Why did the Minsk-1 and the Minsk-2 agreements fail? Ukraine’s Unnamed War: Before the Russian Invasion of 2022 (Cambridge University Press) suggests that a domestic negotiation failure within Ukraine is at the heart of the better-understood diplomatic failure. At the diplomatic level, what stalled implementation for eight years were matters of ordering and sequencing – classic hallmarks of intertemporal commitment problems. The book presents an alternative account, based on a model of domestic Ukrainian interest group politics. Two actors bargain over a basket of zero-sum issues and Russia threatens to send its military to intervene if bargaining breaks down. In Ukraine these zero-sum issues have traditionally been the status of languages and school instruction, the teaching and commemoration of history, trade policy, and geopolitical alignment. The model can explain why, since 2014, no governing coalition in Kyïv could credibly commit to “trading bullets for ballots” in Donbas territories it no longer controlled (DNR/LNR). The talk will conclude with a few speculative observations about prospects for conflict resolution.
Dr. Dominique Arel holds the Chair of Ukrainian Studies in political science at the University of Ottawa, Canada. He has written extensively on language and regional politics in Ukraine. He has organized since 2005 the Annual Danyliw Research Seminar on Contemporary Ukraine at University of Ottawa, and has served since 1998 as Director of the Annual World Convention of the Association for the Study of Nationalities (ASN), at Columbia University.
Dr. Jesse Driscoll is Associate Professor of Political Science and the Faculty Chair of the Global Leadership Institute at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California San Diego. He is the author of Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States (Cambridge, 2015) and Doing Global Fieldwork (Columbia, 2021).
Moderator:
Dr. Henry Hale is a Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, Director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies, and Director of the Petrach Program on Ukraine. He is author (with Olga Onuch) of The Zelensky Effect (Hurst/Oxford, 2022) and is currently working on public opinion dynamics in Ukraine and Russia. His work has won two prizes from the American Political Science Association.