Why do elites in authoritarian regimes choose to pursue democratic transitions? In a CDDRL research seminar series talk, James Fearon, Professor of Political Science and Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI), offers a theory to explain the methods and motivations behind elite-led democratization. Fearon probes how authoritarian elites safeguard their power through autocratic constitutions, focusing on Myanmar, one of the longest-lived military regimes in the post-WWII era.

The Tatmadaw — Myanmar’s armed forces — held exclusive power after General Ne Win took control in a 1962 coup d’état until the early 2010s when they pursued a power-sharing arrangement with a civilian opposition. In 2008, the military junta that ruled from 1988 to 2011 ratified a new constitution they had drafted in a dubious referendum. While the 2008 Constitution appeared to take steps toward democracy, it featured serious limitations. It handed the military full control over several key ministries, secured “rent” streams for the officers, and reserved a quarter of parliamentary seats for military-appointed representatives. It further required that any changes to the constitution be passed by 75% of the legislature, thus giving them an effective veto.

In the November 2015 General Election, the opposition scored an overwhelming victory. The National League for Democracy Party (NLD) won close to three-fourths of the seats, giving them a large parliamentary majority and a strong ability to pass laws even if they were formally constrained on changing the constitution. The trajectory of these events raises the question, why did the military choose to pursue a democratic transition? Relatedly, why did military leaders believe that the 2008 Constitution would sufficiently protect them? Fearon observes that one of the NLD’s first actions was to create a new head-of-state position outside the constitution for Aung San Suu Kyi, the NLD’s leader.

Fearon argues that the military was protected not by the formal constitution, which is just a piece of paper, but rather by maintaining direct control of important streams of income and policy influence in the form of staffing of the bureaucracy and control of natural resource and drug incomes in militarily contested parts of the country. Control of these “rent streams” meant that the new NLD government could not shift them away from the military simply passing laws in parliament — even though the NLD did have considerable control and influence on many other dimensions of policy. In effect, this was a power (and rent) sharing division of the state.

Authoritarian rulers face international and domestic pressures, such as economic and political sanctions and costly revolutionary threats. Continued authoritarian rule would preserve elites’ control of the country’s existing resources. Movement toward democratization, on the other hand, generates both opportunities and costs. It comes with the promise of lifting international sanctions and increasing the flow of foreign aid, thus increasing the total economic “pie” available. However, the military could only take full advantage of that economic opening if they maintained a significant degree of economic and political control that the newly elected government could not revise without provoking a costly conflict (such as a coup attempt to reverse democratization). More general, Fearon argues that autocratic elites will be more inclined to try democratization when they can share rent streams and their military ability to retake power if this is challenged does not decline too rapidly after the transition.

Elite-led democratic transitions hold unique implications. On the one hand, top-down transitions are more efficient than bottom-up democratic revolutions because they reduce the costs and risks of violence. On the other hand, transitions led by undemocratic leaders are likely to result in only partial democratization because they tend to perpetuate preexisting power dynamics by reinforcing the influence of ruling elites and maintaining their access to rents.

Fearon proposes that as newly democratized societies begin to institutionalize, the relative power of the old elites may gradually diminish, leading to “endogenous consolidation.” Yet, if the military sees its power fading faster than expected, it may — as in the aftermath of Myanmar’s 2020 elections — intervene militarily to restore the status quo ante.

In a weekly research seminar, CDDRL's Einstein-Moos Postdoctoral Fellow Julieta Casas explored the varied paths of civil service reform in the Americas during the 19th and early 20th centuries. Her research emphasized the significant impact of patronage systems, particularly the practices surrounding employee dismissals, on the success or failure of these reform efforts.

Patronage systems were frameworks in which government jobs and resources were allocated based on loyalty to political leaders rather than solely merit or qualifications. Although many countries in the Americas operated under such systems during this historical period, the mode of bureaucratic management differed greatly across contexts. The United States and Argentina had similar patronage systems after independence but diverged after the rise of mass politics. That divergence helps us understand why the United States successfully moved to a merit-based civil service system while Argentina encountered significant difficulties in making similar changes.

Casas argued that the practices related to employee dismissals were pivotal in influencing the momentum of reform movements. In the United States, public servants were often dismissed following elections, leading to a significant number of fired employees and job seekers who self-selected out of applying to jobs in the public administration due to the uncertainty of tenure. This created widespread dissatisfaction among civil servants, which political entrepreneurs leveraged to push for civil service reform as a way to improve government efficiency.

