The strategic imperative for a resolution of the Russia-Ukraine War requires that we combine the military and diplomatic instruments of power to accomplish first a cease fire and then a lasting peace. This article traces the development of peace negotiations prior to the outbreak of the war and offers possible lessons that could inform policymakers today. The main argument is that negotiations prior to the invasion were primarily at a standstill because of the way in which the parties interpreted the conflict and how each saw possible ways of conflict resolution.

This article seeks to understand Russia's influence and foreign policy in the Indo-Pacific region and argues that Russia has been slowly reestablishing its presence in various ways and predicts that it will continue to do so despite limited resources and its lackluster performance in Ukraine. The pivot to Asia for Russia is more important in the wake of the war against Ukraine, and it must be seen in the context of Russia's interest in confronting US power amid a crisis of the liberal international order. Russian foreign policy has not factored much into the deliberations of US strategists when they considered the Indo-Pacific region recently. US policymakers will need to pay more attention to Russia going forward because the Ukraine war is bringing Russia and China closer together. Given Russia's increasing reliance on China to help circumvent the impact of sanctions against Russia and to help counter its isolation from the West, the two powers are likely to collaborate further in the future. China's reliance on Russia as its junior partner in the region benefits both in countering US influence.

This book explores the differing treatment of Russian minorities in the non-Russian republics which seceded from the Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Providing detailed case studies, it explains why intervention by Russia occurred in the case of Ukraine, despite Ukraine's benevolent and inclusive treatment of the large Russian minority, whereas in other republics with less benevolent approaches to minorities intervention did not occur, for example Kazakhstan, where discrimination against the Russian minority increased over time, and Latvia, where the country on its accession to the European Union was deemed to have good minority rights protection, despite a record of discrimination against the Russian minority. Throughout the book emphasises the importance of the perceptions of the republic government regarding the interaction between the minority's kin-state and the minority, the role that minorities played within the nation-building process and after secession, and the dual threat coming from both the domestic and international spheres.

What explains receptivity of citizens in the post-communist world to Russian influence? This paper explores popular attitudes in Central and Eastern Europe about Russia's role in the world and seeks to find answers to the question: does ideology or economic factors most influence support for Russia in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe? We use survey data from the Pew Research Center (2017) to assess the drivers for popular support of Russia. We find that the primary driver of individual-level support of Russia is political attitudes associated with the Far Right, but that this relationship also varies by country.

Many new states have formed in the international system as a result of secession. However, such states are rarely entirely homogenous and nationalist elites face the challenge of creating a brand new state while ensuring minority rights and avoiding future conflict. Why do some secessionist states protect minority rights and create inclusive political institutions while others marginalize or discriminate against minorities? In this paper, the author examines patterns of marginalization after secession and provides an overarching theory of inclusion in all secessionist cases and all ethnic groups that reside in newly established countries.

The building blocks of the international system are, for the most part, sovereign states with full recognition by the international community. Yet, when we ask ourselves precisely how many states there are in the world, the answer is not that simple. Do we consider quasi-states and unrecognized states as states that are part of the international system or do we look at them merely as “black holes” that are war-torn and completely incapable of controlling their territory and population? If this would be the case then how come some unrecognized states, such as Taiwan and Northern Cyprus, for example, have been able to function as democracies with a higher standard of living for many years? Nina Caspersen, in Unrecognized States: The Struggle for Sovereignty in the Modern International System, investigates the question of whether unrecognized states are indeed considered states and that the only thing they lack is de jure recognition or are they something different. She assesses the connection between internal and external sovereignty and whether it is possible to survive in the international system if a state does not possess external sovereignty. The topic of recognition has not been given much attention in political science literature, even though the issue has far-reaching implications for conflict resolution and democracy. With well-written style, Caspersen uncovers a lot of this gray area and recommends ways to deal with problems in unrecognized states.

In this article we investigate how parties ‘close out the electoral market’ by monopolizing the channels of upward mobility for aspiring politicians (by reducing the number of independents). We analyse data from (1228) single-member constituency elections from three sub-Saharan African countries (Ghana, Malawi and Zambia) and six national legislative elections. We find that level of incumbent governing party support is the strongest predictor in explaining the likelihood that independent candidates would run for office at the constituency level across all three cases'

New states are often born in a volatile environment, in which the survival of the new country is uncertain. While analysis of the nationalizing new governments exists, research focuses mainly on domestic politics. I argue that the treatment of minority that remains in the new states is a function of the interaction of the dual threat posed by the minority itself domestically on one hand and the international threat coming from the mother state to protect its kin abroad on the other hand. Specifically, I argue that there is a curvilinear relationship between domestic and international threat and the extent of discrimination against the politically relevant minority. Most discrimination takes place when domestic and international threats are moderate because in this case there is a balance of power between the government, the minority, and the rump state. With time-series-cross-sectional (TSCS) data analysis this dissertation systematically tests the treatment of Russian and Serbian minorities in all post-Soviet and post-Yugoslav states between 1991 and 2006 and finds statistically significant results for the curvilinear hypothesis. Territorial concentration of the minority and the ratio of national capabilities between the mother and the seceded states prove to be especially important predictors of minority treatment. In addition, with most similar systems (MSS), most different systems (MDS) design methods, and directed case studies I apply the curvilinear hypothesis to the Russian minority in the Baltic States and the Central Asian Republics, and also to the Serb minority in the countries of the former Yugoslavia to present a detailed analysis.

In this paper, we address the question of why in some de facto states something like “dominant party” politics has emerged, whereas in others there at least appears some form of real political competition. We empirically assess some of the commonly cited factors that affect the character of politics within de facto states (the wealth of the entity, the militarization of society, the level of ethnic homogeneity, and political institutional features). Using Fuzzy-Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), a method developed specifically to deal with the “small N problem” in empirical inquiry, we apply this framework to 13 post-secessionist unrecognized states.

How do the organizational features of rebel groups participating in civil wars affect the likelihood of the resumption of conflict after a civil war has ended? As many scholars have noted, peace duration is a function of the extent to which rebel groups stick to the deal. However, occasionally a rebel group fractures, and the conflict resumes as a result. Using a combination of existing data on civil conflicts and characteristics of the settlement agreement, along with original data on the characteristics of the insurgent organizations implementing the agreement, we test the effect of the organizational features of the rebel group on the duration of the peace settlements that occurred after the end of the cold war until 2009.

How do the features of a rebel group and the external political environment interact to affect the internal dynamics within a rebel group after it transforms into a political party? In this paper we combine literature on organizational change in parties in new democracies with the emerging literature on rebel group-to-party transformation, to develop a framework by which to understand these dynamics. Using the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) as a case study, we find that the legacies of the conflict, the organizational legacies of the rebel group, and the post civil war incentives for electoral gain, create political cleavages within parties that generate considerable organizational centripetal pressures, pressures that will need to be accommodated in new party organizational structures.