Ra Mason, Pierre Bocquillon, Suzanne Doyle, Toby James, Soul Park and Matilde Rosina
The devastating war in Ukraine has transformed our understanding of military combat and international politics in the 21st Century. Until now, analyses of the effects of wars – including this one – have tended to be compartmentalised by sub-disciplines. These include International Relations (IR), Security Studies, International Political Economy (IPE), History, Historical Sociology, Public Administration and Psychology, among many others. In contrast, taken together, and addressed from an interdisciplinary perspective, a new set of studies shows how the war has had deep and complex “ripple” and “washback” effects. These are affecting human life; human development; economies; values and attitudes; policy and governance; and power distribution and relations around the world. This complexity, therefore, derives from both the number of actors involved, areas of human society affected and their interconnections. In other words, each of these layers of society have scope to feedback on one another and feedback loops may in turn affect the evolution of conflict and the possibility of its resolution in the future.
Reductive approaches must, therefore, be replaced with a more comprehensive, integrated analysis if specific lessons which are essential to preventing comparable future conflicts are to be learned from the War in Ukraine. Figure 1 (see below) illustrates the framework that we introduce. The integrated study of these ripple effects provides an invaluable understanding of the impact of the war. As such, the remainder of this article looks at these aspects in turn while highlighting their interconnections.
The war in Ukraine continues to rage on with daily deadly effect. Beyond the immediate death and trauma being dealt to life, which has, deservedly, been the focus of much media and public attention, it is also worth considering the impact upon human capital and the wider economy. The long-term consequences of the war on Ukraine’s total productivity are incalculable. For the time being, results show that losses in total productivity are estimated to plummet by about 7% up to 2035 and that the negative effects will fade away only slowly over the following decades. Moreover, these results should actually be taken with a degree of caution, as they might underestimate the true extent of the conflict’s impact.
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