The Minsk Game: Ukraine's Unnamed War, 2014-2022

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Abstract:
Why did the Minsk-1 and the Minsk-2 agreements fail?  UKRAINE'S UNNAMED WAR: BEFORE THE RUSSIAN INVASION OF 2022 (Dominique Arel and Jesse Driscoll, Cambridge University Press) suggests that a domestic negotiation failure within Ukraine is at the heart of the better-understood  diplomatic failure.  At the diplomatic level, what stalled implementation for eight years were matters of ordering and sequencing – classic hallmarks of intertemporal commitment problems.  The book presents an alternative account, based on a model of domestic Ukrainian interest group politics that might be called “The Minsk Game.”  Two actors bargain over a basket of zero-sum issues and Russia threatens to send its military to intervene if bargaining breaks down.  In Ukraine these zero-sum issues have traditionally been the status of languages and school instruction (Russian vs. Ukrainian), the teaching and commemoration of history, trade policy, and geopolitical alignment.  The model can explain why, since 2014, no governing coalition in Kyïv could credibly commit to “trading bullets for ballots” in the Donbas territories it no longer controlled (DNR/LNR).  The talk will conclude with a few speculative observations about the prospects for future conflict resolution. 

Bio
Jesse Driscoll is Associate Professor of Political Science and the Faculty Chair of the Global Leadership Institute at the School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California San Diego. He is the author of Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States (Cambridge, 2015) and Doing Global Fieldwork (Columbia, 2021)