pointing out the limitations of such hard, identitarian binaries in explaining real-world outcomes, she introduces the two cross-camp coalitions built around ‘pluralizers’ (who strive for greater pluralism in society) versus ‘anti-pluralists’ (who espouse the desire for a more unitary national project) as an analytical framework to trace the evolution of the political trajectory in Turkey and beyond. This is established through the use of rich empirical data of the history of political contests, starting from the late Ottoman period all the way to the present. The book evaluates the Turkish political narrative as a series of cross-camp coalitions of ‘pluralizers’ that periodically take on the ‘anti-pluralists’ –– who want the ‘Others’ to “look or speak, love or believe like they do” (Fisher-Onar 2024:1).

Fisher-Onar starts off with the story of the 2016 military coup and the cross-party coalition that came together in support of the democratically elected leader of the AK Party Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Pointing out the growing discontent with the frameworks espousing hard ‘Islam’ versus ‘Western’ binaries, both Orientalism and Occidentalism alike, she proceeds to examine the three ‘waves’ of intellectual engagements within inter-disciplinary Turkish studies to evaluate these binaries and their limitations. The first wave, which the book terms “pursuit of parity”, closely aligns with the social engineering initiated during the initial decades of the Turkish Republic under the umbrella rubric of ‘Kemalism’, which sought to transcend Orientalism by performing ‘Westernness’ and downplaying its Ottoman-Islamic inheritance. Disillusionment with this approach soon gave rise to the second wave towards the second half of the twentieth century, termed “recognition of difference”, which manifested in the form of ‘post-Kemalist’ attempts to rediscover Turkey’s Ottoman-Islamic past, and emphasised its ‘authentic’ cultural differences with the West, closely resembling the ideological strain of Occidentalism (Fisher-Onar 2024:194).

Fisher-Onar (2024:21) classifies her work under the third category of literature, which involves “making sense of complexity” by rejecting both the Orientalist/Occidentalist binary tropes definitive of the initial two waves. She re-iterates that the terms ‘secular’ and ‘Islamic’ have increasingly become “empty signifiers” –misappropriated in one's search for hegemony and power consolidation amidst Turkey’s turbulent political climate (2024:23). According to her, since the late Ottoman period, only rarely have the political contests in Turkey actually pitted Islamists versus secularists. Rather, political change is driven by shifting alignments of ‘pluralizers’ and ‘anti-pluralists’ across inter- and intra-camp alliances, and betrayals. To be sure, Fisher-Onar (2024:35) uses the term ‘pluralism’ bereft of any cultural baggage as attached to the debates within Western political theory –– rather, pluralism is simply defined in terms of a “basic willingness to share space with one or more Other(s)”. Fisher-Onar (2024:32) calls for a more “pluralistic approach to pluralism”, going beyond the conventional theorizations built on the model of Western liberal democracies –– a bottom-up approach that strives to close the gap between theory and practice as proponents of “new pluralism” insist.

The book further proceeds to delineate the twin analytical toolkits developed to aid a comprehensive re-reading of Ottoman and Turkish politics as a tale of ‘contested pluralism(s)’. The first toolkit maps the pluralizing/anti-pluralist orientations (x-axis) vis-à-vis the role of public religion (y-axis) (see Fig 2.1, p.38). Within this, while the various strands of ethno-religious nationalism are placed towards the anti-pluralist end of the spectrum, Islamo-/secular- liberalism is placed towards its pluralizing end. In the second toolkit, the book adopts institutionalist approaches to map the complexities of the political system formed through an interaction amongst the ideational, agential, and contextual/structural parameters conceptualized (see Fig 2.2, p. 47). This framework, in addition to the reductionist attribution associated to the causal force of ideas alone (such as Islamism, liberalism, and nationalism), also takes into account the role of actors (within institutions such as political parties, bureaucracies, militaries, businesses, civil societies, etc.) and the regional and global structures (micro – such as electoral rule; meso – such as a country’s political regime; and macro  –such as global capitalism) that shape political outcomes.

The book proceeds to retell Turkey’s story from the late Ottoman period to the present as a tale of competing pluralizing versus anti-pluralist coalitions. It starts off with what it terms the “long nineteenth century”, which saw pluralizing coalitions of Islamo-liberalism in its Tanzimat and Young Ottoman expressions between 1839 until 1868, followed by a third pluralizing coalition of disparate Young Turks who attempted to restore constitutionalism and multicultural Ottoman patriotism from 1908 until 1913 (Fisher-Onar 2024:61). This was interspersed with periods of anti-pluralist tendencies in the form of Hamidian pan-Islamism between 1878 to 1908, and the Young Turk triumvirate’s pan-Turkism between 1913 and 1918. The phase of the “short twentieth century” soon followed with the establishment of the Turkish republic in 1924, which initially saw the emergence of an ethno-nationalist regime under the banner of Ataturkism. While the shift towards a multi-party democracy in the 1950s paved the way for the possible emergence of a pluralizing coalition, Turkey’s politics was thenceforth interspaced with intermittent phases of anti-pluralist coalitions formed under various strands of ethno-religious nationalism or Turkish-Islamic Synthesis.

