Multipolarity and the War in Ukraine

The war in Ukraine is often linked to larger shifts in the global distribution of power away from unipolarity and toward multipolarity, with many observers seeing this shift as one of the conflict&s;s primary causes as well as a decisive factor shaping the course of the war and its impact on global politics. This chapter will examine these assumptions, drawing on the extensive literature on polarity in International Relations (IR) and recent academic debates about polarity in the current international system. The chapter finds that multipolarity (as the concept is traditionally understood in the discipline) adds little to our understanding of the war or its effects on world politics. Rather than establishing a stable multipolar order, it has further spread entropy throughout the international system, a process well underway before Russia&s;s invasion. Using multipolarity to characterize the current international order understates the degree of disorder in the current international system while overstating the ability of great power to control events. Used and abused, this concept has become a convenient shorthand label for an international system whose complexity defies easy description or an ideological tool for actors to promote their own narrow interests.