The war in Ukraine and the Dawn of Russian Revisionism: An English School Approach

Abstract

Since Russian president Vladimir Putin's 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference, followed by his country's invasion of neighbouring Georgia the ensuing year, Russia has been one of the most powerful and visible challengers of a West-centric conception of international order. This has led to assertions that Russia is a revisionist state. However, such assertions largely gloss over the “intermediate” stages that Russia has occupied between the two extremes of status quo and revisionist power throughout the post–Cold War era. They also reveal an understanding of international order that is mostly uniform. Employing an English School framework, this paper shows how Russia only became a fully revisionist state in the lead-up to its invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022. And using a theoretical model which outlines the impact of contestation on international society, it outlines the consequences of Russia's recent descent into revisionism for the so-called rules-based international order.