Fast forwarding to the twenty-first century, the book traces initial attempts at forging an Islamo-liberal pluralizing alignment during the AKP’s first term in government between 2002-2007, by gathering moderate religious and secular actors with the overlapping goal to align Turkey with economic globalism and the EU’s project of political liberalization. Towards the end of the initial decade however, the more anti-pluralist faction within the AKP gained prominence –culminating in Erdogan’s pivot from a ‘EU-niversalist’ frame of reference to that of ‘neo-Ottomanism’ around 2013 (Fisher-Onar 2024:178). While the initial trends of religious populism still provided moderate spaces for realizing ethnic plurality, a series of events such as the intra-Islamist clash of the early 2010s, and the collapse of peace processes with the Kurds, led to an evident shift towards ethno-religious nationalism by 2016. This alliance of Islamist and secular nationalists, which Fisher-Onar (2024:254) coins “Turkish-Islamist Synthesis 2.0”, has entrenched Turkey’s illiberal turn towards an anti-pluralist incumbency at the time of writing. However, she asserts hope in the book’s framework by implying that under the right conditions, ideas and actors may coalesce into renewed coalitions for pluralism.

That being said, it is important to note that attempts to locate the so-called ‘pluralizing’ coalition between ‘Islamo-liberals’ and ‘secular-liberals’ within the same ontological plane under the ambit of pluralism would inevitably lead to the re-invention of hegemonies of the ‘one-world’ assumptions of Western modernity –– in stark contrast with the decades of decolonial ‘many worlds’ critique that have come about. This was precisely what Ahmet Davutoglu talks about in his 1993 conceptualization of the differences between Western and Islamic Weltanschauungs as being paradigmatic in nature, rather than merely historical or institutional, with the ‘ontological proximity’ of the former contrasted with the ‘ontological differentiation’ of the latter. Similarly, due caution has to be taken when applying the conceptual framework of ‘pluralism’ to an Islamic context. Instead, it is more appropriate to acknowledge an alternative logic of pluralism rooted within the Islamic tradition as traced by its hermeneutical interpretations when questioning with the “Other”, as noted by SherAli Tareen (2023: 35).

With these caveats, I believe that Contesting Pluralism(s) is a timely intervention in dismantling both the hegemonic Oriental and Occidental binaries that have pitted Islamists versus secularists in Turkey, as well as in the Muslim world in general –– which has, in turn, facilitated misappropriation by actors across both camps in their own attempts at power consolidation centred around a unitary political identity. Instead, Fisher-Onar’s framework of cross-camp coalitions built around ‘pluralizers’ versus ‘anti-pluralists’ offers a much more nuanced conceptual lens to capture the complexities surrounding the operation of political outcomes through an interplay between ideational, agential, and structural parameters in the case of  Turkey and beyond. This is particularly significant, given that Turkey is set to play a greater role in regional politics with the recent overthrow of the Iran-backed Assad regime in Syria by the Turkish-backed fighters belonging to the Syrian National Army and Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) –– throwing open the debates surrounding ethno-religious nationalism in Turkey to a whole new dynamic.

References  

Davutoglu, A. (1993). Alternative Paradigms: The Impact of Islamic and Western Weltanschauungs on Political Theory (1st ed.). University Press of America.

Tareen, S. (2023). Perilous Intimacies: Debating Hindu-Muslim Friendship After Empire (1st ed.). Columbia University Press.

Intent to Destroy: Russia’s Two-Hundred-Year Quest to Dominate Ukraine
By Eugene Finkel
Basic Books, 2024

Samuel Ramani’s book is divided into ten chapters with the first eight on the 2013-2014 Euromaidan Revolution, and Russia’s war against Ukraine from 2014 to the present day. Chapters 8-10 place the war within a global context of Russia’s isolation from the West, Moscow’s pivot to the East, and Russian attempts to cultivate influence and support in the Global South.

Eugene Finkel’s book is divided into ten chapters that analyse the ongoing Russian war against Ukraine within a historical context. The chapters trace Russia’s attitudes and policies towards Ukraine from the mid to late nineteenth century and World War I, through the Soviet Union and post-Soviet era. Chapters 7 and 8 focus on the first Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014, and chapters 9 and 10 analyse the 2022 full-scale invasion, Russian military aggression and war crimes. Finkel writes with a deep knowledge of Ukrainian history and politics that is not found in Ramani’s book and most other studies of the Russian-Ukrainian War. Finkel integrates Russia’s full-scale war within a two-hundred-year Russian campaign to prevent the emergence of, and destroy, Ukrainian identity.

Western Responses to Russia’s 2014 and 2022 Invasions of Ukraine

Ramani writes that the primary reason for Russia’s first invasion in 2014 was the Euromaidan Revolution, which the Kremlin viewed as a threat to its promotion of illiberalism in Eurasia (p.80). The Euromaidan Revolution was a threat to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s revival of Russia as a great power and was seen as a challenge from the US to the Kremlin’s domination of a Eurasian sphere of influence.

