Professor Eka Akobia, Dean of the School of Governance, has published an article entitled “Why Russia’s War in Ukraine Is Not NATO’s Fault: Popular Realism and the Misattribution of Responsibility” in the international peer-reviewed journal Connections: The Quarterly Journal.

The journal is the flagship publication of the Partnership for Peace Consortium of Defense Academies and Security Studies Institutes. It is indexed in Scopus, JSTOR, EBSCO, CrossRef, ProQuest and other scholarly databases. It has an SJR score of 0.244, a Q2 ranking and an h-index of 8.

The article critically examines prominent interpretations of realism in international relations that identify NATO enlargement as the primary cause of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. It introduces the concept of “Popularized Realism” to explain how academic arguments lose essential qualifications and contextual conditions as they enter public and political discourse, turning complex theoretical explanations into simplified, deterministic claims.

Professor Akobia demonstrates how these interpretations diminish the significance of Ukraine’s sovereignty and agency, overstate the risks of escalation and shift responsibility for Russia’s aggression onto abstract structural factors. By restoring a broader historical context and drawing on diverse theoretical perspectives, the article challenges these simplified accounts. It underscores the importance of preserving the nuance and analytical rigor of international relations theory in public debate and policymaking.

The full article is available here.