The war in Ukraine and its consequences for the international order and North East Asia

Abstract

Russia's invasion of Ukraine presents many challenges to the international order. To understand what is at stake, we argue that the nature of the political regime matters to understand this conflict. We propose a classification of three different types of political regimes (empires, nation states and democracies) and propose a comparative analysis of a number of their institutional and economic dimensions: tendency towards geographical expansionism or fragmentation, cultural heterogeneity, focus of public spending and a number of other variables. We use this setup to analyze the situation in Northeast Asia as well as the consequences of the invasion of Ukraine for that region.