It is unclear what Ramani (p.76) means when he writes of the ‘impact of Western sanctions’ on Russia after 2014, as they were weak and had few negative influences on Russia’s economy and finances. Ramani does not explain why the Western response was weak in 2014 and why the West continued business as usual with Russia (as seen, for example, in Germany continuing to build the Nord Stream II gas pipeline). Additionally, between 2014-2021, all Western governments, including the then British Conservative government, were against supplying Ukraine with military aid to defend itself. The Barack Obama presidency (2008-2015) did not apply sanctions to Russia after its 2008 invasion of Georgia and de facto annexation of the Georgian South Ossetian and Abkhazian regions. Obama ignored US security commitments to Ukraine, which had been signed in return for giving up nuclear weapons under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, and he vetoed the US Congress sending military aid to Ukraine. Obama’s ‘red line’ against Syria to halt its use of chemical weapons against civilians was ignored by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and in 2015, Russia came to his assistance. Ramani could have analysed these weaknesses of the Obama administration as a guide to future flaws in President Joe Biden’s (who had been his vice president) weak policies towards the Russian-Ukrainian war from 2022-2024.  

Ramani exaggerates Western unity in providing military support and imposing sanctions against Russia since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 (p.381). In fact, there were three camps: the first sought Russia’s military defeat (UK, four Scandinavian countries, Poland, three Baltic states, Romania, Czech Republic); the second feared escalation, did not support a Russian defeat, and only provided enough military assistance for Ukraine to not be defeated but insufficient for Ukraine to defeat Russia (US, Germany); and a third incorporated a range of stances ranging from indifference (e.g., Spain), often changing its stance (e.g., France),  being weakly committed (e.g., Italy, Spain) to being pro-Russian (Slovakia, Hungary). Turkey was both supportive of Ukraine and at the same time one of those countries re-exporting Western goods to Russia and assisting the Kremlin to undermine sanctions.

Drivers of Russia’s Full-Scale Invasion

Ramani outlines the factors that led Russia to launch a full-scale invasion. One of those which Russia claimed was allegedly pre-emptive, to prevent a Ukrainian an attack in the Donbas region, which had no basis in fact. This typical example of Russian imperial innocence; that is, blaming others for its own actions, could have been analysed to a greater extent, rather than simply cite Western media reports.  An archetypal proponent of Russian imperial innocence is Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill who, Ramani quotes as saying Russia had never attacked anyone and was only ever defending itself (p.179). Russian claims of imperial innocence have remained a cornerstone of Kremlin disinformation as to why it launched its so-called ‘special military operation.’

Ramani writes Russia was confident of a quick victory for its ‘special military operation’ because it believed the Ukrainian armed forces were a ‘depleted force’, a sign of poor Russian intelligence on how they had fundamentally improved since 2014 (p.15). In addition, the Kremlin believed the Western response would be weak once more -- as it was in 2014. These two factors account for only part of the reason for the initial failure of Russia’s ‘special military operation.’ A third reason, which is not discussed by Ramani, is related to identity questions, with the Kremlin believing Russian imperial nationalist myths of Ukraine inhabited by Little Russians, eager to be ‘liberated’ from Nazis who had come to power in an ‘illegal putsch’ in the Euromaidan Revolution. This myth led to failure of the ‘special military operation’ and its transformation into a full-scale and global war that would generate one million Russian casualties by May 2025, the same month Russia celebrates Victory Day at the end of World War II.

Corruption and the Myth of Russia’s ‘Second Best Army in the World’

Ramani writes about Russia re-asserting itself as a great power after ‘military modernisation,’ without sufficiently investigating the roots of why this was a fiction (p.67). Russia claimed its army was the second-best in the world when it invaded Ukraine in 2022, but after three years of full-scale war, we must conclude it is the second-best army in Ukraine.

Eliot A. Cohen and Philips O’Brien provide a detailed study of how Western policymakers, academics, and think tank experts were wrong to believe that Russia’s army was the second best in the world and that it would quickly defeat Ukraine. In other words, Western policymakers, academics, and think tank experts held the same mistaken views of Ukraine as did the Kremlin. One major reason, ignored by Ramani and Western policymakers, academics, and think tank experts, is that Russia is a mafia state, as a US diplomatic cable described the country as far back as 2010. Most of the funding for Russian ‘military reforms’ was in fact stolen, contributing to a chronic inefficiency of the logistical supply chain, a culture of greed and cynicism among officers, insufficient and poor training of soldiers, low quality military technology, and incompetence and weak capabilities of the Russian armed forces and security services.

Russian Imperial Nationalism

Ramani describes how the annexation produced ‘nationalist euphoria’ in Russia (p.52). Finkel writes that the 2014 annexation of Crimea let the imperialist genie out of the bottle and set in motion Russia’s full-scale invasion eight years later (p.195). When Western governments advised Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to accept Crimea was forever lost, they were sending a weak signal to Putin and encouraging future Russian land grabs that took place in 2022. Finkel mentions how in 2014, calls for violence were restricted to Russian imperial nationalists, but by 2022, genocidal calls to destroy Ukrainians and torture and kill them had become mainstream in the state-controlled Russian media and in the discourse of Russian leaders (p.214).

Ramani is mistaken to write that opposition leader Alexei Navalny opposed the annexation of Crimea (p.52); unfortunately, he supported it like many in the Russian opposition. Ukrainians have a century-old saying that Russian democracy ends at the Ukrainian border. Ramani points towards the direction of Russia’s political evolution but doesn’t take this to its logical conclusion, writing that if Putin reconstitutes the Russian political order around an ultranationalist ideology, future scholars could label Russia a fascist state (p.27). I believe, however, that Russia has already transitioned from an authoritarian regime with a collective leadership to in 2020-2022 a fascist dictatorship.

