Special Issue on “Russia’s war on Ukraine”

Guest Editor: Oxana Shevel, Tufts University

Nationalities Papers is inviting manuscript submissions for a topical special issue

Putin’s decision to launch a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 shocked the world. The invasion upended the post-WWII European order, leaving scholars and analysts debating the causes and consequences of this war of aggression for Ukraine, Russia, Europe, and the world. The invasion, which followed the 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea and eight years of Russian-Ukrainian war in Donbas, also raises questions for many theories of post-Soviet politics –the dynamics of political regimes to identity politics, state-society relations, state capacity, reform dynamics and more.

Nationalities Papers invites submissions that address different dimensions of the Russian war on Ukraine. Contributions are encouraged to consider (but are not restricted to) the following questions:

• What are the political, geopolitical, ideational and other drivers of Russia’s decision to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine? How have the power dynamics and institutional relations between Putin, Russian elites, and Russian society affected the invasion and ongoing war?
• How has the Ukrainian (and/or Russian) state, society, military, and/or economy changed as a result of the war? What are the implications of these changes for political competition, state-society relations, economic development, military reform, or foreign policy?
• How can we best understand dynamics of Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion? Do we have theoretical models able to account for the mobilization and effective resistance that surprised many observers?
• What are the dynamics of occupation, resistance, and collaboration at the local level in areas of Ukraine that have been occupied by Russia, and what broader insights can we learn from these dynamics?
• The 2022 invasion was a shocking military escalation, but Russia’s aggression against Ukraine began in 2014. What can we learn about the 2022 war from the dynamics of Russia-Ukraine conflict since 2014?
• How have social media, messenger services, and independent media impacted the war?
• “Memory wars” and debates over history have long complicated Ukrainian-Russian relations. How is history/historical memory playing a role in the current war? How might the war affect the politics of history in Ukraine and/or Russia going forward?
• What role have international actors played at different stages of the war? How is the war challenging the European and global international order and security architecture?
• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine generated unprecedented migration flows of refugees from Ukraine and internal displacement within Ukraine. What are the consequences and implications of this migration for Ukraine, Europe, and existing theories of migration and refugee flows and policies?
• The 2022 invasion also generated migration from Russia. What are the causes and consequences of these migration flows?
• How might we reconsider theoretical priors – about sources of pluralism and authoritarianism, identity construction, strengths and weaknesses of civil society or state-society relations in Ukraine, Russia, or the post-Soviet region more generally – in light of the current war?

 

Submission Guidelines:

Deadline for papers: 1 February 2023

• Please submit your paper in line with the journal’s submission guidelines via ScholarOne Manuscript Central. [See Submission Guidelines]. Papers should be designated as special issue articles, and authors should select “Russia’s War on Ukraine” in the special issue drop down menu.
• The guest editor is responsible for ensuring the quality and collective coherence of the manuscripts in the special issue, and the authors' adherence to the journal's submission guidelines.
• All articles selected from the pool of articles by the guest editor will be submitted for blind peer review.

If your article is selected for this special issue, you will be notified by the editor. Excellent manuscripts may not be included due to issues of fit, scope, and space. If your paper is not selected by the guest editor, it may still be considered for publication in Nationalities Papers. We routinely publish articles on the political developments in Ukraine and Russia, and these countries are of substantial interest to our readers.

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Ukraine's Unnamed War - Before the Russian Invasion of 2022

Dominique Arel, University of Ottawa & Jesse Driscoll, University of California, San Diego

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has its roots in the events of 2013–2014. Russia cynically termed the seditionist conflict in Crimea and Eastern Donbas a 'civil war' in order to claim non-involvement. This flies in the face of evidence, but the authors argue that the social science literature on civil wars can be used help understand why no political solution was found between 2015 and 2022. The book explains how Russia, after seizing Crimea, was reacting to events it could not control and sent troops only to areas of Ukraine where it knew it would face little resistance (Eastern Donbas). Kremlin decision makers misunderstood the attachment of the Russian-speaking population to the Ukrainian state and also failed to anticipate that their intervention would transform Ukraine into a more cohesively 'Ukrainian' polity. Drawing on Ukrainian documentary sources, this concise book explains these important developments to a non-specialist readership.

Find out more here.