A Cosmopolitan Model for Peacebuilding: the Ukrainian Cases of Crimea and Donbas

The responses to new political conflicts and wars that shape the post-Cold War order often remain informed by old patterns of thinking in terms of Realism, Liberalism, or critical theories. These established theoretical frameworks frequently reject the legacy of normative political theory and instead promote their own intellectual credentials. Such an approach means that political philosophy, on the one side, and IR theory, on the other, go their separate ways. When it comes to finding solutions for political conflict and war, the application of a distinct normative conception derived from sub-disciplines within the neighborhood of political theory and international political theory offers an alternative to exclusive reliance on traditional IR paradigms. Critical-Political Cosmopolitanism is such an alternative notion. It integrates liberalism’s focus on individualism and critical theories’ communicative paradigm into a set of binding principles that allow this conception to be ‘empirically meaningful’ for directing conflict prevention and resolution within a concrete political context. The case of the de jure Ukrainian Autonomous Republic of Crimea, which has been occupied since February 2014 by the Russian Federation, and the following war in the Donets Basin (Donbas) offer illustrative challenges to which cosmopolitanism and its principles can be applied. Attempts to resolve the situation before larger escalation ended when Russia first started the building up troops over months along the Ukrainian and Belarusian borders and eventually launched a large-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022.