The untold risks of war

In this wespennest and Eurozine exclusive, Mary Kaldor, author of New and Old Wars, Global Security Cultures and forthcoming book Experimental Junctures, speaks about her views on  security strategies, war economics, commercial warfare, pacifism, neutrality and the risks of nuclear war from a European perspective.     

Andrea Zederbauer: I’d like to start on a conceptual note. In your books, you focus on the typology of wars and security strategies. How would you describe the type of war we see in Ukraine?

Mary Kaldor: In many ways, it looks like a classic, old war. Old wars are deep-rooted contests between regular forces. The inner tendency of these wars is to escalation, to throw more and more at a fight to the bitter end.

Rather than escalating tension, new wars tend to sustain conflict. Indeed, military battle is rather rare in new wars. Territory is controlled through political rather than military means, by seizing administrative buildings, for example, and expelling civilians who don’t agree with you, or those of a different ethnicity. Most of the violence is directed towards civilians. New wars usually involve a mixture of state and non-state actors.

They are characterized by a combination of oligarchy, stealing, making money through violence and extremist identity politics, whether focused on religion or ethnicity. They are incredibly difficult to end, because warring factions benefit from the violence itself rather than from winning.

I think Russia is focused on fighting a ‘new war’. In 2013, just before the annexation of Crimea and the takeover of Donetsk and Luhansk, Valery Gerasimov, the Russian army’s chief of staff, published an article called ‘Non-Linear War’. What he meant by this was very close to what I mean by new war. He said, it’s very easy to create chaos and disorder using what they call in Russia ‘political technology’ – special forces, local dissidents. What happened in Donetsk and Luhansk was a playbook for nonlinear war. Russia tried to take over the whole of southern Ukraine by persuading local dissidents to seize administrative buildings. But everywhere, except for Donetsk and Luhansk, they were thwarted by citizens. In a curious way, Russia’s conventional invasion strategy in February 2022 was an aberration to its new war tactics.

Russia is portraying this conflict as an ethnic conflict between Ukrainian and Russian speakers. The very nature of the Russian regime is very typical of what you see in new war contexts. It’s a kleptocratic regime that is legitimizing its position, on the one hand, with an imperialist narrative and, on the other, with an ethnic-Russian narrative. It’s about identity politics and making money from the state.

In Syria, Georgia and Africa, as well as Ukraine, Russia has engaged in systematic looting and sexual violence – tactical violence against civilians characteristic of new wars. The situation in Ukraine, for the moment, is more like an old war, but it could easily become a new war.

Andrea Zederbauer: Last September German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said that ‘we are not at war, but we are no longer at peace either’. When trying to find the logic of Trumpian strategy, British historian Adam Tooze, who calls himself an ‘enthusiastic reader’ of National Security Strategies, wrote in December 2025: ‘The old new Cold War is dead. Long live the new old Cold War.’ This shows that even professionals in the field of history and politics are struggling to find terminology that adequately grasps the current European and global situation. But to assess the risk we face, it is important to understand which situation we find ourselves in.

Mary Kaldor: I think the situation we are facing is very different from the old Cold War. The old Cold War was a kind of imaginary war that provided a certain order in the world. It divided the world up: the US had its hegemony over Western countries, which was the bulk of the world, and Russia had its own spheres of influence. There was a semblance of agreement about the rules. Non-interference was absolutely key.

I don’t know quite whether Trump imagines himself reproducing the Cold War or nineteenth-century imperialism. But today’s situation is much more unpredictable and transactional. It’s not really about international politics. It’s about what can be gained in terms of mineral deals or whatever. So, I don’t think the new old Cold War description fits.

You could say that we’re arming up for some imagined scenario with both Russia and China. But, at the same time, there are many real wars going on. My concern is that we’re moving towards a global new war. And global new wars are terribly difficult to end. Turbulence, instability, violence against civilians, a rise in crime, all become the new normal – as in the Balkans. Anti-migrant sentiment, polarization around ethnic issues – all of these things come together. My worry is that it’s going to be very difficult to escape this kind of scenario in the future.

Andrea Zederbauer: I would like to focus for a moment on war economy, which is integral to your research. Is Russia more of a threat to Europe because of its economic strength or its weakness?