In 2020, the Russian constitution was changed to allow Putin to be de facto president for life. Since 2022, all independent vestiges of media and civil society life were extinguished, and Navalny was murdered in prison. One million Russians have fled abroad. With approximately one thousand political prisoners, Putin’s Russia has more people incarcerated for their political views than post-Joseph Stalin Soviet Union. The same is true of the Russian puppet state of Belarus, where there are approximately 1,200 political prisoners. Unfortunately, Ramani’s suggestion that scholars would come to describe Russia as a fascist state is not the case as most academics are conservative and are unwilling to quickly change their positions.

Russian Identity and War Against Ukraine

Ramani’s discussion of the period between Russia’s two invasions (2014-2022) shows a weak understanding of the widening divergences in Russia’s and Ukraine’s political systems and national identities. On this divergence, which has been taking place since as far back as the disintegration of the USSR in 1991, I recommend Maria Popova and Oxana Shevel’s Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States (2024). Indeed, one of the Kremlin demands in peace talks is for Ukraine to repeal legislation adopted since 2014 on language, education, media, memory politics, and religion.

There is little mention in Ramani’s book of why the Kremlin was becoming alarmed at legislation adopted by Ukraine after 2014 in the fields of language, education, media, and identity. Ramani’s discussion of the religious crisis in 2018-2019 (p.81) is weak, an area where Finkel has a far greater understanding of its significance for Russian-Ukrainian relations. Moreover, Ramani’s discussion of Putin’s July 2021 long essay ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, the ideological treatise which underpinned the full-scale invasion eight months later, is too short and perfunctory. Ramani lacks an understanding of why Russians of all political persuasions found it difficult to accept a Ukrainian identity distinct from a Russian one and the concept of a fully independent Ukraine outside the Russian World and Eurasia (pp.102-103).

Finkel, correctly in my view, places identity at the centre of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Finkel’s main argument is that Russia is undertaking what it has always done under Tsars and Communist Commissars to destroy Ukrainian identity. Russia’s violence and military aggression against Ukraine “did not spring into being in 2022” — instead, Finkel claims it is the “product of a two-hundred-year-old history” (p.3). Ramani highlights how, since the mid-nineteenth century, “dominating Ukraine and denying Ukrainians an independent identity, let alone a state, have been the cornerstone of imperial, Soviet, and eventually, post-Soviet Russian policies” (p.3). According to Finkel, Soviet dictator Stalin pursued, and Putin is pursuing, the same goals of destroying Ukrainian identity, language, history, and culture through “time-tested methods of Russian domination over Ukraine and its residents” using ‘massacres, deportations, famine, and torture" (p.3). Finkel also writes that Russia is simply doing what it always has done – murdering, looting and destroying identities (pp.223, 257). Anne Applebaum’s Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (2017) similarly argued that Stalin and Putin were both obsessed about ‘losing’ Ukraine.

Russia’s Invasion Goals

Ramani’s analysis of Russia’s two goals in 2022, of ‘de-nazification’ and ‘de-militarisation’ is not compelling (pp.125-126). This is unfortunate because first, the goals were long-standing and go back as far as President Dmitri Medvedev’s 2009 open letter to Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko; and second, they provide an insight into the identity roots of the war. Russia’s ‘de-nazification’ goal was – and remains – to annex what Russian imperial nationalists call ‘New Russia’ (southeast Ukraine), and after genocidally destroying Ukrainian identity, create a smaller Little Russian entity as a Russian puppet state. Little Russia’s domestic policies on education, language, culture, and religion would resemble those undertaken in Belarus since 1994 by Alexander Lukashenka, a president nostalgic for the Soviet Union and accepting of his country’s status as a White Russian province and Russian puppet state. Russia’s goal of ‘de-militarisation’ would permit Little Russia to only possess very small 50,000-strong armed forces with a Kremlin definition of ‘neutrality’ forever ruling out membership of NATO and the EU.

Finkel believes this is Russia’s war and genocide — not just Putin’s war against Ukraine. I agree with this premise, but this is an area that remains surprisingly contested. The two leading academic studies which uphold Finkel’s premise of the Russian people supporting the war against Ukraine are Jade McGlynn’s Russia’s War (2023) and Ian Garner’s Z Generation: Into the Heart of Russia's Fascist Youth (2023). Russian liberal oppositionists, such as Vladimir Kara-Murza and Yulia Navalnaya, academics Mark Galeotti and Keith Gessen, and Economist Russia and East European Editor Arkady Ostrovsky disagree, claiming Russians do not support or are indifferent to the war, and that this is Putin’s war against Ukraine. Ukrainians agree with Finkel, McGlynn and Garner — the Russian people support the war against Ukraine.

After the first invasion in 2014, most Ukrainians were negative towards Russian leaders and the Russian state — but not towards the Russian people. After the full-scale invasion in 2022, most Ukrainians became negative towards both the Russian people and Russian state. Indeed, 93 and 84 percent of Ukrainians respectively hold negative views of the Russian people and the Russian state, with only 8 and 3 percent respectively holding positive views. Russia’s full-scale invasion and war crimes brought about the greatest changes among eastern and southern Ukrainians, who became highly negative towards the Russian people and the Russian state.

