The world order is under pressure. For world peace and stability, the core security tasks of the key international organisations such as, above all, the UN and regional organizations such as the African Union (AU) and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) are to manage and reduce conflict and to establish and build peace.

The problem is that for the past decade and more, the overall number and longevity of armed conflicts have increased along with their intractability. These armed conflicts that international mediation or conflict management seem unable to reach or influence are, alongside confrontation between the great powers and generally toxic geopolitics, key markers of the current disorder.  

This post is the third in a series, based on the introductory chapter to the recently released SIPRI Yearbook 2024, looking at the world order implications of some of today’s key events and trends. The series asks, What world are we shaping for ourselves in the coming decades if these trends continue unchanged? 

The decline of international conflict management

The major armed conflicts active during the last two years or so show little or no sign of being amenable to termination by any means other than victory for one side or mutual exhaustion. Compared to the 1990s and the first decade and a half of this century, that’s new.

It may fairly be argued that many conflicts in which fighting was ended or at least suspended for a period by agreement looked wholly intractable until negotiations were well under way and agreements were imminent or even signed. Relevant examples include Northern Ireland before 1994, Guatemala before 1996 and Sri Lanka before the ceasefire in 2002.

But the last major armed conflict to be largely ended by agreement was in Colombia in 2016. Today, violent conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, the DRC, Myanmar and the western Sahel, among others, show little potential for settlement, and international efforts towards that end appear limited in effect and sometimes in ambition.

Is that, in some sense, the ‘fault’ of world order institutions such as the UN, AU and OSCE? Or is it a characteristic of the conflicts themselves that they are intractable for international mediation?

Structural causes of contemporary conflicts

The backgrounds to these conflicts vary but have in common that they all run deep. Let us not begin with the big and obvious cases of Ukraine and Gaza, partly because these are atypical of current conflicts in more respects than just their scale (and partly because we will get to them in good time).

In the case of states that emerged from colonial status during the period of decolonization from the 1940s until the 1970s, all began by facing sharp challenges of governance.

They were variously confronted with national borders arranged by colonial powers that had little or nothing to do with the histories and realities of the populations; with deficiencies in state capacity, including poor health and education services; with transport infrastructure that was either rudimentary or shaped almost wholly for military purposes or resource extraction; with an economic structure that emphasized agriculture and the extraction of natural resources and paid little or no attention to value-added activities in manufacturing; with a system of international trade that favoured the rich countries that had set it up; and, in some cases, with ethnic or religious division hardwired into the distribution of wealth and power.

By the 2020s, many countries had emerged more or less successfully. Those that have not face seemingly intractable issues of poor governance, arbitrary rule, intra-elite contestation, economic underdevelopment, and weak institutions. These issues are articulated through corruption, policing that is simultaneously oppressive and inefficient, indebtedness and weak public finances, and politics based on patronage. These problems are often treated by commentators, policy circles and scholars in the global North as if they are the root causes of conflict. Actually, the root causes lie one step further back and phenomena such as corruption, bad governance and deficient policing are the symptoms of what has gone wrong. At worst, they metastasise into violent conflict – often chronic yet punctuated by critical moments of escalation.

The depth of the structural roots of contemporary violence in some of the most conflict-affected countries is an important part of the reason why it is so difficult to generate effective international action to help bring these armed conflicts to an end.

Conflict behaviour & motives

Paying attention to the structural causes does not exonerate any state, group or individual of responsibility for starting, sustaining or escalating violence. Sometimes, focussing on structural causes can seem to lead the observer astray. For example, structural explanations may seem to have less to offer in the case of Russia’s war on Ukraine and the Hamas–Israel conflict because of the actions of particular prominent individuals.

In the broad view, however, it can be an error to make a crisp distinction between structural causes of violent conflict and what should be attributed to the decisions and actions of individuals. The individual leaders, after all, are products of their context as much as both the foot soldiers and the families who flee in terror. And over time, the actions of individuals, especially political leaders, can themselves become part of the structural foundations of conflict.

