Global consequences of the war in Ukraine: the last straw for (liberal) interventionism?

Abstract

The interpretation of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine as a “turning point” indicates that long-established parameters of securing peace in international politics will change. This article tentatively assesses consequences of this war for the agenda of international peacebuilding and for wider interventionist practices in contemporary violent conflict settings. It is argued that the ongoing war speeds up a preexisting phase of profound order transformation that will considerably change the ways in which states manage conflicts and attempt to secure lasting peace in the international system. The article outlines how ongoing transformations already affect—and will further affect—(liberal) interventionism at different entangled scales, ranging from the global to the local. The contribution draws on recent studies of the rise and decline of global orders and interweaves them with insights from empirical peace and conflict research and critical studies of peacebuilding and interventions. It discusses the further decline of global cooperation in the wake of the Russian war against Ukraine, outlines the consequences of the rivalry between United Nations Security Council veto powers for the global agenda of peacebuilding and the conduct of peace operations, and illustrates the local consequences for specific intervention sites, in particular the negative impact of the employment of the Russian Wagner Group in Mali.

The Crisis of Liberal Interventionism and the Return of War

“…Although Russia's war against Ukraine has further fueled the crisis of liberal interventionism and the LIO more broadly, they have also been weakened from the inside. Geis and Schröder (2024) argue that the crisis of liberal interventionism began long before the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The US-led global war on terror shifted the emphasis away from liberal peacebuilding to the security of states already in the early 2000s.…”

Interventionist Aid and the War in Ukraine

“…Politically, the main problem will remain the lack of shared minimum rules of engagement for the major Interventionist Aid practices such as the Weaponization of Aid and the Aidisation of Weapons, exacerbated by the shift in geopolitical axes from Central Europe westward to the United States and eastward to Asia and a Chinese-driven Greater Eurasia (Krickovic and Pellicciari 2021). Unlike past Aid Wars, Interventionist (War) Aid would sanction the total incompatibility between a Western front framing its intervention as defence of the liberal rules-based order and an Eastern one contextualising its own intervention as the explicit foreign policy goal of reducing Anglo-Saxon international predominance in favour of a new multipolar order (Geis and Schröder 2022;Freedman 2022;Way 2022, 5-17;Lukyanov 2023, 5-10, Karaganov 2022Sakwa 2017).…”