Russia Loses Soft Power Influence in Ukraine

Finkel does not analyse how the disintegration of the Party of Regions and banning of the Communist Party of Ukraine led to the marginalisation of pro-Russian political forces and pan-Russian identity after the Euromaidan Revolution. Legislation on education, media, education, religion, memory politics, foreign and security policy adopted during Poroshenko’s presidency (2014-2019) reinforced the growing domination of Ukrainian identity distinct from Russian. Russia’s full-scale invasion aimed to halt what it viewed as Ukraine’s permanent break from Russia.

 In 2018-2019, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I removed Ukraine from the canonical territory of the Russian Orthodox Church, under which it had been since 1686. The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople also issued a Tomos for autocephaly (independence) for the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. These two steps produced earthquakes in the Kremlin, with Putin calling an emergency meeting of the Russian Security Council. Importantly, Zelensky, after being elected in a landslide in 2019, double downed on these policies adopted under his predecessor, supporting legislation condemning Russian colonialism, genocide and de-nationalisation of Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Circassians and Ukrainians in Russia; closing five TV channels financed by the Kremlin; banning twelve political parties with ties to Russia; and opening criminal charges against Viktor Medvechuk, Putin’s closest ally in Ukraine.

Russian Historical Myths Driving Military Aggression

The biggest myth driving Russia’s war against Ukraine is that Russians and Ukrainians constitute ‘one people’, which Putin, the Kremlin, Russian leaders, and state-controlled Russian media repeat ad infinitum. This myth is the basis for Russia claiming a right to rule Ukraine and the right to decide how Ukrainians should think and act. Finkel writes that Russians perceive Ukrainian defiance and the pursuit of an identity distinct from their neighbour as ‘betrayal’, which leads to punishment, destruction, and murder (p.12) . He also highlights that when Russia’s so-called ‘special military operation’ failed to defeat Ukrainians in a few days, the Kremlin changed its goal to destroying Ukraine. Finkel goes on to suggest that Putin decided to teach Ukraine a lesson by subjugating and forcefully returning Ukrainians to the fold of the Russian World (p.211).

Putin’s imperial nationalistic claim of Russians and Ukrainians constituting ‘one people’ has no basis in historical facts and contradicts Soviet recognition of a separate Ukrainian people and language. This is ironic because Putin has a deep nostalgia for the USSR. From 1922-1991, Ukraine was one of fifteen republics in the Soviet Union and a UN member (Stalin negotiated three UN seats for the USSR, Ukraine and Belarus).

Denying a separate Ukrainian people requires Putin and the Kremlin to return to the pre-Soviet era when the Tsarist Empire banned the Ukrainian language in the 1863 ‘Valuev Circular’ and 1876 ‘Ems Decree’ and adopted and defined the ‘Russian people’ as comprising great Russians (Russians), little Russians (Ukrainians), and white Russians (Belarusians). This chauvinistic myth was kept alive by Russian emigres after the anti-Bolshevik ‘Whites’ had been defeated in the early 1920s, who later escaped abroad. Unfortunately, Ramani and Finkel do not discuss the return of White Russian émigré writing and thinking, such as the pro-fascist and Ukrainophobe Ivan Ilyin who became Putin’s favourite author. White Russian emigre denial of a Ukrainian state and a Ukrainian people was taken on board by Russian leaders, who diffused this thinking within the state apparatus, armed forces, and education system, thereby providing the ideological driver for Russia’s full-scale war.

Finkel believes Russia’s full-scale invasion was a product of a historical legacy that his book extensively analyses, as well as the Kremlin’s inability to implement Russia’s version of the 2014-2015 Minsk Accords that would have transformed Ukraine into a Little Russian puppet state, the growing influence of imperial nationalism in Russia, and Putin’s isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic (p.212).  He writes that Putin’s infamous July 2021 essay on ‘The Historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians’ draws on the same ideology as that of the Club of Russian Nationalists in the late Tsarist Empire (pp.162, 214).

Although they are a century apart, the Club of Russian Nationalists and Putin’s Russia have four commonalities. First, they both deny the existence of a Ukrainian language. Second, they both arbitrarily divide Ukraine into anti-Russian Ukrainian elites and pro-Russian Ukrainian people. The Club of Russian Nationalists called anti-Russian Ukrainian elites ‘Mazepists’ (followers of Hetman Ivan Mazepa who led an uprising against Russia in 1709), while Putin’s Russia calls them ‘Nazis’. Third, both believe the Ukrainian nationalist movement was artificial and supported by outside conspiracies, whether Austrians and Germans (Club of Russian Nationalists) or Western clandestine services like those of the US and EU (Putin’s Russia).

Fourth, Russian imperial nationalists in the Tsarist Empire and Putin’s Russia have used violence to destroy the Ukrainian language, monuments, and national symbols. In Crimea and southeast Ukraine, the Russian occupation authorities are destroying Ukrainian books in libraries and schools, introducing new Russian school curriculums to Russify and Sovietise Ukrainian children, looting museums, installing Russian and Soviet flags, tearing down Ukrainian monuments, and re-installing monuments of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin. Finkel writes that the goals of the Club of Russian Nationalists were, and Putin’s Russia remains, to transform Ukraine into the mythical Little Russia (p.212). This historical depth to Russia’s goals and war against Ukraine, which Finkel analyses so well, is absent in Ramani’s and most other books on the Russian-Ukrainian war.

The Myth of Russians and Ukraine Constituting ‘One People’

In 2016, the installation of a huge monument to Grand Prince Volodymyr of Kyiv Rus next to the Kremlin was meant to strengthen Putin’s myth of Russians and Ukrainians constituting ‘one people’, traced back one thousand years to the Kyiv Rus state. And yet, Rus  and Russia in fact have nothing to do with each other; the term Russia only came into being in 1721, when Peter I changed the name of Muscovy to the Russian Empire. Grand Prince Volodymyr ruled Kyiv Rus in 978-1015 before Moscow came into existence in 1147, just ahead of the Mongol destruction of Kyiv Rus in 1240. The Soviet regime celebrated Kyiv’s 1500^th anniversary in 1982, making it 600 years older than Moscow and 1,200 years older than St. Petersburg.

Finkel writes that decades before Putin articulated these views, Russian nationalist dissidents like Alexander Solzhenitsyn claimed Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians constituted ‘one people’, and alleged that Ukraine’s borders were artificial and Ukraine included historically ‘Russian’ territories in Crimea and the southeast of the country (pp.159, 163, 165). Solzhenitsyn called for a Russian Union of the three eastern Slavs to replace the Soviet Union, which is like the concept of ‘Holy Rus’ propounded since the 1990s by the Russian Orthodox Church. Finkel continues that Solzhenitsyn and Putin both expressed concern for millions of Russians and Russian speakers stranded in Ukraine after the USSR disintegrated in 1991 (pp.158, 163).

Paul D’Anieri’s Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War (2019) analyses how Russia has had difficulty in accepting Ukrainian independence throughout the period since the USSR disintegrated in 1991. Finkel highlights how Boris Yeltsyn, usually touted as a democratic Russian president, was uncomfortable with the notion of Ukrainian independence, and members of his team threatened to challenge Ukraine’s borders (p.157). Finkel quotes an adviser to Gorbachev, who made irredentist claims declaring Crimea, the Donbas and southern Ukraine as “historical parts of Russia” (p.158).

Russian and Western Historians in the Service of Empire and Imperialism

My book, Crisis in Russian Studies?, showed how Western historians of Russia use a Russian imperial nationalist historical framework, resembling that found in histories published in Putin’s Russia. Historians in Putin’s Russia and Western historians of Russia both monopolise Kyiv Rus as the first ‘Russian state’, and after its demise in 1240, transfer its legacy to Vladimir-Suzdal, Muscovy, Russian Empire, USSR and the Russian Federation.

Finkel writes that Putin’s Russia is monopolising Kyiv Rus even further, with Russian history textbooks referencing only Rus, with Kyiv removed, and claiming that Grand Prince Volodymyr was baptised in ‘ancient Rus’, not Kyiv Rus (pp.230-231). Putin’s Russia’s draws on the policy of the Soviet Union which only permitted Russian historians to write and research about Kyiv Rus. The Soviet Union celebrated the millennium of Christianity adopted by Kyiv Rus in Moscow, not in Kyiv — even though Moscow did not exist in 988.

Historians in Putin’s Russia and Western historians of Russia also marginalise Ukrainians by de facto defining them as squatters on ‘Russian’ soil in Kyiv Rus. These historians depict Ukrainians as ‘younger brother’ appendages in their histories of Russia. The belief that Ukrainians and Russians are very close was prevalent among European scholars and policymakers through to the 2003-2004 Revolution, and even the Euromaidan Revolutions. In the late 1990s, Ukrainian Ambassador to the Benelux countries, Borys Tarasyuk, complained to me how the European Union was linking Russia and Ukraine’s fates, with Eurocrats telling him that Ukraine could not join the EU without Russia. Brussels only changed its approach in 2010 when the EU launched the Eastern Partnership.

Many historians largely ignore Ukrainian historians who have been writing histories of Ukraine separate to Russia since the late nineteenth century. Ukrainian historiography transfers the legacy of Kyiv Rus to the Galician-Volhynian Kingdom, and from there to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Ukrainian Cossack states. When Ukrainians and Muscovites met in the mid-seventeenth century, they held different world views and used interpreters, pointing to them not being ‘one people’.  Finkel critically engages with the imperial nationalist claim that Ukrainians always sought ‘reunification’ with Russians because of a common origin, language and religion (pp.35-37).

Historians in Putin’s Russia and Western historians of Russia write about Russia as an empire; there are no Western histories of the Russian Federation as a nation-state. In contrast, Ukrainian histories use similar frameworks as European and North American histories, incorporating all the events that have taken place on the territory and peoples who have lived on the territory of Ukraine. Kyiv Rus primarily existed on Ukrainian land and is therefore described by Ukrainian historians as the first Ukrainian state. Historians in Russia and Western histories of Russia instead describe Kyiv Rus as the ‘first Russian state.’

The USSR had deliberately merged Soviet and Russian identities by privileging Russians as the ‘leading people’ and ‘elder brother’. The Soviet Russian republic was the only one of fifteen republics to not possess its own republican institutions, such as a branch of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In late 1991, Yeltsyn took control of Soviet institutions in Moscow, and these later became Russian Federation institutions. With history playing such a prominent role in the Russian-Ukrainian war, Finkel points out how Russian imperial nationalist mythology influenced contemporary policy making (p.168). In the mid-1990s, before Putin became president, only 29 percent of Russians were respectful towards the borders of the Russian Federation, and only 17 percent believed Ukrainians and Russians were different peoples.

