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Abstract: While the Russian decision to annex Crimea has been widely explored and debated, scholarship has largely overlooked the Ukrainian response. Why did the Ukrainian side refrain from escalating? I address this gap, leveraging recently declassified primary-source materials from Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council to provide an original explanation for the Ukrainian decision not to fight for the peninsula. I find evidence in favor of realist explanations, while domestic politics was largely absent in decision-makers’ discussions. Additionally, I find prospect theory to offer a compelling account for the Ukrainian decision. This article therefore explains why decision-makers were risk-averse despite the loss of Ukrainian territory.
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2022 "Do Authoritarians Need a Foreign Enemy? Evidence from Fortress Russia,” with Henry Hale (under review)
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Abstract: It is commonly believed authoritarian leaders benefit from having a foreign enemy. Russia’s Vladimir Putin is a prototypical case, supposedly bolstering his legitimacy by continually stoking hostilities with the West. Surprisingly, these claims remain almost completely untested. We address this lacuna comprehensively through Russia using longitudinal and cross-sectional public opinion data, a survey-embedded experiment, examination of Putin’s discourse over time, and qualitative analysis of landmark episodes. The results revise conventional wisdom. There is no causal connection between Putin’s support and hostility to the West. While he sometimes gains when he inflames a sense of Western threat, rewards come from being seen as supporting cooperative rather than aggressive responses. Moreover, he gains as much from anti-confrontation messages as from inflammatory ones. Autocrats, we thus find, can bring in new supporters through statecraft, but political gains come more from tapping into their fundamental appeal as sources of stability than from channeling hostilities.
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This book chapter argues that whilst scholars make implicit claims about the level of state autonomy for Abkhazia and South Ossetia (two de facto states in the South Caucasus legally recognized by most countries as part of Georgia) there has been less attention paid to the narrative frameworks employed by these political entities themselves. Engaging in an interpretive analysis of over 500 texts published by both the Abkhaz and South Ossetian official news agencies. I find that the narrative frameworks employed by these states and state bodies differ substantially, despite sharing almost identical conditions in the international system and their relations with third parties. Whilst Abkhazian narratives focus much more explicitly on autonomous state-building and development, South Ossetian narratives appear to display far greater trauma from previous decades of conflict, including a heightened tendency to decry
Georgian actions. I posit that the source of these differences is endogenous, and as such, that approaches which focus upon the role of the patron in the external relations of de facto states ought to recognize the possible domestic sources of external dependency. Book reviews can be found in Europe-Asia Studies and Caucasus Survey |