In contrast, Argentina's patronage system provided considerable job security to public employees, even during political transitions. As a result, Argentine civil servants experienced fewer grievances and were less motivated to push for systemic change. Rather than advocating for a comprehensive overhaul of the bureaucracy, they primarily focused on labor rights, seeking improvements in wages and working conditions. The absence of a constituency autonomous to the state in favor of reform hindered civil service reform efforts in Argentina, making it challenging to garner the necessary political support.

In building this case, Casas employed diverse methods, utilizing original archival evidence from both the United States and Argentina. She analyzed a variety of archival sources, including civil service reform bills, bureaucratic censuses, government documents, reports from public employee associations, and contemporary accounts, to trace the evolution of bureaucratic and political dynamics, with particular attention to employee turnover before and after the rise of mass politics. Additionally, her quantitative analysis of firing rates and employment trends within the civil service offered a comprehensive understanding of how different patronage systems evolved.

Casas’ research underscored how firing practices within patronage systems significantly shaped divergent trajectories of bureaucratic development across the Americas. The frequent dismissals in the United States created an environment that propelled reform movements forward, while the stable employment conditions in Argentina dampened the drive for professionalization. Her findings provided valuable insights into the complexities of bureaucratic reform, highlighting the critical role of personnel management in determining the success or failure of efforts to professionalize government institutions.

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 does the history and culture of the American West affect its capacity to address Climate Change? In a CDDRL seminar talk, Bruce Cain addressed the question by drawing on findings from his latest book, Under Fire and Under Water: Wildfire, Flooding, and the Fight for Climate Resilience in the American West (University of Oklahoma Press, 2023). Cain — director of the Bill Lane Center for the American West, Professor of Political Science at Stanford University, and CDDRL faculty affiliate — argued that the federalist nature of the U.S., along with regional history and idiosyncratic human behavior, have made resolving collective action problems uniquely difficult.

Cain opened his talk with a reflection on American federalism. He indicated that the U.S. strongly federalist political system aims to delegate the provisions of specific public goods across its national, state, and local jurisdictions. However, the worsening issue of climate change — and its negative externalities — transcends these jurisdictional borders, thereby creating a coordination challenge. There is fracture at both the vertical level — between federal, state, and local governments — and the horizontal level, across branches of government and between states and localities themselves. Polarization, geographic sorting, and rising inequality have exacerbated the problem.

Adequately addressing climate change requires extensive coordination and planning, which is not often the strength of a highly diverse democracy. Furthermore, the public, even when it is not polarized along party lines, may hesitate to take sufficient steps to protect climate progress because people may not want to pay now for future benefits.

This national framework serves as the backdrop for the West’s regional history. The initial move to the West required incentives, as people were uneasy traveling into a land seen as untamed and wild. This created an appropriative culture, as settlers had to be motivated to undertake the risks of living and working in the American West. After World War II, the private nature of this land began to get in the way of the maturing environmental movement.

The Western climate is arid, a characteristic that will be further exemplified by the changing climate. As such, in California, we face two “water problems.” First a “too little” water problem — droughts. But we also face a “too much” water problem — sea level rise and flooding. The “too little” water problem leads to extensive wildfires — the smoke from which has serious health effects. While fires are one of the most visible and concerning effects of climate change, their bearing on electoral outcomes is marginal, as only a small number of people lose their homes in a given year.

In many places where homes have been destroyed, they tend to be promptly rebuilt. Unfortunately, this is not the only case of building in disaster-prone areas. Infrastructure continues to be built in flood zones on the coast, and neighborhoods routinely decimated by fires are erected time and time again. But this issue is confronted with a competing priority, namely the lack of housing in the state, making policy decisions all the more complicated.

Governmental fractioning and perverse incentives make the coordination necessary to address these issues even more difficult.

So what does all of this mean going forward? Cain believes the federalist nature of this country may mean a lower ceiling on progress but a higher floor in the long run. Our progress will be slower but more resilient to party shifts in the executive. He also predicts that U.S. decarbonization efforts will vary more by income and lag behind other OECD countries. Finally, in the absence of coordination, the U.S. strength will remain in providing innovation and pushing for the early adoption of first-mover policies.

A copy of Cain's presentation slides can be viewed here.

How can we encourage citizens to comply with desired civic behaviors? In a CDDRL seminar series talk, Salma Mousa, assistant professor of Political Science at UCLA and former CDDRL postdoctoral fellow, explored this broader question via a field experiment in Lebanon. In conjunction with a municipality and local NGO, Mousa and her team evaluated the effectiveness of a waste sorting intervention.

In 2015, some of Lebanon’s primary landfills reached capacity, forcing displaced waste into the streets and prompting public outcry. Lebanon's crisis is not for lack of money; the country spends ten times more than nearby Tunisia despite having only half the population of Tunisia. This suggests that Lebanon’s issue reflects mismanagement rather than a lack of resources.

A key component of this mismanagement is a lack of sorting at the source of waste. Effective sorting, Mousa argues, requires collaboration between citizens, civil society, and government. Overcoming this collective action problem does not just require physical infrastructure and intrinsic motivation; it also requires that people trust that their neighbors and government will do their part.

To test their sorting intervention, Mousa and her collaborators chose the small, wealthy, and predominantly Christian town of Bikfaya. The town is characterized by high levels of social cohesion and a “green” reputation that is central to its identity.

Working with the municipality and an NGO called “Nadeera,” the team divided the town into neighborhoods, randomly assigning treatment and control. The treatment group received a box with QR codes they could put on their trash bags and an app where they could access feedback on their sorting. They were given instructions on proper waste management and told to sort their waste into recycling, organic materials and other — sticking their personal QR codes on each bag.

After pickup, inspectors at the nearby waste management facility would use the app to provide personalized feedback on sorting quality, giving participants the opportunity to improve.

This intervention makes trash sorting a sanctionable behavior, with social pressure to enforce it, because participation is visible to neighbors via the QR code stickers placed on their trash bags.

The team examined three distinct outcomes. First, the quality of sorting. Second, participation in a raffle for “green” prizes, designed to measure the impact of the intervention on other climate-friendly behaviors. Finally, they measured participation in volunteer opportunities for environmental initiatives.

Two months after the intervention, the program improved sorting quality by an average of 14 percent. That said, at the twelve-month mark, the effect was null. Eight months in, the program and app feedback ceased, making it difficult to distinguish between diminishing long-term effects and lack of sanctioning.

Treated participants entered the raffle at two times the rate of the control group, but the mechanisms behind this increase remain unclear. The rise in uptake could be attributed to behavioral change or familiarity with the NGO as a result of treatment.

On the volunteering measure, the treated group saw a 7% negative effect, meaning they were less likely to sign up for local environmental initiatives if assigned to treatment. Mousa and her collaborators theorize that this is due to moral licensing, or the feeling that they have already done their part.

While the effects of the primary outcome became null after a year, the treated group did see a substantial improvement in sorting quality — a big win for the town on environmental and economic measures. Future iterations of this intervention will include consistent monitoring or cash benefits to promote prolonged participation.

How does climate change shape citizens’ views of political leaders and institutions? At a CDDRL seminar series talk, Amanda Kennard, assistant professor of political science at Stanford University, and Brandon de la Cuesta, a postdoctoral fellow at CDDRL and the Center on Food Security and the Environment (FSE), explored the effects of climate shocks on political trust, employing innovative machine learning methods.

To illustrate the link between the environment and human social systems, Kennard began with an anecdote about street vendors in Liberia. She noted that research has found that the single largest factor influencing vendors’ decision to join the formal economy is precipitation. From crop cultivation to the uptake of government programs, climate sets the stage for all other systems.

The existing literature on the political effects of climate links extreme temperatures to civil conflict and flood events to anti-incumbent voting. However, it has yet to fully explore the effect of climate on state actors or state structures.

Kennard’s and de la Cuesta’s paper focuses on Sub-Saharan Africa, characterized by a diverse set of political, economic, and demographic circumstances.

The authors studied public confidence in heads of state, local leaders, opposition parties, the police, the courts, and the bureaucracy. In the face of the changing climate, the authors are seeking to understand how people perceive state performance, corruption, and democracy.

At the start of this research project, the presenters explained, the available data lacked the spatial and temporal resolution necessary for credible subnational analysis. Accordingly, Kennard, de la Cuesta, and their team worked to create a machine learning algorithm that could harmonize survey questions across survey rounds and countries. These geolocated surveys were then paired with remote sensing data to create a complete picture of the association between climate change and public opinion in a given place and time.

Kennard and de la Cuesta used the data to study the effects of environmental shocks on relevant economic, social, and political outcomes. In terms of economic and social well-being, the team found that temperature shocks led to meaningful increases in dependence on informal networks for borrowing and remittances and to a decrease in interpersonal trust.

On the political side, they found that climate change is associated with statistically significant (albeit small) negative effects on public confidence in local bodies, the president, and the ruling party, along with some state institutions like the police and court system. While the effects of climate change on satisfaction with democracy were directionally consistent, they were, for the most part, not statistically significant.

Several countries in Africa have already seen devastating temperature changes of two degrees Celsius, with another two likely to come before 2050. This change is pushing many people out of the so-called human habitable zone, so the current effects on measures of economic, social, and political distress are only likely to increase going forward.

Kennard and de la Cuesta indicated that they hope to make the machine learning infrastructure they have developed scalable and open source, thereby allowing researchers to access specific geolocated survey responses. 

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.

Is Ukraine too corrupt to be a part of the European Union? In a recent Rethinking European Development and Security (REDS) seminar talk co-hosted by CDDRL and The Europe Center, Maria Popova, McGill University Associate Professor of Political Science, assessed how serious the issue of Ukrainian corruption really is. While some observers have claimed that Ukraine’s corruption renders it unprepared for EU accession, Popova’s research suggests otherwise. Contrasting Ukraine to recent EU entrants — Bulgaria, Romania, and Croatia — she finds that corruption indices are not very helpful in drawing reliable conclusions.

In all four said countries, corruption is touted as the most salient issue, with strikingly similar scandals occurring across them. Over the last ten years, Ukraine has developed an extensive anti-corruption infrastructure, forming institutions for the prevention, investigation, and prosecution of corruption cases, as well as for asset recovery. These institutions have produced mixed results, and issues of political competition between institutions have tainted their wider reputation, with the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption receiving the most positive feedback. Innovative e-procurement systems like ProZorro have been internationally praised. Ukraine is unique in that its anti-corruption infrastructure came well before attempting EU accession. 

Bulgaria, on the other hand, established its anti-corruption agencies ten years after becoming an EU member. These institutions have since become politically compromised; so much so that anti-corruption reformists recently forced their abolition. 

In Romania, institutions were created around the time of accession and have been successful in holding corrupt oligarchs accountable. Similarly, Croatia’s anti-corruption reforms proceeded during accession negotiations.

Although the four countries adopted similar anti-corruption institutional reforms, today Ukraine tracks as significantly more corrupt than the EU members across measures of regime, public sector, executive, and political corruption, even though it is cleaner than Romania was when it started accession negotiations, more corrupt than Bulgaria was, and equally corrupt as Croatia at its start of negotiations. Why? Popova argued that the indices are fundamentally non-comparative and thus need to be taken with a grain of salt. The score for each country is determined by experts that focus exclusively on that country, who consider variation in corruption over time only. Moreover, the abstract conceptual definition of corruption is applied to their narrow case knowledge and experience and thus reflects local, rather than generalizable conceptualization. 

While index scores correlate with local perceptions, this, too, may just reflect a narrative on the ground. If the local narrative is that the country is highly corrupt, the population will likely perceive it to be, with no sense of its real magnitude. 

When analyzing Ukraine’s anti-corruption institutions, Popova finds that Ukraine is better prepared for EU accession than is widely assumed.

What is authoritarian sharp power, and how has it shaped the current geopolitical landscape and the state of democracy around the globe? In a CDDRL research seminar series talk, Christopher Walker — Vice President for Studies and Analysis at the National Endowment for Democracy — and Will Dobson, the co-editor of the Journal of Democracy, discussed their new book Defending Democracy in an Age of Sharp Power (Johns Hopkins University Press 2023). The co-authors argue that dictators have moved beyond the suppression of their own citizens and are now actively attempting to erode the pillars of democratic societies. 

Conventional wisdom of the last 25 years suggests that the solution to our “authoritarian problem” is simple: the passage of time. Over time, scholars argued, authoritarian political systems would gradually and peacefully give way to democratic ones, with rising demands for political rights. Globalization would bind authoritarian elites to their Western counterparts via business, and the internet would expose citizens to new ways of thinking. 

However, the authoritarian regimes have not subsided. In fact, they have worked to undermine democratic institutions in other countries. Thus, Defending Democracy in an Age of Sharp Power serves as a rebuttal to these illusions, arguing that free societies can no longer afford this sort of complacency. 

Autocrats see democracies as an existential threat to their way of rule, both at home and abroad. Accordingly, they have begun reaching across borders to stymie democracy where it does not exist and undermine it where it does. 

How are they doing this? By attacking the facet of democratic society people believed was its principal strength, namely its openness. While autocrats are able to harden themselves and their societies from the free world, commitment to democracy fundamentally means a free exchange of ideas. This allows autocrats to target the minds of foreign publics by manipulating key institutions, such as universities, think tanks, media outlets, and entertainment companies. 

But it is not just autocrats’ outward-looking strategy that has permitted this infiltration; democracies themselves are complacent. Many powerful actors have been willing to cede their values and principles, sometimes for money or prestige, but sometimes just due to a lack of understanding and foresight. 

To prevent further influence, Walker and Dobson stress that democracies need to take both reactive and proactive measures. In response to the offense of autocracies, democracies must commit to prioritizing openness and transparency. They must, for example, prevent deals that extend China’s influence. Democracies must also work to correct knowledge asymmetries and think of innovative ways to get information about China and its role into the wider world. On the proactive front, democracies must defend their own values and the intrinsic benefit of a democratic system.

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.