Vocabularies of International Relations after the Crisis in Ukraine

Description

The conflict in Ukraine and Russia's annexation of Crimea has undoubtedly been a pivotal moment for policy makers and military planners in Europe and beyond. Many analysts see an unexpected character in the conflict and expect negative reverberations and a long-lasting period of turbulence and uncertainty, the de-legitimation of international institutions and a declining role for global norms and rules. Did these events bring substantial correctives and modifications to the extant conceptualization of International Relations? Does the conflict significantly alter previous assumptions and foster a new academic vocabulary, or, does it confirm the validity of well-established schools of thought in international relations? Has the crisis in Ukraine confirmed the vitality and academic vigour of conventional concepts? These questions are the starting points for this book covering conceptualisations from rationalist to reflectivist, and from quantitative to qualitative. Most contributors agree that many of the old concepts, such as multi-polarity, spheres of influence, sovereignty, or even containment, are still cognitively valid, yet believe the eruption of the crisis means that they are now used in different contexts and thus infused with different meanings. It is these multiple, conceptual languages that the volume puts at the centre of its analysis. This text will be of great interest to students and scholars studying international relations, politics, and Russian and Ukrainian studies. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of contributors Introduction 1. ‘There are more important things than where the border runs’: the other side of George Kennan’s containment theory A tiny flame of hope Greatness and power Princes and masters Conclusion Notes 2. The crisis of spheres of influence in the EU–Russia relationship The concept of an international relationship The constitution and tension of Common Spaces The relative crisis of spheres of influence Conclusion Notes 3. Borderline strategies: Calibrated territorial expansionism in the game theory searchlight Interactive territorial value Exploiting collective inaction Controlled borderlessness Micro-case demonstrations Countering calibrated expansionism Notes 4. From‘colony’ to ‘failing state’?: Ukrainian sovereignty in the gaze of Russian foreign policy discourses Sovereignty: ‘problematic’ or ‘written?’ Newly independent Ukraine and Russia: the organization of post-Soviet hypocrisy Ukraine: a European ‘colony’ or ‘mistress’ of the EU? Constructing a ‘failed state’ Notes 5. Reconsidering western concepts of the Ukrainian conflict: the rise to prominence of Russia’s ‘soft force’ policy Asymmetric warfare: explaining the Ukrainian events? The rise of Russian soft force? The Ukrainian conflict and Russian soft force? The misinterpretation of history Conclusion: so what is soft force? Notes 6. Rising powers in the contemporary world: sources of sustainability What is “rising” about rising powers? Future trajectories: sources of sustainability The European Union: sustainable rising of “normative power”? Russia: rising revisionism When rising powers meet: the EU and Russia Conclusion Notes 7. Governmentality beyond the West: (post)political machineries in Ukraine and Russia Conceptualizing governmentality: current issues Policies of subnational actors in the Euro 2012 and the Universiade 2013: good cop, bad cop In residuo: Western governance and spill-over effects Conclusion Notes 8. Managing national ressentiment: morality politics in Putin’s Russia Vladimir Putin: the unlikely moral hero of Russia Moral frames and political action Gde Moi Golos, Volshebnik? Electoral fraud as theft Political and social basis of the new politics of morality “The sleep of reason produces monsters”: on the executors, the inquisitors and vigilantes In lieu of conclusion Notes 9. Stabilizing dispersed identities, or why politics defines EU–Russia disconnections Cultural semiotics of boundary/border-(un)making Temporal boundary (un)making: Russian and European experiences The cultural semiotics of political divides Borderlands and neighbourhoods: places in-between Conclusion Notes Index