Description
This paper assesses the geopolitics of Europe’s protracted secessionist conflicts and how they shape and are being shaped by changing international and regional security orders. I argue there is a need to understand both the ‘unfinished business’ and the ‘new realities’ of these long-running conflicts and that international responses – or non-responses – to these conflicts are crucial in the formation of an emerging European security order. I first identify the analytical problems that must be addressed to inform better (or avoid worse) policy and political responses to protracted conflicts which I put in the context of the unfinished business of the wars of the 1990s and new realities that emerged since Kosovo’s UDI and the Russia-Georgia War (2008) and the Russia-Ukraine conflict (since 2014). Second, I discuss the policy and political problems presented by protracted conflicts arising from the limited number of poor and contested options decisionmakers have to choose from (such as recognition, forced reincorporation and so on). Third, to try and ameliorate these analytical and policy/political problems, I elaborate on the ‘new realities’ as a way to identify which factors should be included in analyses that can inform political choices about protracted conflicts and the emerging new European security order; specifically, the interdependencies and connections between local conflicts in regional conflict complexes; second order effects of protracted conflicts such as innovations in warfare and the presence of foreign fighters; and the precedents being set by attempts at (or neglect of) conflict management and resolution.
