Patrimonial imperialism: a taxonomy of the causes of the Russo‐Ukrainian war

Pierzynski, Gabriel A. and Joseph, Jonathan (2025) Patrimonial imperialism: a taxonomy of the causes of the Russo‐Ukrainian war. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 55 (3). ISSN 0021-8308

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author(s)
Divisions:	LSE
Subjects:	J Political Science > JZ International relations J Political Science > JC Political theory
Date Deposited:	21 Jul 2025 09:54
Last Modified:	28 Jul 2025 12:21
URI:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/128887

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