Mary Kaldor: In new war economies, armed groups finance fighting through violence and extortion: looting, pillaging, charging at checkpoints, smuggling. The Russian war economy, based largely on oil revenues devoted to military production, is more classical. But with the price of oil falling, I think the Russian economy is going to do really badly this year. And only 20% of the Russian population benefits from its war economy; many people are really feeling the pinch.

I don’t know if there will be economic pressure on Putin to end the war, but clearly he believes he can just keep going. He’s calculating on Ukrainians giving up after he has destroyed the country’s energy infrastructure, its hospitals and schools.

Sarah Waring: You co-wrote a PeaceRep report with Luke Cooper published in September 2025, which compares the US peace proposal and the Ukraine-Europe proposal. Trump, deep in transactional oligarchy, is suggesting an agreement based on territorial lines. Is this an ‘old peace’ agreement proposal?

Mary Kaldor: That’s exactly what it is. The weird thing about peace-making is that it usually presupposes negotiations with old war actors. In the period after 1989, when we saw a huge upsurge in peace negotiations, mediators tried to reach a compromise between warring parties. But, because armed groups were benefiting from violence, it was terribly difficult to get them to the negotiating table. If you do manage, it’s only possible if their political and economic positions are acknowledged as part of the peace agreement. Top down peace agreements in new war situations entrench warring parties. They entrench ethnic warlords.

The 1995 Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnian War is often considered the perfect agreement – a high point in peace negotiations. And yet, it still requires NATO and European troops to keep it going and more money per head than was the case with aid via the Marshall Plan to Europe after the Second World War. Bosnia is still totally dysfunctional, because ethnic warlords were guaranteed positions in this agreement, and there’s no way of changing that.

The American model for a peace agreement in Ukraine is very similar. It doesn’t look at any of the underlying factors that contribute to the war. It’s seen as an agreement at the top between Zelensky and Putin about territory and ethnicity. Russia seems to have no interest in reaching an agreement. Equally, the US proposal is particularly transactional because of Trump’s interests. The only sections that are fully worked out are about American access to minerals and US and Russian access to seized assets. But Trump’s interests are secondary to Putin wanting to keep the war going. Russia is demanding territory it hasn’t even captured and is absolutely unwilling to compromise on that. Ukraine has said that it would be willing to withdraw troops from some territory if it could be internationally administered. But Russia is saying no. I’m quite sceptical about whether any peace agreement can be reached this way.

The PeaceRep report you mentioned came out of a discussion with Ukrainian human rights groups and Russian anti-war activists. We argue that people should come first in negotiations, not ethnicity and territory. The discussion led to a campaign called People First, which is campaigning for the release of prisoners of war, Ukrainian civilians captured by soldiers in occupied territories and forcibly deported to Russia, especially the 5,000 children, and the over 900 Russians who have been imprisoned for protesting against the war.

It is not that you shouldn’t negotiate and shouldn’t manage conflicts, but you need to mediate at many different levels about concrete things to improve the situation of people on the ground. You need to focus on ceasefires, ending sieges, protecting nuclear power plants, rather than trying, in the middle of a war, to reach a final political settlement – though, of course, that’s Russia’s goal.

Andrea Zederbauer: Let’s stay with the conflict management process for a moment. When Russia occupied Crimea and parts of the Donbas in early 2014, Ukraine was a neutral state. And yet, despite this neutrality, Russia violated numerous international agreements, including the UN Charter, the Helsinki Final Act, the Budapest Memorandum and so on. How should one expect the Ukrainian population to accept or even believe in any new agreement?

Mary Kaldor: They can’t and it’s awful. The worst was the Budapest Memorandum, when Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees that the Russia’s revoked. So, no, they can’t expect anything from an agreement with Russia.

In the rest of Europe, we are seeing a big push to increase defence spending on the assumption that Russia represents an old-fashioned military threat. But my feeling is that Russia just wants to undermine Europe, particularly the European Union. It wants to undermine Western societies, democracies – although we’re doing quite a good job of that ourselves. Ukrainians had huge demonstrations – the Revolution of Dignity, the Orange Revolution – that posed an alternative for the Russian people, an alternative of democracy. Russia’s main goal is creating disorder, by stepping up what are called hybrid threats: a combination of misinformation, sabotage, drone attacks, attacking undersea cables. That and, of course, above all, support for the far right. Russia wants to see the rise of the far right and the disintegration of the European Union.

