Turkey’s Difficult Balancing Act in the Ukraine Crisis

Posted by & filed under Regions and Powers, Ukraine War

It’s not difficult to imagine Turkey’s President Erdogan watching Putin’s failures in Ukraine with a solid dose of schadenfreude.

Putin has been the kingmaker in Syria since 2015 and Erdogan, not one for compromise, has had to negotiate with Putin to secure Turkey’s interests.

Illustration: Giorgi Balakhadze / Wikimedia Commons

The most critical of these has been Turkey’s opposition to Kurdish autonomy and, more recently, its fear of more refugees crossing the Syrian border (particularly concerns over the unstable northwestern province of Idlib).

Thus, it was no surprise that there was uncertainty about which measures, if any, Turkey would be willing to take in joining the opposition to Russia’s war on Ukraine.Read More

Russia Has Violated the Fundamental Rules of International Law. What Are the Consequences?

Posted by and & filed under Law and Ethics, Ukraine War

Vladimir Putin’s speech on 24 February was not only a formal announcement of his invasion of Ukraine, but also a defence of this use of force under international law.

The fact that Russia is relying on international law is no surprise – Russia has always done so. The question is whether its arguments have any merit.

Further: what are the consequences of violating international law? And is international law of any consequence at all?

Putin visits the ICJ in 2005. Photo: Kremlin.ru / Wikimedia Commons

Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the use of military force against another state. The International Court of Justice in the Hague has also established the principle that aiding a rebel group in a foreign country is prohibited.

These prohibitions had already been violated by Russia through its annexation of Crimea and its supply of military assistance to rebels in Luhansk and Donetsk. In relation to its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has made several claims under international law.Read More

People on the Move in the Face of War in Ukraine

Posted by & filed under Humanitarianism, Migration, Ukraine War

More than half a million people have fled the Russian invasion of Ukraine through the country’s borders to neighbours in Central and Eastern Europe as of 1 March. In a context of war in Europe, and the human suffering it brings, this blog post offers some rough reflections on mobility and inequality, but also solidarity.

Refugees from Ukraine at border posts in the west of the country. Photo: Border Guard Service of Ukraine / Wikimedia Commons

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Hungarian Perspectives on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Posted by & filed under Security, Ukraine War

‘Russians go home!’ (Ruszkik haza!), one of the many slogans of the 1956 revolution against the Soviet occupation, is a familiar term for every Hungarian.

66 years later, the same sentence was chanted by crowds gathered in front of the Russian Embassy in Hungary to oppose President Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. The 1956 Hungarian revolution did not succeed, in large part due to the West’s inaction, and Ukraine’s faith is changing hour by hour.

Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán at the Ukrainian border. Photo: primeminister.hu

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Putin’s War Is Stuck, Beware the Rising Risks

Posted by & filed under Regions and Powers, Security, Ukraine War

Data on the concentration of Russian troops was solid; the diplomatic offensive executed by Moscow was deliberately disagreeable; yet, many experts (myself including) refused to accept the proposition on the coming war as “inevitable”.

Denials streaming from the Kremlin were never convincing, but President Vladimir Putin’s reputation as a shrewd pragmatist still clashed with the forecasts that he could commit a blunder of such monumental proportions.

In the matter of five days, if not already in day one of the full-blown hostilities, it has become clear that the scale of obstacles and damage goes far beyond the unduly optimistic risk-calculus in Moscow.

Putin chairs a meeting in the Russian National Security Council. Photo: kremlin.ru

Every student of Clausewitz (who has a place of prominence in Russian strategic culture) knows that wars rarely go according to plans; this one, however, never had a chance to register a success.

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We Shouldn’t Be Surprised by Putin’s Invasion

Posted by & filed under Governance, Security, Ukraine War

The wheel of history is now in motion. Russia’s gruesome attack on Ukraine disrupts one of the most significant trends in the history of nation states, namely the astounding absence of large-scale wars of invasion and occupation in Europe since the end of World War II.

For many years, peace researchers have pointed out that civil wars far outnumber interstate conflicts and that in Europe, one can see signs of a “norm” against wars of invasion for the purpose of changing national borders. These were central topics during the early 2010s, when Steven Pinker put much of this optimism into words in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined.

Public Domain / Flickr

But if one delves a little deeper into the research, Putin’s invasion is not so surprising.

In fact, it is completely consistent with well-known patterns for how dictatorships behave in international politics, and for conflicts between democracies and dictatorships. These patterns suggest that we should explain current events with a strong emphasis on the mechanisms of Putin’s regime, and his autocracy’s attitude to democracies and democratization in neighbouring countries. We could call this a “regime-based perspective” on Russia’s aggressive behaviour.Read More

What Do People in Ukraine Want?

Posted by & filed under Regions and Powers, Security, Ukraine War

The Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 — a drastic escalation of an already devastating armed conflict ongoing since 2014 — violates the right of the people of Ukraine to live their lives in a sovereign state and independently shape their future.

While much focus has been on the geopolitics of this conflict, it is the people in Ukraine who are at the heart of it — and will bear the brunt of war.

Ukrainian girl. Wikimedia Commons CCBY 2.0

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No Way around a Dangerous Confrontation with Putin’s Russia

Posted by & filed under Regions and Powers, Security, Ukraine War

I, along with many other commentators, believed until the very end that war in Ukraine was preventable and would ultimately not take place. Very sadly, and concerningly, I was wrong. Why did I hold out hope so long for the avoidance of war? What does the invasion of Ukraine tell us about Putin’s regime? And how should the West respond?

Wikimedia Commons

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How Did Europe Get into This Predicament? We Must Look in Our Own Backyard

Posted by & filed under Conflict Patterns, Governance, Law and Ethics, Regions and Powers, Ukraine War

It’s easy to condemn the opposing party in a polarized situation.
But it’s more difficult to exercise self-criticism.

It’s easy to condemn the opposing party in a polarized situation. Particularly when there are good reasons for such condemnation, as in the current situation. It’s easy to state that Russia’s lust for power and its violation of international law are abhorrent. It’s more difficult to exercise self-criticism. So let’s take a closer look at the process that led Europe into this predicament and examine what’s been happening in our own backyard.Read More

Democracy Works, Even in Weak States

Posted by , and & filed under Governance

Political scientists have long assumed that a strong state is a prerequisite for a well-functioning democracy. Recent research suggests that this assumption is wrong.

Scene from a polling station in Bamako during Mali’s presidential election on 29 July. Photo MINUSMA/Marco Dormino

“Building a modern democratic state in Afghanistan where the government’s writ runs uniformly throughout the country implies a timeframe of many years, indeed decades,” wrote the former American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. “It was precisely Afghanistan’s fractiousness, inaccessibility and absence of central authority that made it an attractive base for terrorist networks in the first place.”Read More