A warming planet. Backsliding in democracy at home and abroad. Competition with China. And active war in Europe. Broadening conflicts in the Middle East.

The world today is facing no shortage of overlapping, multilateral challenges. At a recent panel titled, “Global Threats Today: What's At Stake and What We Can Do About It,” scholars from the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) had an opportunity to delve deeper into what the data says about how these global threats are evolving, and how we should be thinking about how to address them.

The discussion, which was held as part of Stanford University's 2024 Reunion and Homecoming weekend, was moderated by Michael McFaul, director of the Freeman Spogli Institute, and featured Marshall Burke, Didi Kuo, Amichai Magen, Oriana Skylar Mastro, and Steven Pifer.

In the highlights below, each scholar shares what they wish people understood better about climate change, the war in Ukraine and Russia's aggression, China's strategy for building power, the health of American democracy, and how the fighting between Israel and Hamas fits into the geopolitical struggle between democracies and autocracies.

Their full conversation can be heard on the World Class podcast, and the panel can be watched in its entirety on YouTube.
 

Political scientist Kathryn Stoner is the Director of the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford and an authority on Russian/Ukrainian politics.

She says views on the current war depend on which side someone is on: Many Russians and their leader Vladimir Putin say Ukrainians are Russians and have been since the 10th century. Ukrainians strongly disagree, likening the two nations to the U.S. and Great Britain. How the present conflict is resolved has important implications for other former Soviet states and the future of the European Union, as Stoner tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast.

Full transcript available from Stanford Engineering.

Many of us go to law school interested in public policy as well as in law, but it is a rare opportunity when students get to do legal research, write a policy report—and present that report to decision-makers in Washington, D.C. For those of us enrolled in Policy Practicum: Regulating Legal Enablers of Russia’s War on Ukraine, our experience went beyond learning theory and skills. The research class provided a platform to support the fight for justice globally and to reiterate the importance of lawyers in safeguarding democracy. And for one of us, it was also the opportunity to aid his own country, Ukraine, and its people in an existential war and to ensure that the voices of people from afar are heard and considered.

As Russia’s illegal war in Ukraine dragged into its third year, we were part of a group of Stanford Law School students researching how U.S.-based policy solutions could contribute to Ukraine’s war effort. In the policy lab, Professor Erik Jensen led students through two quarters of work to develop a policy report on the problem of legal professionals helping to evade sanctions (lawyer-enablers) in the context of the war in Ukraine. The policy lab’s client was the International Working Group on Russian Sanctions at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, led by Professor Michael McFaul, former U.S. ambassador to Russia.

Read the full article in Stanford Lawyer.

In a CDDRL seminar series talk, Michael C. Kimmage, a professor of history at the Catholic University of America, discussed his recently published book, Collisions: The War in Ukraine and the Origins of the New Global Instability (Oxford University Press, 2024). The book argues that the war in Ukraine is not a singular conflict; it has three separate axes, making it a series of collisions, not a singular one.

The first axis of conflict is self-evident: Russia and Ukraine. The armies of these two countries are waging a war of attrition over ideas of nationhood.

The second axis, Kimmage explained, pertains to Russia and Europe. The European Union's 2009 Eastern Partnerships Program was meant to be a bureaucratic and procedural move. However, it effectively forced Ukrainian leadership to choose between Russia and Europe. In 2013, then-president Victor Yanukovych bowed to pressure from Moscow, choosing Russia and sparking the largest demonstrations since the Orange Revolution. This situated Europe as a key player in the conflict.

The third axis encompasses Russia and the US. While the US was not as involved in the conflict in 2013, by 2020, they were a key actor. Based on military spending and risks taken, the war in Ukraine appears to be an important agenda item for the Joe Biden administration. They see it as a precedent-setting conflict — both for European security architecture and the international order at large. It remains unclear how much the US general population still cares about the conflict, but interest remains high at the governmental level.

Russia, too, is invested in this axis. Their rhetoric suggests that there are two shell enemies and one real enemy in this war. Ukraine, they argue, is not a proper nation, and Europe is not a firepower to be taken seriously. The US, on the other hand, is presented in this vision as the mastermind behind these shell actors — that is, the enemy that matters.

The nuclear capabilities of these two nations supercharge this war, and having a transatlantic opponent globalizes it. What may be construed as regional or local conflict has firmly gone global. 

These three points of tension do not have the same origin, carry the same internal dynamics, and will not resolve themselves in the same way — making the war as complicated as it is.

The book draws four conclusions, which Kimmage reflected on and evaluated. The first is that the break between Russia and the West is profound and will be long-lasting. Putin has strategically created as autonomous a Russia as possible, cutting it off from the West. The Russian elite and society have been made complicit in the war, a barrier to normalizing future relations with the West.

He also argues that Ukraine will make its way into Europe. Sentiment, Kimmage believes, suggests Ukraine has already joined, while the humanitarian suffering has expedited the process. Institutional ties are also strengthening with growing intelligence sharing between Ukraine, Europe, and the U.S., as well as bilateral security agreements with countries like the UK and France.

This war, Kimmage believes, has also cast a shadow over peaceful Europe. There is now a major war in Europe, and the European project cannot be divorced from this fact. Finally, US engagement marks a turning point, a shift into a more active role in European politics both militarily and diplomatically. This engagement, however, could change with shifts in priorities in Washington.

