Russia's invasion of Ukraine in late February 2022 caught many people by surprise. It should not have. This was an imperial war long in the making. It was a war that fulfilled the long-held needs and aspirations of Russia's president, his allies and dependents, and a large section of Russian society that had become willing accomplices in and cheerleaders for the state's imperial project. To paraphrase the sociologist Charles Tilly: war made Vladimir Putin, and Vladimir Putin made war. This book shows how.

Leningrad

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in Leningrad, today's Saint Petersburg, in 1952. The city young Vladimir knew bore the scars of its gruelling siege by the Nazis during the Second World War, a rundown wreck of broken buildings and hungry people. Thousands of orphaned, disowned and impoverished children roamed streets ruled by violent gangs. Putin shares his slight stature with many others of his generation, for they are the children of those who suffered most. Indeed, his may owe something to his mother's malnourishment.

Young Vladimir was raised in a shabby and spartan tenement block where the living accommodation was small and essential services communal. The Putins were by no means the worst off. Theirs was a middling lifestyle for 1950s’ Leningrad. Vladimir's father was a factory foreman. After a stint in the navy, he had served in an NKVD (secret police) unit operating behind enemy lines before transferring to the regular army where he was seriously injured. His paternal grandfather had reached an altogether more elevated status as Stalin's chef. He had served Lenin before that. Putin's mother worked in a factory too. Vladimir was the couple's third son, but his siblings were long dead before he was born. He was an unremarkable school student, but a resourceful and tough-minded player in a very rough city. He occasionally loitered with the street gangs but ultimately chose a different path for himself. Like young people on both sides of the Iron Curtain, Vladimir was captivated by spy movies. He wanted to serve the state, as his grandfather had. Judo club taught him the discipline and focus he needed. Legend has it that he presented himself to Leningrad's KGB headquarters and volunteered for service. The bemused officials turned him away and told him to apply again when he had obtained his law degree.

The 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno- Karabakh is an outlier to the story told in this book. Vladimir Putin was neither the engineer nor instigator of war. Russia was not even a party. The 44-day war that erupted in late September was caused by a long-standing dispute between Azerbaijan and Armenia over who should govern Nagorno-Karabakh and the seven Azerbaijani districts occupied by Armenians since 1992. The war's wider, imperial, dimension was secondary to this primary, local, dimension. Yet that imperial dimension is an important part of our story.

Russia used the rivalry between Armenia and Azerbaijan to cement and attempt to extend its influence in the southern Caucuses. Although sentimentally predisposed towards Armenia, Russia attempted to maintain equidistance between the two rivals. This required a delicate balance since the geopolitical sands shifted significantly over time. Dependence on Russian security guarantees made Armenia a willing and loyal member of Russia's sphere of privileged interest, of the CIS, CSTO and Eurasian Union. Resource-rich Azerbaijan, meanwhile, wriggled free from Russia's orbit but not in a westward direction. Resource wealth and strategic location afforded Azerbaijan freedom to manoeuvre itself. Moscow needed Azerbaijan as much as Azerbaijan needed Moscow, forcing the Kremlin to deal with Baku on more equal terms. But Azerbaijan's increasingly authoritarian government had little inclination to embrace the West as anything more than a trade and investment partner. Autocracy thus placed normative distance between Azerbaijan and the West. To maintain influence amidst these changing conditions, Russian policy adapted to circumstance, sometimes at the cost of contradiction. It offered itself as peace mediator and seems genuinely to have pursued a settlement that could have resolved the conflict and established more stable conditions for the exercise of influence. Simultaneously, however, it sold weapons to both sides – an unusual stance for a mediator.

Amidst the delicate shifts and contradictions of policy, was one striking continuity. Among the Kremlin's enduring ambitions was the establishment of a Russian military presence inside Azerbaijan. Russia had just such a presence in Armenia. Fearful of both Azerbaijan and Turkey – memories of the 1915 genocide of more than a million Armenians during the death-throes of the Ottoman Empire understandably loomed large in the new Armenian state's political imagination – independent Armenia looked to Russia for security from the first.

The West may not have known it, but Putin's Russia was at war with it long before missiles rained down on Kyiv in 2022. It was not a conventional style of war. After the annexation of Crimea, Western analysts had scrambled to put a label on what seemed to be a new Russian way of war. “Hybrid war”, “grey-area war”, “full-spectrum war”, “asymmetric war”, the “Gerasimov doctrine” were just some of the terms devised. All these labels captured some of the truth, but none told the whole story. One way of thinking about the war ethos that gripped Putin's Kremlin after he returned to the presidency in 2012 is offered by seventeenth-century English political theorist, Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes described a condition of anarchy, which he called the “state of nature”, where people were forced to compete in a zero-sum struggle for survival. The result was a permanent war of all against all. This was not a state of permanent battle but rather a disposition. Each person distrusted every other; each believed the other posed a threat and presumed that increments of security could be bought only at the expense of others; and thus force was a latent possibility in every social interaction. What mattered most for Hobbes was this disposition, not the instruments used to conduct the war.

This image well describes how third-term Putin understood Russia's relationship with the West. He assumed the West was waging hybrid war against Russia, using its soft power, economic levers, clandestine force, and sometimes its military might to forcibly change regimes and extend its hegemonic reach. Since NATO could not risk direct war with Russia owing to its nuclear arsenal, it seemed to the Kremlin that the West had found a way around that by fostering “colour revolutions”, corroding and changing governments from within to pull them into its political orbit. The zero-sum mentality that characterized Soviet strategic thought during the Cold War told Russian leaders that the Western orientation of many formerly communist republics and the “colour revolutions” were the effects of Western hegemonic aggrandizement. Putin and his allies believed that as a great power with its own exceptional destiny, Russia was entitled to its “zone of privileged interest”, an imperial space it controlled. For Russian nationalists like Putin, nation and empire were not discrete entities.

This chapter addresses the book’s first question by focusing on the Realist critique of classical Pragmatism. This insists that political interests corrupt processes of social learning and argues that power determines how best practice (and the public good) is defined. This criticism was levelled directly at Dewey by his contemporaries, especially Morgenthau and Niebuhr, and it continues to inform neorealism. Inspired by Dewey’s response, the chapter argues Pragmatism is not blind to power or self-interest, it simply emphasizes, like contemporary IR constructivists, that understandings of the self (its identity and its interests) are not fixed; they are instead contingent on the self’s experience of interacting with its material and social environment. The normative implication for Pragmatists is that theorists should render that process intelligent by subjecting it to ‘conscientious reflection’. That process is a political one to the extent access to a community of inquiry is contingent on power. Part of the Pragmatist ‘vocation’ is a commitment to balancing political power by supporting Deweyan ‘publics’: those who are indirectly affected by practice but excluded from the relevant communities of practice. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the implication for key concepts in Realist and Pragmatist thought, including tragedy, prudence and learning.

This chapter applies Pragmatic Constructivism to assess communities of practice in global health governance. It focuses on the problem of containing contagious diseases. This is one of the tasks of the World Health Organization (WHO) and its practice of declaring a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). Given the uncertainty surrounding such a practice, which could lead to the isolation of an effected state, the decision inevitably involves judgement calls rather than the pre-reflexive implementation of pre-planned steps. Applying the first Pragmatic Constructivist test to this practice means asking if the community of practice charged with making that judgement is properly constituted and sufficiently inclusive. The evidence suggests that it is not. The chapter problematizes practice that unduly privileges technical (in this case epidemiological) expertise over social and political advice. A second application of the two Pragmatic Constructivist tests focuses on an inconsistency internal to global health practices as they relate to the distribution of vaccines. Practices that achieve more comprehensive coverage, such as the local manufacture of vaccines, are being prevented by intellectual property practices. The chapter considers how the knowledge of the Covid pandemic challenges the epistemic authority of intellectual property practices.

This chapter begins to answer the book’s second question: how should international practitioners act and adapt. It serves as a bridge between the theoretical discussion in Part I and the empirical analysis in Part II. The chapter identifies a ‘Pragmatic Constructivist’ approach to IR and discusses how it can be operationalized. That approach focuses on problems that are immanent within, and emerge from, actual international practice. A problem occurs when a practice fails to keep pace with material change, when lived experiences suffer and when epistemic doubt emerges. The chapter illustrates this with a discussion of how John Dewey and Jane Addams were influenced by the material transformations of their time and how those processes ‘eclipsed’ the public interest. The chapter draws parallels between the emerging ‘associations’ and ‘publics’ that early Pragmatists wrote about and the ‘communities of practice’ that contemporary constructivists identify as the ‘software’ of global governance. It extends IR research by arguing that Pragmatic Constructivists can assess how well communities of practice learn to ameliorate lived experiences in the face of contemporary global challenges. That assessment is based on two tests: the extent to which communities of practice are characterized by inclusive reflexivity and deliberative practical judgement.

