Where Are We Now? Two Years Since Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

Introduction

Welcome to Talking Policy, the official podcast of the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. I’m your host, Lindsay Morgan, associate director at IGCC…

On February 24, 2022, the Russian army invaded Ukraine in what would become the largest attack on a European country since World War II. Over the past two years, tens of thousands of civilians have died, and millions of refugees have fled Ukraine. In addition to the human tragedy, the conflict has tested the resolve of the U.S. and European nations to defend their allies over the long-haul.

In this episode, guest host Jesse Driscoll, associate professor of political science at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy, sits down with a panel of experts from across the University of California for a conversation to mark the two-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion…

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Jesse: Thanks for tuning in to this special episode of Talking Policy. I’m your guest host, Jesse Driscoll. Today, I’m joined by a roundtable of experts for a conversation to mark the two-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine:

Branislav Slantchev is my colleague at the University of California, San Diego, professor of political science. 

Jess Peake is the assistant director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights and the Director of International and Comparative Law program at UCLA School of Law. 

And Paul D’Anieri is a professor of political science and public policy at the University of California, Riverside, also the author of Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War. 

Together, we’ll discuss the current status of this ongoing war, how we got here, and what factors might impact the future of this terrible conflict.

Branislav, Jess, Paul, thanks for being here. We’re coming up on the two-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion. So to begin our conversation, I want to ask each of you: where are we today, and how did we get here? Paul, would you start us off?

Paul: We’re somewhere in the middle of what is already a very long war, and it might get a lot longer. I say that because while the war seems stalemated now, the stalemate could drag on for a long time. As far as how did we get here? I think the basic underlying factor is Russia’s dissatisfaction from the very beginning of the post-Soviet era with Ukraine’s independence. Russia never really came to grips with the fact of Ukraine is a separate country and it’s always wanted it back. 

Branislav: I think the Ukrainians are in a worse shape right now than they were last year. One of the goals of last year’s offensive had been to show that they can dislodge the Russians by force from the occupied territories and that obviously did not work. And the worry right now is that they will not have the resources for another such burst anytime soon again. And so they will have to defend basically for a long time, which is frankly to the advantage of the Russians. So now the question is whether the Russians can expand their gains. They are nowhere near accepting the idea that they will have to leave Ukraine. They still insist on, at minimum, the annexed territories, even as a precondition to talks. And so I think peace is very, very far off. Add now, to this, the political troubles in the EU and the U.S. with the arms supplies, and now add the internal conflicts in Ukraine that are bubbling to the surface between the general staff and the presidency, and we are in for a very rough ride this year, I think. 

Jess: I think to add on to both of those… how did we get here is really because Putin has no respect for the rule of law. He’s a dictator. He threw himself into this situation thinking it would be an easy victory, and I think he’s been surprised at the incredible resistance that he’s faced from both the Ukrainians and much of the international community. The whole invasion is a fundamental violation of Article 2(4) of the UN charter and that we’ve just seen violation after violation after violation of international law since the very beginning of this conflict. And so I think, you know, both the historical component of Putin never really being okay with Ukrainian independence, coupled with this fundamental disrespect for the international legal order, is two contributing factors to have led us to where we are today. 

(music)

Jesse: Because the war in Ukraine remains front-page news, I think many of us are saturated. But what about the war doesn’t get enough airtime? What’s a story that’s fallen out of the news cycle or an aspect of the conflict that you feel is being underreported? Jess, why don’t you start. 

Jess: I think in terms of something that is a little bit fallen out of the conversation is this idea of prosecuting Putin and the troika for aggression specifically. Obviously, there’s a lot of conversation around what might happen at the International Criminal Court. And I think in the first year of the war, we were hearing a lot about the potential for setting up a special tribunal for aggression, specifically, because that is not a crime that the International Criminal Court can have jurisdiction over in this particular situation.

And I think that, you know, there was so much talk about that establishment of a special tribunal a year ago, and I think that that conversation has really died down. I wrote something actually for your center (IGCC) on this for the blog series you put together last year about why I thought such a tribunal was a bad idea, and I’ve softened my views on that somewhat. And partially that’s because I had the opportunity to spend some time in Ukraine in December, and I got to speak with a lot of Ukrainians and really hear about their rationale for wanting the establishment of this special tribunal for aggression. And it’s incredibly important to the people of Ukraine. Aggression is a leadership crime. The people of Ukraine believe that there won’t be full accountability until the troika, the top three leaders, are held accountable for that aggression. And there is support for this, right? Like, there’s also opposition. But the European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation, Eurojust, in July, I believe, of last year launched an international center for the prosecution of the crime of aggression against Ukraine. And this is an entity that’s based in The Hague. It’s investigating Russian aggression and it’s really helping to facilitate case building for future potential trials. And I think that piece has a little bit fallen out of the conversation, at least here in the U.S. media. I think there’s still a lot of conversation about that in Europe particularly, but I think it’s such an important component because, yes, aggression is this leadership crime and if Putin is allowed to act with impunity for that, then what does that say about the international legal system and the international legal order, and what future impact does that have? 

Jesse: Paul, what do you think?

Paul: One of the things that’s really fascinated me is how Russia’s justification for the war has changed over time, especially as it relates to the relationship between Russians and Ukrainians. For the 20 years plus, or actually, you know, for hundreds of years, the Russian line has been Russians and Ukrainians are one people. They use the word fraternal. There’s all different ways of talking about it, but it’s all about how close we are, which is how we can’t imagine Ukrainians being in a separate country. Since February of 2022, that narrative has very quickly changed to Ukrainians are our enemies. And they’re not just our enemies, they’re vermin. They need to be extinguished. It’s become very genocidal. And so the long-term nature of the relationship between Russia and Ukraine has been fundamentally changed regardless of what the outcome on the ground is. And on the Ukrainian side, you see very quickly, too, there are a lot of Ukrainians before 2022 who wanted to have it both ways. Yes, we’re Ukrainians, but of course, we’re friends with Russia. That’s not really a very tenable position anymore. And so what’s happened is Russia has created a long-term enemy in Ukraine, which I also think will have very important consequences for what Russia then does in territory it conquers, if it conquers more territory going forward.

Branislav: I think one thing that hasn’t actually been in the conversation as nearly as much as it should be, and that pertains precisely to the issues raised right now by both Paul and Jess, is the meaning of leaving what could be several million, if I — last time I think I had looked at it, it’s about 6 million Ukrainians would be under Russian rule if the Russians, you know, keep the territories they’ve conquered. And the question is what will happen to these people? Everybody who wants to discuss peace terms needs to be talking about this and they never do. Real people, millions of them, that any peace settlement that leaves— or even a ceasefire that leaves territory in Russian hands for a long time would require some sort of solution. Population exchange, I don’t know, but some sort of solution. And it might be a factor that is going to prevent settling this conflict for a very long time. 

Jesse: Yeah, I concur, Branislav. I think that’s something that doesn’t get talked about very much. I also wonder in some future scenario, only dimly visible, where Ukraine actually retakes a lot of territory, it’s 1991 borders, whether the population transfer question is going to come up again. I mean, it’s very politically taboo to talk about that because it’s very tempting to presuppose that everyone living on Ukrainian territory buys the Western narrative of this. But we have some circumstantial evidence that the populations on the territory would be divided at a minimum, especially in Crimea. So that’s just, you know, it’s difficult to talk about that because you worry about doing Russian propaganda dirty work for Putin’s regime. But I think these are questions that are hard to think about. 

Branislav: But the Russians are already doing it. I mean, they are already transferring people from Russia to these territories to change the population balance and everything. Absolutely, yes.

Jesse: 100%. And it’s well documented, in addition to the kidnapping of children and other things that have been like, you know, picked up on in Western media. 

(music)

So, just to follow up on something Branislav said before, in terms of the operational military balance: what I’ve been struck by in the last year is a kind of a creeping transition from the land domain to low altitude. The drone war component of this has been very interesting from the perspective of military science. And I think that the war is quite likely, as it becomes more of a drone war, to be more difficult to keep on the territory of Ukraine. And we’ve all gotten kind of used to the idea of this war being contained to Ukraine. That’s been a central western policy goal from the beginning. And I can begin to see a gray zone slippage; strikes on oil factories and stuff like that. So I think that’s a change that we don’t think about much. 

Jess: Just to stay on the point of drones, I understand what everybody’s saying about there is a need for more active, potentially more active Ukrainian resistance within Russia. And I think drone warfare would have a tremendous role to play in that. I’m just thinking about some of the psychological impacts of drone warfare that the Ukrainian people are suffering right now as a result of the, you know, fairly relentless bombardment of drones in different regions at different times. Like I mentioned, I went to Lviv in December and before we went, we had a security briefing and we had to download this app that would give us like a warning of incoming drone alerts. Everybody in Ukraine has this on their phone and it went off several times while we were there. We were not at any risk, et cetera, but this is what people are living through, right? And so I think that the psychological impact of that is really something that doesn’t get enough conversation around it. Drone warfare can be very strategic and can be a really good way to do some precise targeting. But that isn’t the way it’s being used. It’s being used as a weapon of terror, almost, to terrorize the civilian population. And I think that there is a fear that if Ukraine started using similar things, it could hit civilian targets and it could cede some of the moral authority that it currently holds in this war, and I think that is also a really important thing for the Ukrainians to think about in their strategy. 

Jesse: I think that’s all right. It’s extremely difficult to make the case to Ukrainians that they should not engage in parallel behaviors after two years of what you just described, however. I mean, it’s just extremely difficult to make that case in the Ukrainian political space, whatever the larger geopolitical logic is.

And at the other end of the spectrum, I mean, you have very high-quality military analysts like Dara Massicot and Mike Kofman at this point just take for granted that long range precision strike and long-range artillery on the Russian side is what must be degraded if you’re going to go after the weak point in the Russian military machine. They’re not going to run out of people. They’re not going to run out of artillery. What can they run out of, actually? And that is going to require deep strikes. I mean, not deep strikes, you know, Moscow, Saint Petersburg… but the logistical lines are on the Russian side of the border. And that’s not something that you can wish cast away. That’s going to be the case however long this war goes on. That’s just the map. 

So, with that as a transition, what do we see as the main barriers to settlement and assuming there is no settlement, because we all have a long list of barriers to settlement, how long, realistically, can this go on?

Paul: Okay, so barriers to settlement. I’ll maybe point to three overlapping ones. One is Russia has not achieved any of its objectives. Or maybe it’s gotten some— it’s built a land bridge to Crimea. But in terms of taking Ukraine out as an independent state or controlling Ukraine, it’s actually further away from its goals than when it started, because Ukraine is now absolutely against it and for the West. Russia can hope that Western support for Ukraine will fade, and that Russia can rebuild over the next year and, if not in 2024, in 2025 they can really get after it and take the rest of the country. But then the third thing that I point to is the commitment problem, which is that, not to get too academic, but any peace agreement requires all the sides to make promises of things they won’t do in the future, right? Russia won’t rearm and attack, Ukraine won’t rearm and attack. And none of those promises are very credible at this point, and nor are they very easy to enforce. And so, in my opinion, a credible peace agreement will depend on Western actors, primarily the United States and NATO, making some commitments that they don’t want to make. 

Branislav: I think that’s exactly right. So let’s just look at what a credible peace deal would require. The primary obstacle to peace is Russia right now. And the reason is exactly what Paul said, which is they have not achieved their goals. Their goals were territorial, of which they’re failing short. It’s unclear, even if they rebuild, that they actually can capture this entire territory that they’ve claimed. Number two is what they call de-Nazification, which basically is regime change. That’s not going to happen anytime soon, if ever, right? Then they have demilitarization of Ukraine, which means no army and no defense industry, which also will not happen. So these goals are not satisfied. So we’re asking, basically, the Russians to give up on everything after these years of fighting while they haven’t actually lost on the battlefield. So that’s very hard to imagine how it’s going to happen. That means the only way of keeping the peace is deterring them from attempting to gain what they think is owed to them, right? Ukraine, we know by itself cannot withstand this, which means they do need an external alliance of some sort and they do need internally to have their industry and they have their big army to resist the Russians. And so this means none of them, not demilitarization, not neutrality, nothing can be given to the Russians from the Ukrainian perspective.

From this, it follows that the Russians are still going to keep fighting as long as they can. I said this at the beginning of the war, and I still believe it. This war will last as long as Putin is alive. I don’t think the Russians have the means of conquering Ukraine and I don’t think they have the means of compelling the Ukrainians to give them what they want either.

And so that’s why I’ve been so critical of the slow -trickling aid and all this calibration because we should have realized, or people here should have realized, from the beginning, this is an all-out effort and that’s how it should be fought. 

Jess: I think I agree with Branislav. I think this definitely could go on indefinitely. And I think Putin really has no incentive to end this in his lifetime because of all of the reasons that Paul and Branislav have just outlined. But I also think that there is certainly waning enthusiasm from the Russian people, right? This is not the quick victory that they were promised. And I think what we’re going to see more and more is difficulty with Putin recruiting enough people to fight this war. So it’s been reported that, I think in 2024, so this year, they want to recruit 400,000 people, which is, I think, similar to the numbers of last year. They’re obviously desperate to avoid conscription of soldiers, but the pool of available recruits for that contract work is drying up. Originally at the beginning, they sought to recruit by providing higher salaries. I think there was something like three times the amount of a regular salary being offered to those who went as a contract soldier. But then there are numerous reports of soldiers not getting paid, their families not receiving death benefits, them not receiving disability allowances and payments for those that are injured during the conflict. And so pretty soon they’re going to run into a real people problem, right? Like people are just not going to be willing to do this. And so then it will have to shift towards more of a conscription-based model, and I think at that point the resistance will grow within Russia, and it will take some time, I think. But that is one of the big variables, I think, to the longevity of this conflict is really kind of the people question from the Russian side.

(music)

Jesse: So what are the other variables? If we try to imagine the future of this war, what, Paul and Branislav, are the big questions for you? 

Paul: For me there’s two big questions. The obvious one is Western support for Ukraine. And, you know, a lot of that depends on U.S. domestic politics, but a lot also depends on the Europeans, who I think are more committed, being able to ramp up defense production in ways that they never thought about doing. The other part is exactly what Jess raised about Russian force regeneration, which is sort of my nightmare scenario, is Russia gets another 400,000 soldiers, arms them up, trains them up, and probably not in 2024, but in 2025, deploys them in Belarus, north of Kiev, so that they can go after Kiev without having to come across the Ukrainian frontlines or without having to cross the Dnipro, and then really facing Ukrainians with some really difficult choices about where to deploy their limited forces. So I think it’s a contest of mobilization on the two sides now, and a contest of the will in the U.S. and Europe. 

Branislav: Well, I think that’s exactly right, that the training and the supply… The Russians can sort of limp along indefinitely, but I do not see them regenerating a force that is actually capable of conquering Ukraine. The problem is they certainly don’t need, you know, motivated soldiers to defend. We know all about the problems with morale, but they still fight. I mean, that’s the thing. They still fight. Yeah, in Russia, you won’t be able to get them, you know, by incentivizing them with salaries and things and even plots of land, in some cases, they were promising stuff like this. Yeah, okay, so they’ll start more forcible recruitment. Is it pleasant? No. Will the Russians do it? Yeah, they will, actually. And once they are at the front, they will fight, because once you’re there, what are you going to do?

So it is possible that they change their mind. Yes, and it will have to do with the suffering of the population at home and problems maintaining the economy because the economy is struggling. I mean, the sanctions, despite the loopholes, the sanctions are working exactly. They’re making everything more expensive to the Russians and to the government. So they have to tighten their belts. Now, in a country where a third doesn’t have indoor plumbing, that’s not immediately obvious that the impact is big, but eventually it’s going to percolate to the cities. And also the problem is we also kind of hope that once they start suffering casualties, you know, the public will wake up or something? No! Last year I did kind of a rough, back-of-the-envelope calculation, assuming about 200,000, you know, dead for the Russians, which at that point was already reasonable. I thought, okay, they’re recruiting mostly from rural areas, medium-sized cities, how many extra funerals would that mean in a city like this per month? It looks like four or five extra funerals in a city. Nobody will notice this. So there’s a lot of private suffering in Russia, but it’s not common knowledge, and so people can’t organize around anything. Putin’s ten-year, you know, repression of the media has been extraordinarily effective. And so there’s the internal weaknesses that usually cause the Russians to collapse in these kinds of wars. They may have learned from their history, too. We should not forget that. 

