Bye. Thank you very much to the Oxford Peace Studies Network for the invitation to speak today.
It's great to see you and see such a great turnout.
So as you've heard, I'm involved in peace reps Ukraine team say we've this program within peace wrapped has been running
since October last year and we're working very closely with Ukrainians on the ground in Ukraine.
And our research is really about co-creating knowledge with those that are experiencing the impacts of violent conflict.
And in that context, we part of our part of our research is building a network of local researchers on the ground in Ukraine,
spread across different territories, and using their insights into local conditions to feed ideas into our wider work and
to really build evidence based understanding of what is happening in this conflict.
And one of the big priorities for us, particularly in the run into the Ukraine recovery conference, is Ukraine's economic needs.
And in the talk I give today and I don't think I didn't realise we get got a generous 15 minutes that she had planned for ten.
So if I don't if I don't need ten you can tell me off because that was my intention.
And so and that will affect some of the analysis that I give you today, because Ukraine really isn't in a good place economically at the moment,
as well as the appalling crimes that are committed in the course of the Russian invasion, too.
So the question I'm really going to engage today is what does the war against Ukraine tell us about our changing world?
And I many people in my discipline, international relations, argue that this is really a return of geopolitics.
It's a return of great power politics in another discourse.
It's the revenge of the revisionist powers.
And I think all of these categorisations of the war against Ukraine are quite misleading and often made by people, to be honest.
You on aren't really getting insights to what's happening in Ukraine on the ground,
but speaking much more at a international geopolitical level, even an ivory tower level, if you want to put it pejoratively.
And they have a few things in common.
I think the first is that they're very state centric in their understanding of this conflict, particularly this idea, geopolitics,
political geography, that the most important thing about the world in which we live is fundamentally territory and who controls it.
I think that's a quite mistaken assumption when it comes to the course of this conflict.
It misses out by two elements that I think we need to consider.
The second is a question of time, which is really important in this idea of return, right?
It's drawing on a kind of cyclical view of history that there's something that was present in the past that's just returning, it's coming back.
And so there's a resurgence of, if you like, a past sense of affairs.
The war is regenerated, something that we thought had lost.
And I think that's also quite mistaken because it's not asking the question we I think we need to ask about this war,
and that is what's new, what's distinctive, what's changing in global politics.
The other question, I think, is around the causes of the conflict that this often gets wrong.
If you think of it in terms of territory that the great powers, great states, there are security claims on the international order.
This can also lead to the, I think, the false claim that NATO's expansion caused the war.
And there's quite a good body of evidence to show that this simply isn't the case.
I mean, one data point could be Putin's statement in May 2002, where while he didn't renounce Russia's historic opposition to NATO expansion,
he certainly indicated that he was extremely relaxed about it.
And even in the case of Ukraine,
explicitly stated that that the decision of whether Ukraine should join NATO or not was a decision that only Ukraine could make
independently a correct actually position made at a time when Russia's relationship to the West was obviously very different.
And I think the the other question that we need to consider here is whether that leads into the conclusion that really, you know,
the nature of the military balance of forces between states is actually the most decisive one,
because actually it's not just the military balance of forces, it's how individuals like Vladimir.
Imagine that distinction, how they think about the balance of forces between states.
And then the final point of critique I want to make against some people in my discipline, not the whole discipline.
I have to say that some people. And the final point, because I think this gets wrong,
whether you can actually achieve strategic efficacy for military intervention in the world today,
if you think about the conflict purely in terms of this return of great power politics,
I think what you miss is the great power politics isn't very effective in achieving the aims of great powers.
And I think here I'm drawing on the work of my LSC colleague Mary Couto, who argues,
I think very correctly that military intervention overseas isn't effective in bringing about what we can refer to as compelling,
as compelling as states to behave in a particular way.
So then the second so that's the first point I want to make in my,
my first 5 minutes and the war that I want to get across that critique of how we think about the war of Ukraine and then the globe.
It's not about great power politics. Well, what's going on here and here?
I want to argue that it's better to see the war against Ukraine as a sign of the
fragmentation of world order that's taking place on lots of different levels.
One level, I think, is the level of ideas of ideology, a kind of discursive level,
where that's where there's a much greater fragmentation of identities.
And within that context, within that frame, there's a rise of ethno nationalism, authoritarianism in many states all over the world,
and that Putin's Russia has seen one of the most extreme examples of this wider trend to authoritarian ization.