In this light, it is interesting to look at Russia’s war on Ukraine. Considerable analytical effort has been invested in attempting to understand the true motives and goals behind it. The questions that are commonly asked in the West boil down to two binaries: is it Putin or something deeper in Russia; and is it relatively short-term and political or does it have deeper historical and structural roots?

There are three Russian narratives: in one, Russia is a victim but, in a second, a generous protector of all Russians wherever they live, while, in a third, Russia has a destiny to fulfil. 

Overlapping motives

Perhaps there is no single answer. Perhaps it is yes to both options. Indeed, overlapping political, strategic and cultural motives have been presented by Putin, other Russian spokespersons and unofficial commentators. 

President Putin, for example, has both emphasized the aim of dealing with the Ukrainian leadership, depicted as ‘criminals’ and ‘neo-Nazis’, along with more modest if fantasy-fuelled aims, such as preventing Ukraine from developing tactical nuclear weapons, and invoked more ambitious ones, envisaging the end of the Ukrainian state, on the grounds that it has no historical right to exist.

This line of thought appears to draw on grandiose and largely polemical theorizing about an historical Russian mission to be a great power, dominant in Eurasia. 

Putin also depicts the war as an existential struggle against the West, as do some Russian commentators. Others, however, depict the war aims in more limited terms that swing on the need to protect Russians living in the provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk. Some of Putin’s speeches also emphasise this aim of Russian solidarity.

These goals are not logically incompatible with each other but they are distinct, which could imply different strategic paths for reaching them and give rise to different political narratives. In one narrative, Russia is a victim of the West and of neo-Nazism in Ukraine; in another, Russia is a generous protector of all Russians, even those who live in other states; in a third, Russia has a destiny to fulfil. 

The political dimension relates to Russia’s role in the world and the belief, most fully articulated by Putin in his Munich speech in 2007, that the West was attempting to shape the world order in a way that excluded Russia from its rightful role as a great power. 

The strategic dimension of official Russian justifications of the war against Ukraine swings in part on a related question: the post-cold war enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The claim is often made, not least by Putin, that NATO promised not to grow bigger; this is based on a misunderstanding that I explore in my next post, a short companion piece to this article. Leaving that claim to one side,  it is not strange if there was some alarm within the Russian defence establishment as NATO’s borders moved closer. Whether that alarm justifies or even explains Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is another matter.

The strategic dimension also involved a Russian calculation—clearly disproven by events since February 2022—that Ukraine represented a relatively straightforward target of opportunity. While reports suggest Russia now holds about 18 per cent of Ukraine’s territory (compared to 6.5 per cent before February 2022, and down from a peak of 24-25 per cent by the end of March 2022), that figure has barely changed in over 18 months.¹ And while, as in all wars, casualty figures are uncertain and contested, western intelligence estimates that those territorial gains have been at the expense of half a million Russian soldiers killed and injured; that estimate has risen by an astonishing and gut-wrenching 150,000 deaths and injuries in just three months.² There is no clarity about Ukraine’s human losses, estimated by US officials in mid-2023 at 70,000 military deaths, but put at 31,000 military deaths by President Zelenskiy in February 2024.³ Civilian deaths have been estimated by the UN at 11,000 by May 2024, with 33,000 injured, but both figures are regarded as major under-estimates.

