War in Ukraine

Understandably most attention regarding the War in Ukraine is focused on the fighting taking place and the associated suffering. Nevertheless, beyond the concrete manifestations of violence, the War in Ukraine is also embedded in a complex web of global economic relations. This includes contextual factors such as the historical trajectories of post-socialist transformation or the general context of multiple crises in global capitalism. The economic embeddedness of the war also manifests in concrete repercussions such as the sanctions regime levelled against Russia or commodity price hikes and associated shortages in food and energy. Taken together current events might be foreshadowing more fundamental changes in the structure of the global economy including an acceleration of deglobalization or a potential loss of the dollar’s reserve currency role. Given the high degree of complexity and the dynamic pace of events, it is helpful to approach the War in Ukraine from a perspective of pluralist economics, thus aggregating analyses from multiple perspectives including political economy, macro-finance and ecological economics.