By Deiniol Brown
Dr Stefan Wolff is professor of international security in the department of political science and international studies at the University of Birmingham. Dr Wolff is a leading scholar on international conflict management, having published twenty books on the subject, the latest being ‘Subnational Governance and Conflict’. Dr Wolff is a founding editor of the academic journal ‘Ethnopolitics’, is the Honorary Treasurer of the UK Political Studies Association, has served as a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the UK Defence Academy, and has worked for a series of organisations on conflict management and conflict settlement processes around the world. Dr Wolff also recently co-founded the publication ‘Navigating the Vortex’ which can be accessed on Substack. In our discussion, Dr Wolff covered his approach to research on ethnic conflict and the state of European security.
As someone who employs a comparative approach, do you find that research on the topic of ethnic conflict is too reticent to compare different contexts, and how do you navigate the particularism-universalism dichotomy in this field?
That is a perennial question for a lot of comparativists. On the one hand we want to make comparisons so we can generalise our findings, but on the other hand it’s much easier to say that we can’t compare two contexts because they are too different. We always strive for a good middle ground that gives adequate credit to the particular circumstances of the case, but also finding what is similar across a diversity of cases. I have used this approach for many years, since my PhD in the late nineties. What I have found studying this for thirty years is that across all of the examples of ethnic conflict there are aspects which are the same, or are comparable, and which we can generalise.
For example, the intensity of the emotions connected to the abstract concepts, like nationhood or justice, which drive conflicts is always the same. The concepts are different, but how they drive people are similar, and once you get to that level of abstraction you are able to compare conflicts, and look into how best to respond to these emotions to reduce violence. Comparison often has a lot to do with finding the right level of abstraction in order to compare conflicts to one another, without ignoring the individuality of each context.
How do you deal with both the local and global contexts often concurrently present in ethnic conflict?
This is one of the things I quickly realised in my PhD and early work on ethnic conflicts, that you couldn’t fully understand what was going on in ethnic conflicts without understanding the broader connections to regional and global politics, as well as the unique history of individual conflicts. The internationalisation of conflicts is not a new consideration, although it is more pronounced in current conflicts. I’m sure there are some very unique conflicts which are just local, but in my experience, we always have to factor in how relationships on one level affect relationships on another, and how issues cross-cut levels of analysis.
For example, in a lot of the conflicts I have studied in Africa, it is very common that issues will jump from local to regional importance, while being less important nationally. If you look at the DRC and the conflicts in its eastern provinces, they are much more driven by regional factors than national ones. Just looking at the distance of the conflicts from the DRC’s capital, which is many times greater than to the Rwandan capital. You also have to look at the role of geography in these conflicts; how geography may structure conflict. Everything in a sense is connected, but the question is how they are connected, and which connections are the most important.
Turning to your work on Ukraine, how fundamental was the change that the Ukraine war created in the norms of global politics?
This question hints at the political complexities of the Ukraine War, going back to 2022, but also the longer history of the conflict and other post-soviet conflicts in the region. What’s unique about Ukraine is the intensity of the fighting, and how close it has pushed NATO to an all-out confrontation with Russia, with escalation in the Baltic countries and Finland. The chance for broader fighting is heightened to a level we haven’t seen in Europe since the end of the second world war, apart from potentially in the former Yugoslavian states. In that sense, Ukraine has really fundamentally changed the international security order; the fact that a member of the UN security council would violate so many of the norms of the organisation is quite major, not necessarily to say that western states haven’t contravened these rules in the past. There’s a lot fuzziness around the decisions of states under international law previously, but the Ukraine war is a clear breaking of these laws. The Ukraine war has also presented a challenge for scholarship on conflict. Scholars continue to debate if the war is a national war, a global war or a local war stemming from conflicts in the border regions of Ukraine fuelled by Russia.
Do you think that there was a dislocation between the perceived stability of the world order before 2022 and the more unstable reality which was exposed through the Ukraine war, or was the war a turning point in global stability?
There is no question that the war represented a huge change in 2022, with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The problem with that is what academics would call ‘hindsight bias’, where events can be interpreted in a more logical way with the benefit of hindsight. It is easy to say now that the Ukraine war was a long time in the coming and that we should have better identified it as an area of instability. However, there is also the case that there are several actions that could have been taken in, and in relation to, Ukraine which could have helped avoid conflict.
I found myself going back and forth between these two arguments. I think certainly what has happened over the last three years and how Russia has pursued its war, and even in the six months since Donald Trump’s return, demonstrates that Russia’s talk of wanting security is just talk. We are currently talking a day after the supposedly historic meeting of European leaders in the White House yesterday (August 18th), and the meeting between Trump and Putin on Friday (August 15th), and yet we are no closer to seeing a resolution to the war. That is because Putin sees no reason to end the war, because he thinks he can still achieve territorial gains. There has also been mounting evidence that Ukraine is part of a wider Russian game plan to regain its traditional ‘sphere of influence’ beyond its borders.