How have pre-communist social structures persisted in Russia, and why does this persistence matter for understanding post-communist political regime trajectories? In a CDDRL seminar series talk, Tomila Lankina, Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science, discussed her award-winning book, The Estate Origins of Democracy in Russia: From Imperial Bourgeoisie to Post-Communist Middle Class (Cambridge University Press, 2022). The book challenges the assumption that the 1917 revolution succeeded in leveling old estate hierarchies, arguing that these social structures persist today. 

While analyses of the bourgeoisie factor heavily into the understanding of many societies, the relevance of this group is frequently left out when discussing countries like Russia and China, on the assumption that they had been completely leveled by revolutionary ruptures. Lankina’s book critically assesses this assumption. It adopts a uniquely interdisciplinary approach, utilizing archives, subnational comparisons, statistical analysis, social network analysis, and interviews with descendants. 

In characterizing the social structure of pre-communist Russia, Lankina noted that peasants comprised 77 percent of the population on the eve of the revolution. Other social groups, which she refers to as “educated estates” because of their higher literacy rates compared to those of peasants, included the urban meshchane, the merchants, nobility, and clergy. Out of the educated estates, meshchane constituted the majority, or 10 percent of the population. While their homes appeared rather modest, members of the meshchane exhibited characteristics of the urban bourgeoisie, and even their dress differed from that of the rural estate. They enjoyed much higher literacy rates than peasants.

Lankina explained that the comparatively high status of these “educated estates” — the meshchane, merchants, nobility, and clergy — persisted even after the Bolshevik revolution. To illustrate this, she highlighted partially intact social circles of the highly networked merchants, nobles, and tsarist-inspired soviet schools. Letters from the Samara province indicate that while many high-status citizens emigrated, there were matriarchs who stayed, spreading the tsarist-era values to their children and grandchildren after the revolution. Regardless of whether this middle class was endowed with democratic values, Lankina maintained that they passed human and entrepreneurial capital onto their offspring.

How did these estates endure? While the literature clearly articulates what happened to the ruling classes following the revolution, less time has been spent understanding what happened to the educated, middle-class segments of society. How did they adapt? 

Lankina proposed three different routes. First is the “pop-up brigade,” wherein young, educated individuals traveled around promoting education to peasant workers, instantly employable and absorbable into a new society. Then there is the “museum society,” where prominent nobles and merchants joined insular cultural institutions like archives, provincial libraries, and museums. Finally, “the organization man” denotes professionally skilled individuals, such as medics, who retained their positions following the revolution as the social hierarchy got absorbed into newer organizations. 

To illustrate the significance of this persistence in social structures and values, Lankina, drawing on her co-authored paper with Alexander Libman (APSR 2021), indicated that meshchane concentration (as opposed to more recent educational indices) is a better predictor of a post-communist region’s openness, at least in the 1990s.

What has driven Russia’s violence in and against Ukraine from the 19th century to the contemporary era? In a recent Rethinking European Development and Security (REDS) Seminar talk co-hosted by The Europe Center and CDDRL, Eugene Finkel, the Kenneth H. Keller Associate Professor of International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, argued that Russia’s recurrent attacks against Ukraine can be traced to issues of identity and security. Finkel draws on what he described as a two-hundred-year-long quest by Russia to dominate Ukraine, as detailed in his upcoming book Intent to Destroy (due for release in November 2024 by Basic Books).

Reflecting on the role of Russian identity in driving the country’s attempts to capture Ukraine, Finkel pointed out that many Russians think of Ukrainians as a subbranch of the Russian people.  These stark views on identity, he noted, are partly the product of the struggle between the Russian Empire and the Polish Independence movement. In an effort to avoid Polish influence, Russia began emphasizing unity between the Russian and Ukrainian people.

Security is another key driver of Russia’s aggression. There are large geographical features that block off Ukraine from the rest of Europe, but no such dividing features exist between Ukraine and Russia. As such, any force that enters Ukraine can easily invade Russia. Historical repetition of this route has made Ukraine seemingly imperative to Russian national security.

Regime security also plays an important role. Many of the democratic ideas reaching Russia were diffused through Ukraine. Abiding by the logic of Russians and Ukrainians as one people, if Ukraine can be democratic, so can Russia. Thus, an independent democratic Ukraine poses a serious ideological threat to the regime. 

Finkel argues that identity and security have always been the driving factors of Russia’s aggression. To illustrate this continuity of this trend, he draws upon a case study from the early 20th century, namely the Russian occupation of Galicia and Bukovyna. As rising Ukrainian activism threatened the Russian empire, the regime responded with propaganda peddling the notion that Ukraine had been created to destroy Russia from within – a stark parallel to propaganda today. Russia also waged a war to “liberate” the Ukrainians, believing that annexing Galicia would allow Russia to reestablish its rightful boundaries.

The conflict resulted in violence and plunder against civilians, targeting of Ukrainian community leaders, banning Ukrainian publications, and switching the education system – actions closely mimicking those of Russia today. 

In 2022, Russia’s “divide and repress” strategy failed. Ukraine witnessed the emergence of a nation – Ukrainian identity became more pronounced. Russia’s initial plan was to repress Ukraine’s elites, not conduct mass executions. But as the war progressed and Ukrainians turned from brother to traitor, the violence escalated. 

This obsession begs the question – when will Russia’s quest to dominate Ukraine end? Or rather, how? Given the central role of identity in driving this quest, Finkel believes that the only realistic path for ending this longstanding trend is changing the education system – a path that Russia seems to be moving further away from.