Patrimonial Imperialism: A Taxonomy of the Causes of the Russo‐Ukrainian War
Journal: Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour
Year: 2025

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, an