This article probes the logic behind Russian President Vladimir Putin's nuclear saber-rattling associated with the war in Ukraine. The authors argue that contemporary debates typically misinterpret Putin's oblique coercive discourse by "mirror-imaging" Western-centric frameworks and focusing on consistency with external posture. Overlooked are insights from Russia's "reflexive control" that emphasizes opportunism, ambiguity, inconsistency, and indirect manipulation to shape adversary perceptions and decision-making. This claim is buttressed by leveraging large language models to discriminate trends in the frequency, intensity, and underlying logical elements to Putin's coercive public rhetoric. This reveals systematic "internal" consistency among patterns of "outwardly" incoherent discourse, as well as distinctions between rationales for Putin's red line and nuclear threat statements. The findings highlight a hybrid mix of elements of reflexive control with mainstream Western nuclear deterrence arguments. This holds implications for broadening theories of coercion and managing risks of inadvertent escalation in Russia's war on Ukraine and beyond.
The Western military strategy debate on the Ukraine War has focused on defeating Russian forces inside Ukraine militarily and the associated risk of Russian nuclear escalation. Too little attention has been given to the possibility of Ukraine achieving victory-by-coercion, a negotiated outcome carrying a lower risk of nuclear escalation than victory-by-defeat. This article fills this gap by outlining the conditions for victory-by-coercion and applying them to the Ukraine War. The analysis shows that the US-led coercive strategy employed against Russia failed to impose enough economic and military pain to create the urgency for compliance in Moscow that coercive victory requires. It also finds that coercion must be paired with credible assurances that punitive measures will cease if demands are met, and that the unwillingness to offer Russia positive incentives to withdraw decreased the likelihood of a negotiated solution.
Despite more than a decade of deliberation, efforts to develop a shared norm for autonomous weapon systems (AWS) within the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) have stalled. This article argues that this stagnation is an actively produced political outcome shaped by proactive contestation during norm emergence. Extending an existing model of norm emergence phases and building on contestation theories, it names and operationalizes norm stagnation as a distinct stage-III outcome of agenda diffusion, in which issue creation succeeds but candidate-norm consolidation fails. It situates this contestation as a discursive and procedural struggle within a formal multilateral forum, complementing accounts that locate early norm change in operational practice outside it. Drawing on consensus documents, working papers, and state statements, the article presents a qualitative case study of CCW deliberations on AWS. It thereby contributes to a broader understanding of how contestation shapes the early stages of norm development.
