Introduction

If we were to dip into the great ocean of modern pop cultural references to find an appropriate first sentence for a book on a topic such as ours, we might hear the softspoken words of Lady Galadriel (voiced by the inimitable Cate Blanchett) saying: “The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air.” Should she have added that she feels it on the beaches as well, her call to arms in defense against a great evil would truly have been completed. Churchillian (1940) and other references notwithstanding, an overwhelming notion within the current zeitgeist , if we can lay any claim to interpreting it, has been that on February 24, 2022, the world indeed changed, and did so in ways and with magnitude that, at least since the end of the Cold War, can be compared only to a handful of events such as 9/11, the fallout from the 2008 “Lehman crash,” and the 2020 COVID-19 lockdowns and various government actions. Although it is not the first war on European soil since the Cold War (to which anyone from the Former Yugoslavia will readily attest), nor the first military conflict the Russians have been involved in the past 30 years, the overwhelming idea remains that the war in Ukraine truly does introduce tectonic changes in the international political, economic, and social landscapes, and that it is indeed giving a new impetus to the shaping of alliances, allegiances, institutions, organizations, or simply the international order of the 21st century. It is therefore not a truism to say that the war in Ukraine is definitely shaping the things to come.