The Russia-Ukraine war has exposed systematic failures to explain the war’s actual trajectory — Ukraine’s fragmentation, Russia’s authoritarian consolidation, and the fragility of Western unity. This lecture argues that these analytical failures reflect a deeper crisis of knowledge, rooted in the inadequacy of prevailing analytical frameworks for understanding post-Soviet transformation: theories of democratization, patronal politics, and decolonization. As an alternative, I outline a research program grounded in a Gramscian framework of hegemony crisis as a long-term disintegrative process with its own self-reproducing dynamics. The lecture
traces a post-Soviet vicious circle in which the centrifugal disintegration of Soviet counterhegemony has contributed to the global erosion of democratic capitalism, generating both authoritarian (Caesarist) and deficient revolutionary responses that fail to resolve the underlying crisis and instead either conserve or intensify it. Applied to Ukraine’s Euromaidan of 2014 and its aftermath, this framework explains both why contemporary revolutions do not produce durable orders and why the resulting political fragmentation left post-Euromaidan Ukraine vulnerable to Caesarist coercion from without.

Die Vortragsreihe „Kapitalismus und Krieg“ wird von der AG Internationale Beziehungen und Politische Ökonomie (AB4 / AG Koddenbrock) an der Fakultät für Soziologie ausgerichtet.

Weitere Informationen unter: sekretariat.koddenbrock@uni-bielefeld.de