Since November 2013, Ukraine has moved rapidly from protest to revolution to state collapse to foreign intervention. We can now ask seriously whether a new cold war is emerging, and what that might mean. However, Ukraine’s experience in 2014 is far from unique. Rather, it brings together a set of dynamics that we see emerging around the world, including the emergence of hybrid democratic-autocratic regimes, the diffusion of protest, the weakness of states, innovation in information warfare, and the erosion of traditional notions of war. Is this the future of world politics?

A political scientist, D’Anieri's expertise is in Eastern European and post-Soviet affairs, with an emphasis on the international and domestic politics of the Soviet Union. His textbook, International Politics: Power and Purpose in Global Affairs, is in its third edition [Thomson Wadsworth] and has been called the first truly student-oriented text in the field. He also provided commentary about the current political crisis between Ukraine and Russia. D'Anieri came to UCR from the University of Florida, where he had served as dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences since 2008. In that post, D’Anieri headed the largest academic unit of the university, with more than 600 faculty members responsible for teaching the majority of the university’s core curriculum to at least 35,000 students each year.