Thirdly, the cultural dimension relates to a deep sense among some Russians that Russia and Ukraine belong together, bound by history and cultural similarity. One of the most balanced treatments of this is to be found in an analysis presented by a Chinese think tank, which suggests the core issue is that Russia once dominated the East Slavic cultural and historical space, comprising Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. While Russia cannot accept losing its dominance, Ukraine seeks freedom from domination and increasingly emphasizes Ukrainian difference from Russia rather than similarities.⁴

But the cultural dimension feeds back into the political dimension because it is about reluctance to contemplate the erosion of former dominance. This is characteristic of all declining powers.⁵ The Russian variant of it is generally unstated but nonetheless evident in some of Putin’s speeches and in ideological theories of Russia’s greatness and its world mission. Russian commentator Sergei Karaganov focuses on ‘the accelerating failure of the modern ruling Western elites’, which is ‘accompanied by rapid changes, unprecedented in history, in the global balance of power in favor of the Global Majority, with China and partly India acting as its economic drivers, and Russia chosen by history to be its military-strategic pillar’. Karaganov’s idea that Russia is ‘chosen by history’ is as fanciful as any arrogation of the right to power in earlier times by figures as different in other ways as European colonists and Chinese emperors. This combination of declining western power and rising others on the world stage is presented by Karaganov as the ‘underlying, and even fundamental cause of the conflict in Ukraine.’

War, order and change

The differences and similarities between what could be described as mainstream western and Russian opinion are interesting. In western eyes, the war challenges the international order – indeed, in some interpretations of Putin’s 2022 escalation of the war, that is an integral motive. In the Russian understanding, it is the fact that the order is facing challenges that leads to the war, a perspective that is visible in Putin’s June speech to Russian Foreign Ministry senior officials⁶ as well as in what Karaganov has to say about it.

There is so much that is different between these opinions: the worldview, the understanding of history, the analysis of today and expectations of tomorrow, the meaning of key terms and concepts, what the facts are and which ones are relevant, the role of states and governments – so much. You can read one and then the other and doubt whether they share the same space-time continuum.

Yet they agree that Russia’s war is about much more than Russia and Ukraine. They agree it is also about world order and an effort to change it in Russia’s favour.

How that order will look is, of course, far from clear. A thoughtful Russian treatment of what it may involve, such as this one, has something in common with the perhaps soon-to-be-vogueish idea of multiplexity (interleaving elements) as the keynote of an emerging world order. Both argue that the architecture of international relations is becoming more complex. There was the relatively simple architecture of a bipolar world system during the US-Soviet Cold War from the late 1940s to the late 1980s, with a dyadic confrontation constrained by some rules and mutual understanding. Then came the even simpler architecture of a short-lived unipolar or hegemonic world order for 10 to 15 years after the Cold War ended. What is emerging now something more complex. As we look ahead to it and try to understand in advance what it might entail, whatever shape it may take, my emphasis would be on trying to ensure that the rules and norms are clear, and not so much on the positioning of international organisations.

But in the meantime, as change unfolds, an arrangement of treaties, laws and norms that is indubitably flawed and a long way less than perfectly fair in practice, yet oddly functional, is weakening.

And the result is that the world order is less stable and its institutions are accordingly less effective at conflict management. 

NOTES

1. Exactly what “control” of territory means at any time in a war can be quite uncertain, which leads to differences between estimates. Another common estimate for Russian territorial “control” at the end of 2022 was 16.5 per cent. Whether 16.5 or 18, the percentage has not changed more than a few decimal points at most despite the Ukrainian counter-offensive in 2023 and the Russian counter-counter this year.
2. Most of the casualty estimates are given as a total of both killed and injured. In mid-2023, a US estimate suggested 120,000 Russian combat deaths and 180,000 wounded, in the then estimated total of 300,000. On that basis, the June 2024 total of 500,000 would include about 200,000 deaths.
3. The official Russian estimate of Ukrainian military casualties, which is not generally given much credence, was put by former Defence Minister Shogun at 444,000 in February of this year.
4. Yu, Z. and Qi, N., ‘Antagonistic historical and cultural factors in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine’, China Institute for International Strategic Studies, vol. 4 (Dec. 2023).
5. Kennedy, P., The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Vintage, 1987).
6. Quote: ‘The events in Ukraine are a direct result of global and European developments from the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries. They stem from the aggressive, unrestrained, and utterly reckless policy that the West has been pursuing for many years, long before the special military operation began.’