Patrimonial Imperialism
A Taxonomy of the Causes of the Russo‐Ukrainian War
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6431995 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Gabriel A Pierzynski (0009-0005-4900-930X, London School of Economics and Political Science London UK), Jonathan Joseph (0000-0002-4578-211X, University of Bristol Bristol UK, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 55 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Publication date | 2025-07-19 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0021-8308 • E-ISSN: 1468-5914 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/jtsb.70007 |
| OpenAlex | W4412874136 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 35 |
Explanations of the causes of the Russo‐Ukrainian war tend to drift towards one of two lines of argument. These are the ‘NATO expansion’ argument, chiefly focusing on the structure of the international system and the possibility of the acceptance of Ukraine into NATO, and the ‘Putin's war’ argument, which attempts to place the bulk of blame for the war on the actions and agency of Putin himself. Both arguments might better be considered as focused on processes rather than structures, and this leads to explanations operating at the level of actual manifestation of causes rather than real and underlying structures. Critical realism cannot tell us what structures are the right ones to study, but a plausible explanation might lie in the notion of the patrimonial imperialism of Russian state–society relations. To address the issue of an alternative to these arguments, one overly structural and the other overly agential, this article proposes a framework referred to as patrimonial imperialism. It will attempt to show how an imperialist state structure can come to perpetuate and ingrain itself and thereby induce actors to behave in certain ways consistent with the state structure. The above framework will be integrated into a model of stratified reality and will situate the constituent arguments surrounding the causes of the war into an ontological framework that will allow greater clarity and coherence of thought when attempting to grapple with the causes of the Russo‐Ukrainian war
Linguistics · Political science · Sociology · Taxonomy (biology · Ukrainian · European and Russian Geopolitical Military Strategies · International Relations and Foreign Policy · Philosophy · Soviet and Russian History
Culture and Agency
State Sovereignty as Social Construct
Agents, Structures and International Relations
Causation in International Relations
Scientific Realism and International Relations
Making Sense, Making Worlds
The Possibility of Naturalism
Nationalism, Ethnic Pressures, and the Breakup of the Soviet Union
Imperialism, supremacy, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine
Russia’s War Against Ukraine
Nationalism, identity and civil society in Ukraine
Critical Realism and Causal Analysis in International Relations
The Two Faces of Contemporary Eurasianism
Post-Communist Nationalism as A Power Resource
The Soviet people
Russian, Imperial and Soviet Identities
Explaining the Irrationality of War
The Russian Empire and the Soviet Union as Imperial Polities
Explaining and understanding international relations
The Faces of Contemporary Russian Nationalism
Emergence and the Realist Account of Cause
Nationalism and Foreign Policy in Ukraine
Nationalism in Ukraine
Philosophy of Social Science
Theory of international politics
The War in Ukraine
After Postpositivism? The Promises of Critical Realism
The agent-structure problem in international relations theory
Why is There No International Historical Sociology
"Russian World" Concept
Violence, Peace, and Peace Research
Offensive ideas
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2 |
| Citation span | 2025 - 2026 (2) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |