Even the most difficult and protracted negotiations are preferable to the spectre of further armed conflict.
Confidence Building
Is there a future for cooperation between the OSCE and China?
Engagement with China must not lead to a further weakening of the OSCE human dimension, which is already under a lot of pressure.
The OSCE’s Afghanistan Challenge
The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan poses local, regional and global stability challenges for the OSCE and its participating States.
Trade as a confidence-building measure in protracted conflicts: the cases of Georgia and Moldova compared
Published in 2019 in Eurasian Geography and Economics, my colleague Nino Kemoklidze and I investigate the extent to which economic confidence-building measures (CBMs) contribute to conflict settlement in this article. Academic and policy literature on the post-Soviet...
In Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskiy must tread carefully or may end up facing another Maidan uprising
It’s been six years since the start of the Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine, which led to the ousting of then-President Viktor Yanukovych. By the time his successor Petro Poroshenko was elected in May 2014, the domestic political scene in Ukraine and the geopolitical dynamics in the contested EU-Russia neighbourhood surrounding it had fundamentally altered.
Ukraine presidential election: young comedian leads polls, but country’s dangerous divisions are no joke
Ukraine’s presidential election campaign is a tragic indictment of the country’s current political state. Most candidates have adopted populist strategies, voters appear highly irrational in their preferences, trust in the political system and its leading representatives is extremely low, and the country remains deeply divided and perpetually stuck in a systemic social, political, and economic crisis partly of its own making.
The Dynamics of Emerging De-Facto States: Eastern Ukraine in the Post-Soviet Space
What are the causes and consequences of the crisis in Ukraine, and what has been the nature of local, national, and external actors’ involvement in it? These are the questions that my colleague Tetyana Malyarenko and I examine in this book which represents...
Economic Diplomacy and Connectivity: What Role for the OSCE?
Economic connectivity has been at the heart of the OSCE’s Second Dimension for more than four decades. The Second Dimension may not always have received the attention that it deserves, but the successes that the OSCE has had in using the tools of economic diplomacy to...
Unsustainable Status Quo or Costly Stability?
Since the conclusion of the Minsk II agreement in February 2015, the situation in eastern Ukraine has evolved into a seemingly permanent yet highly volatile state of “no peace, no war.”