Important, not impotent: Russia and the exercise of agency through the war in Ukraine

Abstract

Russia’s open military aggression against Ukraine is a matter of agentic misrecognition rather than of classic rationalist considerations. Through the war in Ukraine, Russia exercises neglected agency and tries to reverse the feeling of marginalisation, irrelevance and status degradation in world politics. Russia’s war in Ukraine allows the current Russian leadership to escape from the stigma of an impotent power and to stabilise its identity as an important one, independent of Western norms and rules. Looking at Russia’s revisionism from the perspective of agentic misrecognition has some advantages. First, it helps in filling gaps that conventional interpretations and explanations of the war, found prominently in both public and academic discourses, leave open. These are problematic because they are too entrenched in positivist thinking and construct the world along essentialist concepts. Second, it allows room to understand the war as the result of a contingent process. In this process, it is not only the agency expectations of Russia’s leadership that play an important role but also the relational dynamics between Russia and the West and their impact on the further transformation of Russian identity constructions and self-descriptions.