Sarah Waring: Ivan Krastev rang an alarm bell when he gave a talk at Presseclub Concordia in Vienna at the end of 2025, reminding us that Europe doesn’t have an official body that decides on its defence strategy or a unified army but rather defence companies making decisions about weaponization and military strategies. What do you think about corporations like Palantir dictating the terms of war, and even international law? Will the dominance of defence companies be the defining factor in how Europe handles Russian aggression? Or do you think that the Coalition of the Willing has a strong enough political position to balance out corporate powerplay?

Mary Kaldor: Well, that’s the big question. I think we’re at an inflection point where it could go either way. I published a book 40 years ago, The Baroque Arsenal,1 about how large-scale weapon systems, aircraft, tanks are becoming too expensive, too complex and too vulnerable for modern warfare. We see this in Ukraine. I visited NATO recently, and what I found  really alarming wasn’t Palantir – although that’s alarming enough – but the role of classic prime contractors. Due to the relationship between prime contractors and European governments, increases in defence spending are going to be largely spent on armoured military equipment. A Kiel Institute study shows that 90% of procurement budgets in European countries are going on such armaments.2

The tragedy is that we’re increasing defence spending at the expense of welfare and foreign aid, and we’re wasting it. It’s a very dangerous trend. And if you combine that with the rise of the far right, what might happen becomes really frightening.

Andrea Zederbauer: When thinking of war zones, you seem to derive your sprinkle of hope from ‘islands of agreement’. How should these function? How can one build upon these islands?

Mary Kaldor: The Zaporizhzhia Agreement for a localized ceasefire to repair powerlines at the Russian-occupied nuclear power plant is a good example. The UN-brokered Black Sea Grain Initiative ended Russia’s grain blockade is another – even though Russia then broke the agreement and Ukraine had to open up a new naval corridor to its ports after attacking Russian ships in the Black Sea. Numerous agreements occur at local levels: the evacuation of civilians, access to humanitarian aid. Cindy Wittke calls these ‘islands of agreement’: little agreements that happen all the time and maybe make the situation of ordinary people a little bit better.

In new war situations, whether you’re talking about Syria, Sudan or Congo, numerous local agreements are made that aren’t necessarily pro-peace such as tactical agreements among armed groups. There are some horrible agreements we’ve uncovered about the mutual deportation of people and mutual ethnic cleansing. Many agreements on Syria that involved Russia, Türkiye and Iran weren’t good. Warring parties had the dominant voice.

But good agreements about reducing violence and providing access for humanitarian assistance also happen, which, on the whole, benefit from international multilateral support. Agreements involving the UN or the World Health Organization, where civilians had a bigger voice, are more likely to reduce violence or provide access to humanitarian aid. I was involved in quantitative work on agreements in Africa, which found that local agreements where the UN was present tend to last longer than other types of agreements.3

Andrea Zederbauer: You differentiate between objective and subjective risk in your writing. Being safe and feeling safe, the perception of threat and actual threats, both individually and on regional, national or global levels, are not necessarily the same thing. Given the multiple layers involved in what we face, how can we detect objective risks, those that are actually real?

Mary Kaldor: Ulrich Beck is very useful in this regard. He describes climate change, terrorism and new wars as global manufactured uncertainty. Trump, Putin and other right-wing leaders, meanwhile, are positing the imagined risks of the past within a national framework. Everything they’re doing is making situations worse, because they’re not addressing the transnational, technically manufactured type of risk that we really are facing. They’re trying to control the perception of risk, which they see as coming from a combination of external threats and migrants, other ethnicities.

We see this in Britain, where I’m from. There you have a Labour government taking an extreme anti-migrant position, increasing defence spending, including spending on nuclear weapons. Military spending is bad for the economy. It increases inequality. Labour is doing the absolute opposite of what it set out to do. People have lost trust in the government.

Other European countries like Germany are taking a similar line. Only new movements can shift this. Look at the movement in support of Palestine. What we see is incredible support for international law from global public opinion. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza are the most documented wars in history. Everyone is collecting evidence for future court cases against war crimes. On the one hand, we’re seeing total disdain for international law on the part of governments and, on the other hand, popular support. It’s positive that we’re seeing the growth of anti-corruption movements across the world.

