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Colonial and anti-colonial discourses of peace in Russia’s war against Ukraine | Vortrag von Dr. Ksenia Oksamytna

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Colonial and anti-colonial discourses of peace in Russia’s war against Ukraine 
based on forthcoming International Affairs article with Bohdana Kurylo and Yulia Ioffe

This article analyses competing discourses of peace in Russia’s war against Ukraine by asking how they reproduce, enable or resist relations of colonial domination. It examines peace proposals advanced by Russia, Ukraine and aspiring mediators, such as the Trump administration and the Group of Friends for Peace on the Ukraine Crisis, which China and Brazil co-founded at the United Nations. We argue that these peace discourses are structured around three competing logics: Russia’s colonial entitlement, mediators’ colonial enablement and Ukraine’s anti-colonial resistance. Russia framed peace as a pacification of allegedly chaotic Ukraine in a great power concert with the US, demanding limits on Ukraine’s internal and external sovereignty. The Trump administration and the China–Brazil initiative did not fully reject these premises, treating Ukrainian concessions as a route to stability and validating spheres-of-influence thinking. Ukraine articulated peace as sovereign agency and justice, advancing a distinct variety of anti-colonialism that cast Ukraine as a security provider, not just a victim, while sometimes aligning itself with European modernity. By reframing peace discourses as sites of colonial politics and extending existing accounts of anti-colonial agency, the article contributes to the scholarship on wartime diplomacy, the normative foundations of multipolarity, and varieties of anti-colonialism.