use of force

As I reflect on the reasons for my own incredulity about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in the weeks and months before it was launched, I often come back to the public rhetoric and practices that Ukraine’s leadership was pursuing at the time, in early 2022. Surely enough, I thought a full scale invasion did not make much sense. But my thinking was also based on the following line of reasoning:

Reflecting on major changes in the use of force in international relations, Holsti (2016) records the common understanding that inter-state wars have become less frequent in recent decades. “Aggression, a secretly planned, unprovoked war of choice, usually with a staged ‘incident’ or some ‘intolerable’ condition as a pretext, remains a relatively rare event in international life.” He also highlights how, in stark contrast to previous centuries, territorial conquest resulting from the use of force has effectively become obsolete and almost unseen after 1945.