Politics and the Life Sciences: Virtual Issue 4
Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: Conflict, Misinformation, and Specter of Biological Weapons
INTRODUCTION
Margaret E. Kosal (margaret.kosal@inta.gatech.edu)
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has brought renewed attention to topics that have been addressed and explored in the pages of Politics and the Life Sciences over the years. This virtual issue highlights papers that provide insight and analysis on topics that have entered or re-entered popular and policy debates.
Conflict
The nature and driver of conflict is a re-occurring subject in the pages of the journal. One of PLS’ most downloaded articles, “The evolution of offensive realism: Survival under anarchy from the Pleistocene to the present” by Johnson & Thayer, 2016 considers how evolutionary biology reconciles with one of the most dominant international relations theories of the 20th Century, namely offensive-realism. One of the author’s key insights is that the human traits and behaviors they assess are crucial for cooperation and alliances, which has been seen in responses by states and treaty organizations, like NATO, to Russia’s activities.
How “emotive” or human behavioral causes can better explain observed patterns in international conflicts and strategic rivalries is explored in Long and Brecke, 2003. They challenge the dominance of material and structural explanations, such as are common in realist explanations in international relations. Their work is worth re-visiting in the context understanding and explaining Putin’s choices.
Tullberg & Tullberg, 1997 present a model for reducing violence associated with separatists or irredentist groups sharing a common ethnic background and how real or perceived myths of history can contribute to conflicts. They explicitly note the millions of ethnic Russians who reside outside of the territorial borders of Russian and the implications for reducing conflict.
While primarily focusing on the need to incorporate capacity to respond to public health and infectious disease outbreaks into thinking on international security, Albert, Baez, & Rutland, 2021 also posit the hypothetical (at the time of writing) of how COVID-19’s impact on Russia’s perceived military readiness might contribute to a decision to invade militarily one of its neighbors.
Information
Recognizing the importance of information in warfare goes back to Chinese military strategists Sun Tzu treatise “The Art of War.” Traveling throughout Russia in the 1700s, the French Marquis de Custine noted in his journals, “Russian despotism not only counts ideas and sentiments for nothing but remakes facts; it wages war on evidence and triumphs in the battle.” The manipulation of information as part of conflict is a feature of Russian history. From different contexts, a number of authors have explored the used of information or mis/dis-information in the context of conflicts and violence. Beahrs, 1996 considers a variety of uses of information from deception to overt disinformation by political leaders in order to win support and minimize internal conflict, including the requisite tacit participation by a population. How participants in a conflict use information in decision-making and the difficulties of overcoming cognitive biases to deal with misinformation during conflicts is explored in Hanley, Orbell, & Morikawa, 2002.
The Biological Weapons Context
Intersecting with the topic of mis/dis-information, Russia called a meeting of the UN Security Council in March 2022 to make allegations against the United States regarding public health laboratories in Ukraine. The Russian Ambassador made a number of allegations many of which related to a long-standing US-led Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) Program that was established after the break up of the Soviet Union. These are efforts that reduce the biosecurity risks from laboratories that had been a part of the former Soviet offensive biological weapons program. Vorobiev, 1996 discusses some early export control and other efforts among former Soviet States to cooperatively address such risks. The threat that those pathogens, which had been part of the former Soviet biological weapons (BW) program, posed and how CTR efforts improved security in states like Ukraine is reviewed in Vogel, 2000.
In context of human conflict throughout history, the use of biological weapons is exceedingly rare, as Cole, 1998 outlines. He presents an explanation for why this is grounded in evolutionary biology.
Analyzing the evidence regarding alleged use of biological weapons by the Germans in Italy,
PLS virtual issue #3 on Chemical Weapons: Politics, Science, Diplomacy, and Emerging Issues and Challenges and the papers cited are also recommended in context of allegations that Russian forces used chemical weapons in eastern Ukraine.