Consequently, Russians hold an identity that imagines ‘Russia’ to be bigger than the Soviet Russian republic and Russian Federation. Finkel writes how in the 1990s, Russian liberals did not develop a post-imperial civic identity for the Russian Federation (p.267). Due to this, Finkel believes Russian liberals failed the litmus test of dealing with the ‘Ukrainian question’ by ceding the definition of Russian identity to imperial nationalists, and thus they failed to counter imperialist and nationalistic perceptions of Ukraine as an illegitimate entity (p.267).

Russia and the Anti-Western Axis of Upheaval

The subtitle of Ramani’s book, Russia’s Campaign for Global Counter-Revolution, promises more than is delivered in the last two chapters, which deal with the global impact of the war. There is insufficient analysis explaining why Putin views the ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine as a wider war against liberalism, the ‘collective West’, NATO, the US-led unipolar world, and the perfidious ‘Anglo-Saxons.’ Why do the Kremlin and Russian imperial nationalists believe an artificial Ukraine and non-existent Ukrainian identity are propped up by the West as an ‘Anti-Russia’?  Why was a supposed great power – Russia – with the ‘second-best army in the world’, forced to go hat in hand to plead for drones and missiles from Iran, and military equipment and troops from North Korea? Ramani’s book also does not investigate China’s role as the main external enabler of Russia’s military machine.

Furthermore, Ramani’s discussion of Israel does not explain why it refused to militarily support Ukraine, a country led by a Jewish president whose family was murdered in the Holocaust (pp.351-353). Why has Tel Aviv not understood the ramifications of Iran’s military cooperation with Russia, up to and including receiving Russian technology to build nuclear weapons? Why does Tel Aviv not understand that Israel and Ukraine are natural military allies because Iran and Russia have the same goals to destroy them? These are the many questions which Ramani could have answered in these last two chapters dealing with the global ramifications of the war.

Conclusion

Ramani’s book falls into the same pitfalls as many books published after Russia’s two invasions of Ukraine. The book lacks a theoretical framework, cites few academic sources, and is over-reliant on Western media sources. Importantly, the book includes little analysis of national identity in the Russian-Ukrainian war, and yet — as Finkel convincingly shows — this question, along with Russian imperial nationalism and messianism, are the drivers of the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine. In addition, Ramani also does not analyse why the war spread from Russia and Ukraine to a global war.

Moreover, Ramani’s over-reliance on Russian sources is another example of academic orientalism; that is, viewing Ukraine through the eyes of the colonial power (in this case, Russia). Ramani’s book cites nearly 500 Russian sources and only 50 (primarily English-language) sources from Ukraine. The book therefore continues in a line of academic orientalists since 2014 who have written about the Russian-Ukrainian war who do not use a balanced mix of Russian and Ukrainian sources. For example, Richard Sakwa’s Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (2015) was one of the first classic books dominated by Russian sources that cited Putin thirty-one times but never once Ukrainian President Poroshenko. Gerard Toal’s book Near Abroad: Putin, the West, and the Contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus (2017) cited Gorbachev twice and Poroshenko only once!

An essay or thesis on the Russian-Ukrainian war submitted by an MA or PhD student would receive an F grade if it were dominated by Russian sources, with the only Ukrainian source the English-language Kyiv Post. When writing their own books, Western academics should surely practice what they preach to their students.

In placing Russia’s objectives within a historical context, Finkel’s book is an important contribution to our understanding of the roots of the Russian-Ukrainian war. I would therefore recommend Finkel’s book for academic syllabi in the areas of Russian-Ukrainian relations, national identity and nationalism, war studies, and international relations. Finkel understands the root causes of the war; sadly, Raman and many others who have written on this subject do not.

Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia
By Jade McGlynn
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023

Scholars have focused more on the issue of the instrumentalization of history, memory politics, and the Putin regime in Russia, especially since Russia’s escalation against Ukraine in February 2022. Putin has often used history to explain his worldview. His essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” showed Putin’s long obsession with Ukraine and provided context to Russian aims during the escalation. He commented on the history of the Second World War in the Western press. He often highlights how he sees himself as a historian, claiming he has gone through the archives himself. Suffice it to say, Putin and many Russian political and cultural leaders around him see a value in creating a useable past for Russia’s gain.

Jade McGlynn’s first book, Memory Makers, outlines the importance of creating this useable past for Russia, and Putin’s purposes and she explains how they developed it. McGlynn argues that Putin, upon his return to the presidency in 2012, turned to history to respond to threats to his rule: the protests regarding Russia’s electoral processes, a hurting economy, and Western involvement in Libya. They drafted new textbooks, developed new programs, and encouraged Russians to participate in the Kremlin’s historical memory politics through a variety of public-facing approaches.

To illustrate her point, McGlynn uses several case studies to show how Russia used a specific version of history to defend its policies abroad. This includes Ukraine in 2014 and Syria in 2015. Through Ukraine, the Russian government, alongside state media, propagated a campaign focusing on the alleged Nazism of Ukrainians, highlighting Ukrainian nationalist collaboration with Nazism during the Second World War, and the continued present-day lionizing of Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera and other members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in Western Ukraine. Russia reviewed these themes in 2022 with its escalation against Ukraine. In Syria, the Second World War again offered the link to the past, although this time, the focus was on the Soviet Union, and thereby Russia’s, participation in crafting a rules-based order through a specific understanding of the Yalta Conference of February 1945.