Sarah Waring: The war in Ukraine, as you say, is highly documented. Civilian and institutional documentation projects are well organized and coordinated. The multiple forms of documentation, from standard audio interviews and photographic evidence to logging social media communication and fact-checking, make the task immense. Archiving documentation, especially digital material, in a form that could be useful in a court of law, perhaps decades down the line, is a huge challenge. Given that international law was written before the digital revolution, do you see a disjuncture between legal frameworks and the type of evidence available, what is permissible in a court of law?

Mary Kaldor: Yes, I do, but there’s an awful lot in international law that’s still very relevant. The growth of human rights law and international criminal law in the post-war period has been very significant. And how human rights law and international criminal law is combined has become very important.

Andrea Zederbauer: So, you think that we do have the tools, but we don’t have the situation to apply them? This leads me to another term you use: ‘hybrid peace’. Could you explain the concept? What lessons can we draw from the Bosnian War or the Yugoslav Wars in relation to liberal hybrid peace, where it failed and what that failure can teach us?

Mary Kaldor: I think we use the word hybrid a little too much. I used ‘hybrid’ to refer to situations like Bosnia, where a peace agreement is reached – which is, of course, better than outright fighting – but freezes the situation, where none of the underlying problems are resolved. The Balkans typifies that.

In a recent report on European security, one argument we make contrasts the Baltic states as the front line of old-fashioned military threats and the Balkans as the front line of hybrid threats.4 What you see in the Balkans is precisely a legacy of the wars of the 1990s: ethnic polarization, crony capitalist/ oligarchic regimes, the privatization of armed forces, the spread of militias and armed groups. And, of course, deep inequalities. The decline of industry, dating back to the Yugoslav period, made people’s lives very precarious. All of these things make people vulnerable to misinformation, the political sabotage of technology that is characteristic of hybrid threats.

Sarah Waring: Austria is keen on its neutrality, the full legitimacy of which comes with a question mark. What do you think of the notion of neutrality as a security strategy? Is it effective?

Mary Kaldor: Neutrality is very difficult in a globalized world. It means keeping out of everything that we’ve been talking about. But new wars don’t respect borders. If your concern is the capture of territory, then perhaps neutrality has its place. But then again Ukraine was neutral. Russia claims that Ukraine’s bid to join NATO changed this position. I think the proposed expansion of NATO was a problem, but I don’t agree with those who say it was why Russia invaded Ukraine. NATO, however, being based on an old-fashioned, old-war fighting strategy, could be seen to pose an objective threat. It’s good that countries are integrated into collective security alliances, but NATO needs to change in very profound ways. I wouldn’t be against the expansion of NATO if it changed its whole idea of what constitutes security. After the end of the Cold War, it would have been much better to expand the Helsinki process, and to develop a more humane form of security that, by its very nature, can’t be threatening. I still think that’s what we should do.

It would be a huge mistake for Europe to adopt nuclear weapons and focus on conventional defensive postures now that the US is threatening military withdrawal. But more importantly, we have to think about countering hybrid wars. And neutrality cannot help against hybrid threats. It might help against military threats, but I’m not even convinced of that. Neutrality is a product of the old perception of risk, the old territorial war. I’m not sure what it means any longer.

Sarah Waring: And then there’s pacifism. In Germany, what we can call the extreme left is calling to withdraw support to Ukraine from what is deemed a pacifist’s position. But is this viable in relation to new wars? Eurozine published ‘What Makes a Humanist Kill?’, an article by Yevhen Shybalov, a journalist, a pacifist who became a soldier, which identifies injustice as his motivation to abandon pacifism. Do you think pacifism can save us from attack?

Mary Kaldor: No, I don’t. I’m not a pacifist, and I’ve spent many years thinking hard about why I’m not. I’ve been very active throughout my life in the peace movement and regard myself as a peace activist. But being a peace activist is somewhat different from being a pacifist. Those who say we shouldn’t support Ukraine with arms are essentially saying we should surrender. I know there’s quite a convincing argument that says, ‘wouldn’t we all have been much better off if we hadn’t fought Hitler in the Second World War, and we’d just surrendered. Many people would have lived rather than died’. Would we have been better off?