The second part of this fragmentation that picks up on what Alex was saying
earlier is that the world is going through a period of economic transition.
So the paradigm of free market neo liberalism has displaced significantly and in fact is being inverted.
So, you know, whereas 20 or 30 years ago, big corporations were asking the state to get out of their lives as much as possible,
leave them alone so that they could get on with the task of making money.
That's no longer the case. The paradigm has shifted really quite significantly because now corporations are interested in what states can do for them.
One buzzword that's often used is de-risking.
How do you reduce the risks of the investments that we make?
The corporations are obsessed with talking about security considerations and geopolitics in for their investments in this new world order.
And what this is a sign of broadly is that markets are becoming much, much more dependent upon states.
Then there's a related aspect to this, too, which is to do with environmental change,
which obviously this is part of the economic transition, which I think is driving this fragmentation.
Part of the reason that corporations are so interested in de-risking their investments is
because of the extraordinary ecological threats that the world is facing all the time.
And that, again, is making politics and political security a more and more important consideration for capital.
And then there's this other aspect that I think you really see in the civic response to the war against Ukraine,
that if you think of the war just in terms of what's happening in Ukraine,
you're going to miss out on all of the transboundary connections that are part and parcel of Ukrainians everyday resistance to the invasion.
One of my colleagues in East Carolina, Jessica Shaw at your Colonial University,
has been studying the extraordinary civic response in Poland to the challenge of migration.
And this isn't just a question of the humanitarian considerations for migrants in Poland, though,
of course, that's very, very important to make sure that the refugees are well looked after.
It's also about the self activity of Ukrainian civil society organisations inside Poland and how they're interacting with their homeland,
whether that's raising money for humanitarian relief that is then going back to Ukraine or also it has to be said,
raising money for the Ukrainian military directly through crowdfunding platforms to support the war effort.
This is this is part and parcel of this sort of fragmented picture.
And in a way, migration and diasporic links are a feature of this sort of global.
Rising worlds, this fragmented, globalising world that we've grown used to.
So each of those trends boundary levels, ideas, ecology, economic linkages, civic mobilisation and shaping how states respond to the war itself.
And this certainly leads into, I think, if you like, opportunities of this global fragmentation.
Maybe there's an opportunity in this new environment for progressive economic paradigm change.
Maybe there's opportunities within this fragmented environment for developing
sustainable peace strategies that address in different ways each of these levels.
Perhaps a new internationalism, we might call it.
But of course, there are also extraordinary dangers, and we would be foolish not to emphasise those.
In Ukraine,
I think the principal danger lies in the intersection of economics and security and how those two elements are interacting with one another.
My fear is that the economic situation in Ukraine is so negative, with around one in three people looking for work,
unable to find it, that a certain state that the society might has a risk of some form of fragmentation or breakdown,
and that would create an environment in which the Ukrainian resistance loses its kind of civic character,
its democratic character, potentially, or finds it much harder to sustain that civic democratic character.
Unfortunately, in the fragmented world in which we're living in, we have many,
many examples of conflicts that go through this process of fragmentation and then become very,
very difficult to stop, especially when lots and lots of groups emerge that have in one way or another,
a interest in perpetuating a cycle of violence, perhaps as a means of survival and so on.
So this is a clear risk at the same time.
And with that economic exhaustion, we also, I think, could say equally on the Russian side, but for slightly different reasons.
And this conventional war, this high intensity conventional war, very different to the conflicts that my colleagues on piece reps peace rep study.
This high intensity conventional war may lead to a situation where both sides lose the ability in one way or another to continue to fight the war.
On the Russian side, that would not be due to domestic economic exhaustion,
but the impact of sanctions and its ability to procure the high end manufacture of high tech
weaponry and the high tech weaponry that it needs to sustain the tanks that it's using and losing,
it has to be said in the conflict itself. With that, exhaustion comes a clear risk, very clear risk of violent escalation.
That poses a question, a challenge, of course, for peacemaking.
So then in the final the the final remark, and I conclude, I don't know if I was successful on my 10 minutes.
I suspect not, but I think that was more like 15, they say the relationship.
So, yes. So I think any any peace in Ukraine, we have to put at the forefront the question of peace with justice, not peace at any cost.
And for a sustainable peace to have to be achieved.
That has to be a recognition of a peace that's compact, encompassing, compatible, excuse me with international law,
recognising territorial integrity, the principles of the rule of law system, and the principles of sovereign equality and democracy.
Thank you.