This chapter draws conclusions based on the impacts of exclusionary and hierarchical practices, the relative value of ‘top-down’ reform and ‘bottom-up’ activism, and the place of global learning in a gradualist approach to progressive change. Beyond that, the chapter considers how an approach inspired by American Pragmatism informs Global International Relations, which seeks to construct a discipline that is more inclusive of non-Western perspectives. The chapter draws parallels between the book’s reading of classical Pragmatism and non-Western ‘cosmologies’ like Confucianism. This has been introduced to contemporary Western IR mainly through the works of Yaqing Qin. The chapter does, however, build on other works identifying resonances across Deweyan Pragmatism and Confucian philosophy. The chapter argues that if the Pragmatist turn in Western IR continues, then it can be more easily harmonized with non-Western approaches. This at least signposts a path ‘towards’ Global IR, even if it does not fix the path’s end point. Indeed, the chapter argues that we should follow such signs because they do not fix the destination. Those points are for practitioners and global publics to construct and reconstruct as they work collectively to mitigate lived problems through communities of practice that are inclusive, reflexive, creative and deliberative.

This chapter addresses the book’s first question by focusing on what classical Pragmatism can tell us about the ‘practice turn’ in International Relations. It assesses the value – both descriptive and normative – of defining practice as pre-reflexive or habitual. Dewey was clear: habits can be useful, but only if those subject to their hold can improvise when practice produces unwanted consequences. Applying this to International Relations, the chapter shows how a failure to adequately reflect on the situational value of an ideological commitment to ‘democracy promotion’ – what Bourdieusian-informed Practice theory might call a Western ‘habitus’ – contributed to the maladapted response to the humanitarian crises in Syria and Myanmar. This again points to the centrality of reflection, deliberation, judgement and learning to the Pragmatist approach. The chapter develops that argument by examining how Dewey’s ‘pedagogic creed’ aimed to put individuals and societies in control of their habits and how his critique of the unhelpful hierarchies in formal education was extrapolated to form a theory of social learning, which included an emphasis on the role democracy plays in facilitating the reflexivity and deliberation.

This chapter applies Pragmatic Constructivism to interpret and assess two communities of practice: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which frames the problem of global warming, and the Conference of Parties (COP), which meets annually to discuss international society’s response within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Applying the book’s two normative tests – inclusive reflexivity and deliberative practical judgment – the chapter demonstrates how the IPCC maintains epistemic authority by appropriately managing the boundary that separates expert knowledge from non-expert opinion. The analysis of COP operates at a micro level (e.g. how physical space at the Conference is organized) and the macro level (e.g. whether it would be better to organize deliberations on a ‘minilateral’ basis). The chapter notes how this debate has been bypassed by the Paris Agreement and the decision to commit to Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) for emissions reduction. It assesses the consequences of that collective judgement in light of the progress made at the 2021 Glasgow COP. The chapter concludes that the problem should now be framed in terms of states delivering on the commitments they have made, and it considers the usefulness of nationalist dispositions and citizens assemblies in that process.

This chapter introduces the book and its context. It argues that the philosophical Pragmatist’s commitment to experimentalism and learning, and the social and political theory emerging from that, is well placed to address global security, climate and health challenges. To recognize that, International Relations and ‘new constructivism’ has to bring Pragmatism in from the margins. The chapter summarizes IR’s current relationship to Pragmatism focusing on the methodologies of analytical eclecticism, the historical accounts of the progressive foreign policy agenda that classical Pragmatism informed and the attempts to use Pragmatism as a tool of analytical and normative analysis. The chapter sets three questions, which structure the rest of the book: (1) what can classical Pragmatism bring to debates in IR, including those centred on the perennial question of how norms, practices and interests interact to influence international society and its practitioners? (2) How, if at all, should international practices and practitioners adapt in the face of pressing global security, climate and health challenges? (3) Given the Pragmatist answer to these first two questions, what normative conclusions can we come to about actual practice in contemporary international society? A summary of how each chapter contributes to answering these questions is provided.