Spotlight: 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine

In line with our mission at Oxford University Press, we recognize the power of education and research in helping to disseminate knowledge and to transform people’s lives. We want to enable individuals to access our valuable resources, wherever they may be. To further our mission, this page features a select group of annotated bibliographies from Oxford Bibliographies in International Relations and Oxford Bibliographies in Political Science addressing key topics related to the current crisis in Ukraine.

• Authoritarian Regimes  

  “There has been an upsurge in the study of comparative authoritarianism since the 1990s, which has led to a number of novel arguments, some still in the evolving stage, and to the identification of new forms of authoritarian rule...” - Vesna Danilovic

• Central Europe 

  “This article focuses on works that take “central Europe” as a subject of research. There are two conclusions one can draw from the overview that follows. The first one is that there is no common definition of “central Europe” The second one is that in spite of the lack of consensus, the literature on central Europe is abundant...” - Zlatko Šabič, Marko Lovec, Kateřina Kočí

• Emerging Powers and BRICS 

  “The term “emerging powers” is a broad and somewhat vague category or shorthand for countries that are thought to be in the process of increasing their economic (and political) power faster than the rest...”- Oliver Stuenkel

• Foreign Policy Decision-Making 

  “The study of foreign policy decision-making seeks to understand how states formulate and enact foreign policy. It views foreign policy as a series of decisions made by particular actors using specific decision-making processes...” - Jessica D. Blankshain

• Foreign Policy of Non-democratic Regimes 

  “The literature on the foreign policies of non-democratic regimes has grown significantly in the last decades. To be sure, there is a tradition of analyzing the foreign policy of individual authoritarian states from the totalitarian regimes of the Axis, to the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China...” - Randolph M. Siverson, Malcolm Easton

• Genocide 

  “Genocide is a phenomenon that has confounded scholars and practitioners as well as ordinary readers. Notwithstanding the carnage of the 20th century, our understanding of genocide remains partial, not least because vocational, disciplinary, and methodological boundaries have inhibited intellectual progress...” - Jens Meierhenrich

• Hybrid Warfare 

  “Hybrid warfare has been the bandwagon term to describe modern warfare in academic, policy, and journalist accounts. It describes a wide array of warfare techniques that do not correspond with earlier notions of warfare...” - John G.L.J. Jacobs, Jonge Atlantici, Martijn W.M. Kitzen

• Ideology, Values, and Foreign Policy

  "Ideology is a prototypical “contested concept,” though competing definitions can generally be sorted into pejorative and nonpejorative categories. Pejorative definitions consider ideology to be a set of false beliefs about the world and how it operates, typically facilitating exploitation or injustice...” - Peter Beattie

• Laws of War 

  “The laws of war are a set of rules that aim to regulate the acceptable reasons for going to war (jus ad bellum), the conduct of hostilities during a war (jus in bello), and the aftermath of a war and the transition from war to peace (jus post bellum)...” - Calin Trenkov-Wermuth

• Mediation in International Conflicts

  "Mediation, like conflict, spans both history and the globe. Examples range from the diplomatic efforts by emissaries of several Greek city-states to create a truce between the Aetolian League and Macedonia during the First Macedonian War in 209 BC, to the decree by Pope Alexander VI to establish spheres of influence for Portugal and Spain in the New World in 1493..." - Molly M. Melin

• NATO, Europe, and Russia: Security Issues and the Border Regions  

  “The enlargements of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and European Union (EU) membership since the late 1990s have had a significant impact on political security issues in the differing border regions of Europe, from the Baltics, to central and eastern Europe, to Turkey and the Black Sea/Caucasus..." - Hall Gardner

• Psychology and Foreign Policy

  “The use of psychological concepts to explain the behavior of individuals and groups that shape foreign policy is centuries old. Thucydides in his great History of the Peloponnesian War explored the impact of the fear of decline on leaders’ decisions to go to war...” - Janice Stein

• Rising Powers in World Politics 

  “The topics of power shifts and the rise and fall of great powers have been at the core of the discipline of International Relations since its inception. However, with the end of the Cold War, the increasing economic success and political visibility of countries like China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, and the concomitant perceived decline of the United States..." - Sandra Destradi

• Russian Foreign Policy

  “Russian foreign policy has undergone substantial shifts in the post–Cold War period. Scholarly attention toward the topic has also experienced ebbs and flows as the breakup of the Soviet Union drastically decreased general interest toward a newly emerged Russia..." -Marcin Kaczmarski

• Sanctions 

  "The study of sanctions is topical but also contentious and inconclusive in international relations. On the one hand, scholars are deeply divided on the utility of sanctions as foreign-policy instruments. There is an ongoing debate about the “success” or “effectiveness” of sanctions that has yielded a conventional wisdom that they are failed policy instruments..." - Adrian Ang

• Theories of Foreign Policy 

  "The academic discipline studying international relations (IR) is often subdivided into two fields: “systemic” international relations, which provide for a bird’s-eye perspective on the international system as a whole, and “subsystemic” foreign policy analysis (FPA), which zooms in on the placement and actions of states considered to be the most fundamental unit of this system..." - Gunther Hellmann, Ursula Stark Urrestarazu

• War 

  "Modern war is often defined as armed conflict within, between, or among states, although other political communities partake of war: ethnic and religious groups, ideological movements, terrorist organizations, large drug gangs, and other “non-state actors...” - Cathal Nolani

Featured image credit: .Photo by Wikimedia

At Oxford University Press, we stand behind the response of our parent institution, the University of Oxford, to the invasion of Ukraine:

The unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia is causing a humanitarian catastrophe to unfold in Europe. Members of our community are appalled by Russia’s action and in awe of the bravery shown by Ukrainians as well as the bravery of those Russians who have denounced their government’s aggression.
 

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