But my view is connected to international law. We’ve spent the last few hundred years developing non-violent mechanisms for resolving conflict, elections, courts, policing. Police are permitted to use force. Everyone is permitted to defend themselves if somebody attacks them and there’s nobody there to help them. Self-defence is allowed in a civil situation, not just in war. It’s necessary for justice. But the laws of war are much looser than human rights law. Under the laws of war, you are permitted to kill civilians if it’s necessary to achieving your military objective. And I think that should be unacceptable. I would argue against pacifism. But I would also argue for something in between. It may be a utopian idea, but I think we need a form of global policing – global, accountable, democratic policing.

War has become impossible. The nineteenth-century calculation that you could capture territory militarily is no longer possible against an equivalent enemy in the twenty-first century, because technology has advanced to such a degree that you always reach stalemate, unless you escalate to human extinction. Wars don’t make sense anymore unless the individuals participating in them are gaining from the violence. It isn’t that Putin has to win in Ukraine. It’s rather that it helps him domestically, it mobilizes popular support. If he feels he can keep on going indefinitely, that might be in his interest but not in order to win. I mean, he probably wouldn’t say no to winning, but even if he knows he can’t win, it’s still worth his while. And that, to me, is completely unacceptable. Not that it would be any more acceptable if he could win, but I’m saying that wars don’t make rational sense. The idea that you can go to war for state interest is not only unacceptable but it’s also technically impossible nowadays. Even Greenland could have defended itself against America.

Andrea Zederbauer: So, you don’t see a nuclear war on the horizon?

Mary Kaldor: I think it’s perfectly possible. It’s quite striking that most German elites have become pro-nuclear. Because Russia has nuclear weapons, it’s assumed that Europe should also have nuclear weapons, which I find incredibly dangerous. The only thing that stops countries from using nuclear weapons is the idea that it’s taboo. The British government has claimed that the only reason Russia has not actually used tactical nuclear weapons is because of pressure from China. That may or may not be true, but Putin is undoubtedly using nuclear threats. And if you surrender to those threats, it makes everything much more dangerous, and makes nuclear weapons more acceptable. If Europeans go for an independent deterrent, there are all sorts of reasons why it will become more dangerous. The more nuclear weapons are around, the more they are legitimized, the more the risks that someone, sooner or later, will use them. Or there might be an accident. The world has come close many times.

There was a good report produced by Chatham House about the number of near accidents there have been.5 No deterrent is ever credible. Can you imagine a genuinely democratic person being ready to kill 100,000 people, even if they’re their enemy? I suppose one can, because that’s what Winston Churchill did. But even arch-rivals Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger both said the American nuclear guarantee was never credible. It was, however, a psychological prop for Europe.

Andrea Zederbauer: Is there anything you are working on at the moment that you would like to share with us, Mary?

Mary Kaldor: Yes, I’m finishing a book, a synthesis of my work over the last 50 years called Experimental Junctures: The social shaping of world order. By ‘experimental junctures’ I mean moments like the ones we’re living through, when the political class has to act, but they don’t know how to act, so they experiment. Many of these experiments are really stupid and make things worse.

In past experimental junctures, there were old wars – like the Napoleonic wars or the world wars in the twentieth century. In order to win those wars, governments made compromises with progressive social movements, proposing experiments that could work like civil rights or the welfare state. Now it’s more difficult. It is possible that we will have a global new war, which never ends.

Sarah Waring: So, just off the cuff, are there any good experimenters at the moment, in your opinion?

Mary Kaldor: I’m not sure there really are any, no. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney talked about emphasizing international law at Davos. Pedro Sanchez, though terrible on Venezuela, is allowing migration in Spain, which has led to dramatic economic growth. And he has taken a good position on Palestine.

But we need to work on a global level. We need to look to social movements that are pushing for ways to reconstruct world order. We need a global financial speculation tax. We need to tax big multinationals. We need a global carbon tax. We need stronger global institutions. But we’re going in the opposite direction at the moment.

This interview took place on 27 January as a collaboration between wespennest and Eurozine. The edited transcript in German, translated by Andrea Zederbauer, will be published in the 190th issue of wespennest in May 2026.