Jesse: Okay, so we’re recording this in early February and it’s pretty clear American domestic politics are going to turn the Russia-Ukraine war into a political football. Now, speaking only for myself, there are clearly compelling, strong moral and strategic rationales for the U.S. to keep Ukraine supplied. I mean, that’s my opinion, but it’s not that costly for us to do this. Whether you measure it in blood or treasure. This is not Vietnam; we’re not putting soldiers or sailors or airmen in harm’s way in Ukraine. And in terms of how much money we spend, a hundred billion dollars here and there sounds like a lot, but not the way the Pentagon spends. So, I’d say it’s a wise overdue investment: we’re priming the pump on the defense industrial base, we’re putting ammunition stocks back on full, which we’re going to want someday for pacific contingency readiness, for ourselves. But I recognize that many of my friends and neighbors are skeptical of forever wars, and rightly worried about homegrown problems, and don’t see an end in sight. So how would you make the case, to a skeptical voter, that supporting Ukraine has benefits for American security?

Paul: You know, I think there’s two parts of this. One is that in terms of defense against a really dangerous enemy, this is a bargain, particularly in the part that the one thing Ukrainians are not asking for is for us to send Americans to get killed, which is the thing we are most sensitive to. 

The second part of this is how it relates to China, which is we’re not spending so much on Ukraine or even talking about spending so much on Ukraine, even in the Ukrainians fondest dreams, that’s going to dramatically decrease our ability to arm Taiwan or to do what we need to do in the South China Sea. On the other hand, what it says about America’s willingness to support its allies when the going gets tough, this will send an immense message to China about what we may or may not do when it comes time to defend Taiwan. And so if what you’re worried about is Taiwan, you absolutely want to defend Ukraine. 

The only way to end the war is to arm the Ukrainians. And the only way to convince various other bad actors around the world that these kinds of adventures are a bad idea is for this to work out badly for Russia. 

Jess: Yeah, I also agree with the arguments, but I think part of the comeback on that is like, well, why do we need NATO in the first place? Right? Like, part of Trump’s old shtick was we should withdraw. We’re not getting bang for our buck from being in this alliance. And so I think that’s another thing that we really have to push back on is why this alliance is so valuable. It’s actually never been tested. We don’t have an Article 5 example to point to, and so I think it’s quite difficult to show that to people who are already very skeptical of this alliance to begin with. 

Jesse: Okay, so let’s just do this among ourselves here. Why is NATO so valuable? There’s something about the United States being an offshore balancer and actually needing to have friendly ports where we can unload our stuff and land our airplanes. There’s something about having NATO interoperable weapons so that 155 ammo produced in France can fit a howitzer that can be launched at Russia, whether it’s France or Germany or the United States actually building it. There’s something about values and legitimacy as a force multiplier. What are the other arguments for NATO as a thing? 

Paul: Yeah, look, the United States has an isolationist streak that’s, you know… our last 70 years or so of internationalism are more of an anomaly than isolationism overall. And so I think actually that’s the world you have to imagine, which is if you think that the United States will continue to be the country we want it to be, as an island of free market democracy in a world controlled by people like Putin, Xi Jinping and various others we can point to, then that’s great. We could do that. But that is the logical consequence of the United States not caring about the rest of the world. 

Branislav: The answer, I think also in part, is what will happen to Europe if the U.S. withdraws? Like, would the Europeans be able to get their act together to resist the Russians? I think actually they’ll just make deals with the Russians instantly. They don’t care that much. And then the Western world essentially is, you know, the unity is going to be eroded by this as well. And this — I think it is straightforward to make an argument — this is bad for us economically. It’s bad for us politically, for our influence in the world. I mean, while I’m counter to the idea that the members of NATO are not paying their way. Yeah, sure, that’s exactly right. They were not paying their way, which is why the U.S. has had such an outsized say in NATO politics and influence in Europe. Because no representation without taxation is really the rule of the world. And so when we paid for this, we got to say stuff. You want them to pay equitably, then you have to deal with their opinions for real, not just pretend opinions and paper over disagreements, but for real deal with this. And this transactional nature of the kind of Trump approach to NATO is terrible if you want to have leadership by the U.S. 

