“In the heat of the devastating war in Ukraine, Arel and Driscoll have given us a cool and courageous account of the complex and fraught prehistory of Putin's invasion. Their argument is the most compelling account of how a civil war in a divided country turned into a hot war between two neighbouring states.”
— Ronald Grigor Suny, William H. Sewell, Jr. Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of History and Emeritus Professor of Political Science, The University of Michigan and Emeritus Professor of Political Science and History, The University of Chicago
“Contrary to explanations that emphasize the foreign origins of the war in Ukraine, Arel and Driscoll understand it instead through a logic of escalating violence, rooting it in significant part in domestic Ukrainian political dynamics. In doing so, they bring to light new aspects of the war and Moscow’s miscalculations leading up to its full-scale invasion in February 2022.”
— Mark R. Beissinger - Henry W. Putnam Professor, Department of Politics, Princeton University
“It is impossible to fully comprehend the onset and course of the full-scale Ukraine-Russia war that began with the Russian invasion in February 2022 without understanding the politics and violence that preceded it. Using a strategic action model as a guide, Arel and Driscoll’s Ukraine’s Unnamed War provides the definitive account of the Ukraine-Russia conflict from 2013–2021. Eschewing overgeneralization and writing with a style accessible to non-specialists, the authors show, in detail, how the decisions, agency, and identity of local Ukrainian actors prevented a political solution and developed the conditions that would spark a major conventional war in Europe.”
— Roger Petersen - Arthur and Ruth Sloan Professor of Political Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
“The ‘unnamed war’ in this brilliantly argued, comprehensively researched, and historically accurate book began as a civil war within Ukraine primarily fought between factions of what Russia has long imagined as their world. From this perspective, Arel’s and Driscoll’s analytic model reveals missed opportunities for a fragile peace that might have avoided Russia’s imperialist invasion, where we can now envision only an endless war of attrition.”
— David D. Laitin - Professor of Political Science, Stanford University
“Arel and Driscoll offer a meticulous and nuanced account of the developments in Ukraine that preceded the Russian invasion of 2022. After the antigovernment Maidan revolution in 2014 in Kyiv, Russian President Vladimir Putin moved to annex Crimea in a bloodless operation enabled by the popular local rejection of the Maidan revolution and by the defection of Crimean elites to the Russian state. Events were quite different in the eastern region of Donbas. … At the root of this violence [were] … real divisions between those Ukrainians who aligned with Ukraine and those who aligned with Russia.”
— Maria Lipman, Senior Visiting Fellow, George Washington University (full review at Foreign Affairs here.)
“A reader informed by the wisdom of hindsight will find the application of theories of civil war to the Donbas case academically rigorous and thoroughly researched.”
— Pavel K Baev, Peace Research Institute of Oslo (full Journal of Peace Research book note here).
“A controversial issue is the authors’ use of the term civil war to describe the early phase of the conflict in Donbas. The authors are careful to stress that they do not agree with the offensive and misleading way in which official Russian sources have used this term in the context of Donbas. They also marshal considerable evidence to underline the fluid nature of the situation in Donbas between March and August 2014, the important role of local actors during this period, Russia’s cautious reaction to early developments in Donbas, and the way in which Kyiv’s reactions to the situation there often made a difficult situation even worse. … Even those who disagree with some of the authors’ arguments will greatly benefit from its excellent survey of the dramatic developments that preceded Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.”
— Ivan Jaworsky, Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science, University of Waterloo (full review at The Russian Review Here)
In focusing on the decade-long prelude to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Dominique Arel and Jesse Driscoll have provided an excellent and accessible account of the situation in Ukraine on the eve of the current war. … They provide a complex reading of the process that led to the war in eastern Ukraine, negating the distortions of Russian state propaganda as well as the simplistic analyses of the conflict that circulate in the Western politics and media. … Arel and Driscoll allow the reader to imagine themselves in a situation similar to that of the residents of eastern Ukraine in those critical months of 2014, when predictable outcomes for political actions became confusing and obscure, and calculations and decisions had to be made quickly, with limited and often distorted information, colored by personal emotions and fears for one’s own and one’s family’s social and political position.
— Douglas J. Cremer, Woodbury University (full review at The European Legacy here.)
“Arel and Driscoll’s book stands out for its strong focus on local Ukrainian agency in the events that led to the war in Donbas. The authors are rigorous in their analysis, are meticulous in assembling and analyzing evidence that supports each of their arguments, and are committed to restoring a detailed picture of the complexity of actors and events without sacrificing the clarity of their observations. While describing the Ukrainian roots of the conflict, they also provide a better understanding of Russian influences among various ethnic (Russian and Ukrainian) communities in the southern and eastern regions of Ukraine. … As thick as the “fog of the war” might sometimes appear, the authors remind us that rigorous social science research has in its hands important tools that permit us to resist the temptation of simple, yet erroneous narratives. This book provides salutary reading for those who despair at the ubiquity of toxic discourses that contribute to the continuation of violence and destruction. Arel and Driscoll show that public narratives are crucially important because they define how different actors perceive and react to the events, especially in situations of uncertainty and asymmetry in information. But the facts continue to matter, and reality cannot be reduced to its interpretations.”
— Tatiana Kasperski, Södertörn University, Stockholm (full review at H-Diplo here.)
In Ukraine’s Unnamed War: Before the Russian Invasion of 2022, Dominique Arel and Jesse Driscoll cogently explain how the 2014 Donbas war started, how it was fought, and why it was difficult to end. Most notably, the authors’ argument to reconceptualize it as a civil war, rather than simply a proxy conflict between Russia and the West, is both provocative and compelling. As such, the book provides a multilayered analysis by interweaving elements of social identity and rational choice theory while offering uniquely incisive insight into how the public narratives of the conflict—from Western, Ukrainian, and Russian viewpoints—impacted public perceptions of it prior to Russia’s 2022 invasion. Taken together, the book is a must read for policymakers and the general public … While the authors hold no disillusions regarding Russian aggression, their emphasis on Ukrainian political agency will likely provoke Western readers to rethink their previous conceptualizations of what exactly unfolded in Ukraine and why, including the extent of Russia’s role.
— Robert Hink, Assistant Professor, Air War College (full review at Political Science Quarterly here)
“Arel and Driscoll seek to explain the outbreak of war in Eastern Ukraine in 2014. Their primary argument is that ‘the war in Donbas was … a civil war at its root.’ … Arel and Driscoll are aware that similar claims have been a staple of Russian propaganda, and they stress that they use the term ‘civil war’ as it is used in the literature on that topic. Compared to works that indeed resemble Russian propaganda, Ukraine’s Unnamed War is better in two important ways. First, the empirical argument is based on a rational choice model rooted in theories of conflict … Second, the empirical work is much more nuanced; Arel and Driscoll recognize that much of the evidence is ambiguous. The picture they draw is plausible, and their analysis of the dynamics among actors in Donbas is illuminating. This makes their book well worth reading, even if one rejects the civil war thesis. Not everyone will connect the dots as they do. As they recognize, there is a battle of narratives.”
— Paul D’Anieri, University of California Riverside (full review at Perspectives on Politics here).