The war against Ukraine and the failure of 'great power politics’

This chapter interrogates the claim that the Russian war against Ukraine represents a ‘return’ or ‘resurgence’ of ‘great power politics’. It argues that this cyclical temporality, in which the world order is imagined to be returning to, or still locked within, a condition of great power competition inhibits scholars of International Relations (IR) from identifying the features of novelty and transformation in the 21st century world order. The chapter pursues the claim that rather than a world order of attenuated hierarchy – that the concepts of unipolarity, multi-polarity and great power competition all, in different ways, assume – power in the contemporary world order is becoming more diffuse amongst a wider range of actors and this is undermining and reshaping traditional geopolitical hierarchies. Rather than a resurgence of great power politics, the opposite may be occurring: a fragmentation of order in which no state can expect to create the ‘spheres of influence’ historically associated with a select few dominant powers.