How Global Ideological Competition Drives Russia’s War in Ukraine

Join us in the Centre for Dialogue or online Jan. 16 at 1 p.m. as the Cascade Institute at Royal Roads University hosts Dr. Jonathan Leader Maynard, senior lecturer in International Politics in the Department of Political Economy at King's College London, to speak on what's driving Russia’s war in Ukraine. Space is limited. Please email RSVP to reserve your seat or access the Zoom link.

Since the start of Russia’s full invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, analysts have expressed puzzlement at President Vladimir Putin’s actions. Even if ultimately able to achieve some kind of advantageous ceasefire, Russia has been substantially harmed by the war, with huge Russian casualties in the military campaign, progressively severe damage to the Russian economy, a growing Russian dependence on China, Iran, and North Korea, and the strengthening and expansion of NATO. In this talk, speaker Jonathan Leader Maynard will suggest that this puzzle is largely explained by the growing role of ideological competition in global politics in the 21st Century. Maynard stresses two key points: first, that ideological changes within Russia are key to understanding how Russia has come to perceive itself as increasingly threatened by external ideological forces; second, that Russia has further been emboldened by transnational ideological linkages between ultraconservatism in Russia and populist authoritarian trends in Europe and North America. Contrary to conventional wisdom, this actually makes ideological competition more destabilising in 21st Century politics than in the Cold War. These factors are crucial to explaining the difficulty of what would otherwise be a relatively simple task – containing Russia’s revisionist ambitions – and point to important broader fractures within the international system.

Jonathan Leader Maynard

Dr. Jonathan Leader Maynard is a Senior Lecturer in International Politics, and a Parliamentary Academic Fellow working for the International Affairs Unit of the UK House of Commons. Prior to joining King’s in 2020, Dr. Leader Maynard was based at the University of Oxford, where he served as the Rank-Manning Junior Research Fellow in Social Science (2013-2015), and then Departmental Lecturer in International Relations (2015-2020).

His research spans International Relations, political science and political theory, and is focused on the role of ideology in armed conflict, geopolitical competition, and extremist politics, particularly in forms of violence against civilians such as genocide, state terror and systematic human rights abuses. He also has secondary research interests in the broader role of ideology in contemporary politics, the ethics of political violence, and methodological debates within political theory and qualitative political science.

Leader Maynard’s work has been published in an interdisciplinary range of journals, including the Journal of Peace Research, American Journal of Political Science, British Journal of Political Science, Ethics, Terrorism and Political Violence, and Genocide Studies and Prevention. His new book, Ideology and Mass Killing: The Radicalized Security Politics of Genocides and Deadly Atrocities, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. He is also the Co-Editor (with Mark L. Haas) of The Routledge Handbook of Ideology and International Relations (Routledge, 2022).