Naturally, this will appear jarring given that Russia seems to be challenging that order today in its escalation of Ukraine. However, internal coherence was not the goal. Instead, Putin utilized key moments of Soviet triumph (the defeat of Nazism, and the Soviet Union as a superpower), dressing them up as Russian triumphs to gain popular support for Russia’s current policies. Finally, McGlynn also looks at how Western sanctions in 2014 were reframed through the lens of Soviet collapse and the tumultuous 1990s to position Putin as returning Russia to the stability of the Brezhnev era. From 2012-2021, the period the book mainly focuses on, McGlynn argues that Putin’s Russia also highlighted other Russian triumphs, including going back to the Kyivan Rus and the expansion of imperial Russia. The aim was to instrumentalize history in such a way that Russians use it to develop a sense of national pride. It also allowed Putin and his regime to highlight the stability Putin’s rule had provided Russia since his coming to power.

But this useable past was also something that Russians could interact with. To do so, the regime developed a series of activities. Russians could attend a museum exhibit, watch a parade of the Immortal Regiment, or commemorate past glories. The idea was to develop such an inclusive project so that Russians would engage with the past, particularly a specific past that the government carefully curated. Yet, even with this broader useable past, there are events that resonate more than others, hence the extensive focus on the Second World War. Yet, through its appropriation of the past, the Russian government would develop a curated narrative. This meant a history that would downplay, if not outright erase, parts of the past that the Russian government did not want to be remembered, such as any of the atrocities the Red Army committed or the extensive collaboration of Russian soldiers with Nazism during the Second World War.

Memory Makers came out in 2023, giving McGlynn’s work new urgency and only limitedly does McGlynn touch on Russia’s escalation in Ukraine after February 2022. If anything, she highlights how Russia continues to do the same. Perhaps because it was mostly written before the escalation, being largely her doctoral thesis, it tends to have a much more measured analysis than her other recent publication, Russia’s War (Polity, 2023). McGlynn includes the insights of many Russian scholars and figures, some based on interviews she herself conducted, something largely unthinkable today, which helps contextualize how Russian analysts saw Putin’s efforts, but also how they defend them. On one hand, February 2022 is where the book is leading, but at the same time, it explicitly is not written that way. While later, McGlynn would argue in Russia’s War that Russians have accepted this message, hence a need to include the Russian public in who to blame for Russian aggression against Ukraine, McGlynn instead focuses on the processes used by the government, through its instrumentalization of history, and its deployment of those narratives to cultivate support, through both direct and indirect ways. To this end, Memory Makers explains why many Russians buy into the narratives put out by the regime. They have become familiar and have been cultivated over time, but also, Russia’s government and state media deploy them strategically to build that support.

There have been many books, especially since Russia’s escalation against Ukraine, that have attempted to explain the role of history in Russian society, in Putin’s regime, and in influencing how Russians interact with these efforts, and the link to Russian aggression or the Russian worldview. Memory Makers should be considered among the best of them, and should not be lost in the shuffle. As mentioned, the book was mostly written before the escalation, and therefore, it serves as the foundation for what we have seen since 2022, which has seen these processes, along with the coercion of Putin’s regime, go into overdrive. McGlynn states in her introduction that she “hope[s] [her book] will explain why policymakers and analysts need to take ‘propaganda’ and historical obsessions much more seriously and acknowledge their considerable emotive power.” (p.1) McGlynn certainly succeeds in this goal. The challenge is whether policymakers will heed the arguments made in this book.

Today, Russian aggression cannot be seriously understood without understanding its instrumentalization of history. It underwrites how Putin’s regime sees everything. Most importantly, McGlynn argues that this search for a useable past reflects Russia’s insecurity, given the notable upheavals and traumas of the twentieth century. This argument is now increasingly commonplace, but it reflects the broader appeal of Putin’s instrumentalization. While it may have been born out of a specific moment in his rule, “ordinary Russians” have embraced it to some degree and here, McGlynn makes a particularly important point – the level to which they have does not matter; instead, the goal is to get interaction, and to make history an “everyday concern” and encourage people to not only take pride in the Russian past but engage in the Kremlin’s version of that past. This memory of the past (McGlynn differentiates smartly between memory and history) also offers a common background most Russian citizens can buy into – it overcomes divisions of religion or ethnicity, instead focusing on a broader memory and appropriation of national history that is accessible to most if not all. It can also be policed, and it can be harnessed. Therefore, the population can buy in on their terms, while the regime can use it as they see fit.

Another reason why Memory Makers should stand out from others is McGlynn’s attempt, albeit a limited one, to reflect how these processes are not unique to Russia. Whereas there has been a popular desire to try to essentialize what is happening in Russia as unique to Russia, the reality is that the processes it has used are not unique and can be identified in other nations, including in the West. History and memory increasingly are something that can be used for patriotic ends and although McGlynn could be more direct in some of her discussion here, the opening of the comparative door is welcome and a needed reminder that memory politics exist in all societies and nations.