Could you briefly explain the role of the OSCE and the operations it carries out?
That almost needs a completely separate interview! The OSCE goes back to the height of the cold war, originating from the Helsinki process on August 1st 1975 where the countries of the Eastern Bloc and NATO signed up to the Helsinki agreement on security, stability and human rights in Europe. It was and still is the largest security organisation in the world, with 57 participating states today.
The point of the OSCE initially was to create a forum for the different states of Europe to discuss issues such as human rights and freedom of movement. I’m East German and I would say that I have massively benefitted from the OSCE, as there is the argument that the processes initiated by the OSCE eventually led to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of communism. After the cold war, and the ‘unipolar moment’ in international relations, the OSCE became more of a regional collective security organisation, charged with functions like conflict management in a lot of the post-soviet states. There is not really a record of concrete success at the OSCE for conflict management, it has never negotiated a peace settlement, apart from the exception of the obscure autonomy arrangement for Gagauzia in Moldova.
The other roles which the OSCE has fulfilled since 1991 it has been more successful with, although gaining little credit. There has been lot of work on stabilisation and confidence-building in states in Eastern Europe. I think for what it was designed to do, it has been relatively successful in supporting and improving European security.
Has there been an increasing rejection of the OSCE by states in recent years, and how can an organisation like the OSCE still contribute to security in a world increasingly rejecting multilateral cooperation?
Given how the international situation has evolved, I think the OSCE would be more effective if it went back to its roots as a conference on security. This is a more limited aspiration, where the OSCE returns to being a forum where states discuss arrangements and improve cooperation, without being a permanent organisation with rigid practices. A lot of the OSCE’s early successes in the 1990s were due to Russian cooperation, but this is no longer possible, so the OSCE can’t continue with this approach. Furthermore, I think the role of the OSCE as a forum is currently lacking in Europe, and is desperately needed as there is no real forum for a broad discussion between Europe and Russia. There is currently a paralysis of the organisation, which is in contrast with what is currently happening at the UN, where the Security Council still continues to operate and make consensual decisions despite the fact that four out of the five veto powers are also OSCE participating states that are unwilling to cooperate in Vienna.
Has the EU been weakened by the rejection of liberal internationalism from many states and political movements, or has it been strengthened by the new impetus for collective security in Europe?
I think a particular ‘liberal international order’ vision that the EU symbolises has been deeply damaged in recent years, which has been very difficult for the organisation. Looking at Brexit, this did a lot of initial damage to the idea of a united Europe and to the founding principles of the EU. However, at the same time the EU has created new mechanisms for cooperation and communication which are becoming much more fit for purpose in the current unstable world. The new ‘coalition of the willing’ that has been formed in Europe this year demonstrates a really strong core European consensus on the norms of the European project, the need to defend them, and that Europe needs to do more to defend them, instead of relying on the US security umbrella.
Now with Trump in the White House, and the establishment of Trumpism as a long-term ideology in the US, Europe needs to survive in order to survive. It was interesting yesterday seeing who was in the Oval Office with Trump, who he recognises as holding power in Europe; the President of France, the Prime Minister of the UK, the President of Italy, the Chancellor of Germany, the Finnish President, the Secretary General of NATO and the President of the European Commission. This is the core of the coalition of the willing, and excludes some EU and NATO members but cuts across the normal boundaries between the two organisations. This is coming together as another pole in the emerging multipolar world order.
Looking at your work on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Europe, do you see China and Russia’s foreign policy interests converging in Europe, or are they opposed in their interests?
I think there are a lot of similarities but also a lot of differences in Russia and China’s aims. I think Russia is primarily interested in restoring its great power status, and rebuilding a sphere of influence. China certainly wants more influence in Europe, but is pursuing this mainly through economic means. That is not to say China isn’t engaged in more political operations, but it’s not comparable to Russia.
I think both have an interest in weakening the transatlantic relationship, but China is hoping to maintain a good trading relationship with Europe. What I find somewhat surprising is that in Europe there is a lot of criticism of Trump’s reluctance to impose secondary sanctions on India and China for helping finance the Russian war effort, but the EU itself would have similar leverage if it wanted to use it against India and China. The EU and China have an enormous bilateral trade relationship, but there has been no real discussion about the EU using its leverage to rein in China’s relationship with Russia. So, China’s and Russia’s interests are divergent, but in respect to Ukraine they are both damaging and contributing to the war. At the moment I don’t think the EU has found the right line on approaching China in light of the Ukraine War.
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