"From 'Civilized Divorce' to Uncivil War: Russia, Ukraine, and the West, 1991-2017"
This book will explore Ukraine's relations with Russia and the West from 1991-2017, focusing on why and how Russia came to invade in 2014. It will show that, while violence was never inevitable, conflict over Ukraine's status emerged with the breakup of the Soviet Union and never fully receded. The project will be significant in that it will provide the first scholarly analysis of the entire quarter century leading up to the conflict. Early work on the Russia-Ukraine conflict has focused largely on assigning blame, tending therefore toward advocacy and oversimplification rather than analysis and nuance. The work will be theoretically informed by the political science literature on conflict, but will proceed chronologically, and will aim to provide a detailed empirical account of the evolution of Ukraine's relations with Russia and the West since independence. The project aims to provide a definitive account on which future research will rely.