Offensive realism, differentiation theory, and the war in Ukraine

In this article, I shall demonstrate that several of the arguments made in favour of an offensive realist explanation of Russian actions in Ukraine as part of a power balancing process are inconsistent both with available empirical knowledge of the conflict in Ukraine and with the structural logic p...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autor: Kleinschmidt J.
Tipo de documento: artigo
Estado:Versão publicada
Data de publicação:2019
País:Colombia
Recursos:Universidad del Rosario
Repositório:Repositorio EdocUR - U. Rosario
Idioma:inglês
OAI Identifier:oai:repository.urosario.edu.co:10336/22170
Acesso em linha:https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-018-0150-4
https://repository.urosario.edu.co/handle/10336/22170
Access Level:Acceso aberto
Palavra-chave:Civil society
Empirical analysis
Political conflict
Political power
Political theory
War
Russian federation
Ukraine
Conflict
Differentiation theory
Offensive realism
Russia
World society
Descrição
Resumo:In this article, I shall demonstrate that several of the arguments made in favour of an offensive realist explanation of Russian actions in Ukraine as part of a power balancing process are inconsistent both with available empirical knowledge of the conflict in Ukraine and with the structural logic postulated by offensive realist theory itself. Rather than a conflict about power in a material sense, I will argue that the war in Ukraine is better understood as a conflict about the incompatibility of the Russian state structure to cope with the imperatives of functional differentiation as understood by theories of world society. © 2018, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature.