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KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Identity and War: What We Can Learn from Russia’s War on Ukraine
Dr. Yoshiko M. Herrera, Professor of Political Science at UW-Madison
The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has reinvigorated debates about the causes of war. The question of why Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale war in 2022 does not seem to be answered by many usual explanations, e.g. material interests or threats to international security. We argue that Russia’s imperial ambitions and sense of Russian national identity heavily shaped Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to launch the full scale invasion. Yet, importantly, identity in this case is not reducible to ethnicity: While identity factors are central to the cause of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, ethnicity per se does not matter that much in this war, or at least it does not matter in the way that much of the literature might have thought it would.
Hence, one of the challenges for International Relations theory that has been brought up by the Russian war in Ukraine is that we need to update and improve our understanding the role of identity in conflict and political violence. Identity is not the only factor in the causes of the war, and changes in identities are not the only, nor most important consequences of the war, but for theories of war, the Russian invasion and war in Ukraine compels us take another look at how we understand the relationship between identity and war. In this paper we map out a theoretical framework for identity and conflict, and then discuss relevant aspects of identity in both Ukraine and Russia, with an emphasis on how identities might have contributed to the war and been changed as a consequence.
Speaker Bio: Yoshiko M. Herrera is Professor of Political Science at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research focuses on Russian & Eurasian politics, identity, and international norms. Herrera teaches courses on comparative politics, social identities and diversity, and a new course on the Russian war on Ukraine. She was a recipient of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award at UW-Madison in 2021, and a Distinguished Honors Faculty Award from the College of Letters & Science Honors Program at UW-Madison in 2024. She is the author of two books and an influential co-edited volume on Measuring Identity. Her most recent co-authored article, is “Don’t Look Back in Anger: Cooperation Despite Conflicting Historical Narratives” published in the American Political Science Review.