Jess: I think Branislav is right about the… the power and influence point is a really powerful one to push or to use on those people who are very skeptical of the U.S. role in NATO and what that brings to us. I think the same people who are very skeptical also want the U.S. to be the most powerful country in the world, right? They want the U.S. to, like, play this role, to have this powerful position in decision-making. And I think you can’t achieve that if you’re withdrawing from international organizations that are really set up to buoy up some of that power in some ways.

And so, you know, it’s a nuanced argument to make, but I think focusing on the desire to have U.S. power and influence actually speaks to the U.S. needing this role in all of these organizations and needing to really follow through on the commitments that it’s made. 

Jesse: Okay, last question: how has the Ukraine war changed our thinking on the idea of peace, the possibility of peace, what peace means?

 Branislav: So, being Eastern European, I always found the American idea of end of history and democracy being like something that everybody secretly aspires to and will just have it if they’re given a chance very laughable because having lived and studied regimes that are not democratic, you know that’s just not true. For many people that simply isn’t the case. And so I have a much kind of darker, more kind of struggle for survival view, if you will, of this. And, for me, peace is inextricably linked with war, because it’s not just the absence of fighting. To me, it’s like, the natural state actually is peace, and we’re trying to figure out why it’s broken. For me, it’s not war against war, being the natural state of affairs. And so for me to understand peace is to understand why they’re not fighting over something that they potentially could be fighting.

And so it’s always been looking at these interests. So, for instance, the current war in Ukraine was eminently predictable. As Paul said at the very outset, we knew the Russians were open about not accepting Ukraine as an independent country. It was just a matter of time. In 2014, I literally wrote, given these policies, this only ends with the Russian invasion. There’s no other way out of it. You cannot wish it away. You cannot bargain it away. And we also know from research, and people have the exact same ideas that international trade and finances are going to make war impossible. And when we had World War I, and then we had World War II, and seems it’s actually quite possible, unfortunately. People simply do not seem to imagine what nation states are capable of mobilizing. And we repeatedly seem surprised by this, which is… it’s not a new lesson, but we seem to have to relearn it every single time. And so I’m not sure there’s a whole lot of kind of absolutely new sort of ideas that need to percolate. They just, people have to give up some wishful thinking, I think. 

Paul: I mean, I think the short-term lessons, you know, and this connects back to Europe and this also connects to China, which is we thought like this, this post-Cold War liberal world view of if we engage everybody with trade, folks will get along. The Germans thought that was true buying gas from Russia. We thought it was true, buying everything we could possibly buy from China. And it’s turned out not to work. So I think one of the things it’s done is it’s left us going back to the drawing board a little bit in terms of what are the sources of peace. We thought that democracy was sort of naturally over time going to ratchet itself more widely geographically around the world, and now we see it receding. So there’s a lot of rethinking that needs to be done on democracy, on peace, on the relationship between them. And I think we’re going have to do a lot of that kind of rethinking before we arrive at some new good ideas about how to build peace in the world. 

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Outro

Jesse: We can’t see the future, and it could be a very long war. There are many barriers to ending the conflict that we’ve identified here. And, a lot depends on Russia, and only Russians can change Russia. What’s clear, to me, is that when there is a final settlement, and someday there will be, it will take sustained cooperation between governments in Europe, the United States, and nonstate actors who care about the future of global institutions to make that settlement stick. 

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Credits

This has been a special episode of Talking Policy. Special thanks to our guest host, Jesse Driscoll.

Talking Policy is a production of the University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation. This episode was produced and edited by Tyler Ellison.

To ensure you never miss an episode, subscribe to Talking Policy wherever you get your podcasts. To learn more about IGCC, visit ucigcc.org.

 

The UC Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) is a research network comprised of scholars from across the University of California and the Los Alamos and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories that conducts policy-relevant research to mitigate conflict and promote a more peaceful world order. Our focus is on challenges that have the potential to lead to wide-scale conflict, and that can benefit from global cooperation to solve. Our portfolio includes both traditional security issues—defense innovation, strategy and deterrence, nuclear weapons policy, and security cooperation—and emerging and non-traditional challenges such as climate change, geoeconomics and great power competition, and threats to democracy. In each of these areas, IGCC builds diverse, multidisciplinary research teams that analyze the causes and consequences of global conflict—and help develop practical solutions.