In this article, I shall demonstrate that several of the arguments made in favour of an offensive realist explanation of Russian actions in Ukraine as part of a power balancing process are inconsistent both with available empirical knowledge of the conflict in Ukraine and with the structural logic postulated by offensive realist theory itself. Rather than a conflict about power in a material sense, I will argue that the war in Ukraine is better understood as a conflict about the incompatibility of the Russian state structure to cope with the imperatives of functional differentiation as understood by theories of world society.
CITATION STYLE
Kleinschmidt, J. (2019). Offensive realism, differentiation theory, and the war in Ukraine. International Politics, 56(4), 427–443. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-018-0150-4
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