The unfortunate breakdown in prospects for minerals deal between Ukraine and the United States may open avenues for considering other pathways for environmental peacebuilding in the current conflict with Russia. A key stumbling point in trying to chart a peace agreement has been an inability of both sides to consider hybrid solutions which recognize the resource interdependencies that could benefit either side. Rather than having a stylized view of world order with ossified notions of hard borders and protectionist control, we need to consider creative options on how territories can share aspects of access and governance. Such a pragmatic view would not undermine American or Western principles and lead to a more durable peace agreement that does not compromise our values.
Current Western policy has framed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as an assault on “world order.” While the term has no international definition and is widely contested, at its core “world order” connotes a view where economically or militarily dominant nation-states police the planet. Putin and NATO are both captivated by a Cold War geopolitics of order that is no longer relevant to complex changes in environmental and social systems on our planet. We need to move from such a narrow view of World Order to a more naturalized vision of what I call “Earthly Order.” I define this term (in the context of my eponymous book from Oxford University Press) as governance that considers the constraints of planetary level natural processes when defining social, economic, and political systems. Thus, border delineation and enforcement of any flows of financial and human capital and ecological processes become intertwined in decision-making. Such an approach opens the way for developing what are called “superordinate goals” in psychological research which can be a highly effective mechanism for conflict resolution.
Hybridity of Borders
The late Sen. John McCain noted in 2014, Ukraine was the jewel of the Soviet crown because of its rich arable land, vast mineral wealth and massive manufacturing infrastructure. The fact that the bitter battle for Mariupoul has occurred at a steel plant is emblematic of the resource nationalism of this conflict. Instead of making this a hard fight between whether Ukraine’s border should be delineated along the old Ukrainian SFSR, or based on ethnic majoritarianism, we need to consider the underlying resource factors behind this invasion. Ukraine’s geography has given it highly arable land because of the river systems that bring alluvial deposits to its plains. The region was the bread basket for the Soviet Union and has continued to be a major supplier of grain since independence.
While hard borders can play a vital role in times of crisis, economic exchange that is linked to comparative advantage and market efficiencies provide a more natural means of crafting governance arrangements. Without relinquishing sovereignty Ukraine could develop an autonomous governance arrangement with the eastern territories. The flow of oil, gas, and even water (in the case of the North Crimean canal) across political borders has been another point of contention that has exacerbated the current conflict. If assurance mechanisms between nation-states could be developed around natural resource flows, the potential for conflict escalating to war would be severely reduced. On the western side of the Black Sea, Ukraine and Moldova have maintained a hybrid border arrangement where a sliver of Moldovan territory is sandwiched between Ukrainian lands (which I visited in 2018). The separatist region of Tranisteria is nearby with Russian troops present as well, and a frozen conflict situation has emerged.
The autonomous region of Adjara within Georgia has largely avoided war because a hybrid governance mechanism was established between the Georgian territory and the breakaway territory. The Russians maintained a military base within this territory as well until 2007. The capital of the region, Batumi, is a resource hub for oil from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, and its oil refinery handles Caspian oil from Azerbaijan. By “naturalizing” a notion of order in this vital Black Sea location and considering the vitality of resource infrastructure and market efficiency, a pragmatic series of concessions were made that satisfied all sides. Over a decade the breakaway region felt secure enough in its relationship with Georgia and vice versa that the constitutional court of Georgia is now in Adjara.
For those who think that such a path towards pragmatic peace would erode sovereignty, we only need to consider variations of national order that countries have accepted in the past. Iraqi Kurdistan provides one example of how a hybrid governance mechanism has been workable within the existing United Nations system. Until trust can be built to have more defined mechanisms for ascertaining preferences for self-governance, such hybridity is a way of both saving human lives and natural systems on which we all depend.
Environmental Concerns as a Motivator for Peace
The ecological damage and human cost of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine is horrendous. Both sides have disregarded ecological concerns with Russians attacking the ruins of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor and the Ukrainians destroying the Nord Stream pipeline. The more it is protracted the greater the risk of nuclear meltdowns at power plants or weapons usage (either through oceanic/terrestrial tests or in the war theater). Much as we must support Ukraine’s principled defense, we must also recognize a fundamental ground reality: An impaired planet due to stifled science or nuclear fallout will make any victory less sustainable for all of humanity.
The logic of such an approach is predicated not just in social and political science but in the natural science understanding of complex adaptive systems. For example, the development of cities has been well-studied and their growth follows many of the same “power laws” of scaling that we find in fundamental physics. A means of developing such a naturalized view of world order is to consider such resource complementarities through more nimble multilateral economic governance mechanisms such as the G20.
In the case of the Ukraine war, there are existing institutions of cooperation such as the Organization for Black Sea Economic Cooperation, which recognizes ecological connectivity and also has an environmental mandate. Henry Kissinger’s sharp comments at Davos this past year suggested land concessions for peace would be met with less opprobrium if seen from the lens of “Earthly Order.”
In his magnum opus on World Order, Kissinger identified power and legitimacy as the two key elements of a sustainable order. Add to this a recognition of natural systems of connectivity that transcend borders and we begin to chart a more durable geography of peace. However, the path to gaining such a naturalized vision of peace requires us to revisit some of the lessons of unconventional diplomacy from the Cold War era.
