The untold risks of war: peace, profit, and nuclear fear

In an interview published through wespennest and Eurozine, security scholar Mary Kaldor argues that today’s conflicts—especially the war in Ukraine—fit a “new war” pattern where violence finances itself, civilians pay the price, and political deals risk freezi

The first thing Mary Kaldor wants to insist on is that the war in Ukraine doesn’t only resemble the past—it also behaves like something harder to stop.

Asked how she would describe the type of war unfolding in Ukraine. the author of *New and Old Wars* and *Global Security Cultures* starts with an image of deep-rooted escalation: “Old wars” are contests between regular forces. their tendency to “throw more and more at a fight to the bitter end.” But. in her account. Ukraine carries a different logic alongside that familiar shape.

“New wars,” she says, tend to sustain conflict rather than escalate it into decisive battle. Military fighting is “rather rare” in her typology. while territory is controlled “through political rather than military means”—seizing administrative buildings and expelling civilians who won’t comply. including people from different ethnicities. The violence, she adds, is directed mostly at civilians. And these wars, she says, typically involve a mixture of state and non-state actors.

Kaldor also places economics at the center of why wars like this do not end. They are characterized. she says. by “a combination of oligarchy. ” stealing. “making money through violence. ” and extremist identity politics—whether framed through religion or ethnicity. That blend is, for her, the trap: warring factions benefit from the violence itself rather than from winning.

From there. she argues that Russia is focused on fighting a “new war.” In 2013. just before the annexation of Crimea and the takeover of Donetsk and Luhansk. Valery Gerasimov—then the Russian army’s chief of staff—published an article called “Non-Linear War.” Kaldor says his idea was that it is easy to create “chaos and disorder” using “political technology. ” including special forces and local dissidents. She connects the 2014 events in Donetsk and Luhansk to that playbook: Russia tried to take over southern Ukraine by persuading local dissidents to seize administrative buildings. and “everywhere. except for Donetsk and Luhansk. ” she says. they were thwarted by citizens.

She then points to a contradiction: Russia’s conventional invasion strategy in February 2022, she says, was an aberration to the “new war” tactics.

The fight for narrative is part of the same picture. Kaldor says Russia portrays the conflict as an ethnic one between Ukrainian and Russian speakers. and she calls the regime “kleptocratic. ” legitimizing itself through an imperialist narrative and an ethnic-Russian narrative. In other places—she names Syria. Georgia. and Africa. as well as Ukraine—she says Russia has engaged in systematic looting and sexual violence. presenting “tactical violence against civilians” as characteristic of “new wars.” She adds that Ukraine. “for the moment. ” is more like an “old war. ” but “it could easily become a new war.”.

That risk—war hardened into a system, and peace treated like a scoreboard—shapes the rest of her warnings.

She responds to a remark by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. who last September said. “we are not at war. but we are no longer at peace either.” She also tackles the struggle to name what’s happening. referencing British historian Adam Tooze’s December 2025 line: “The old new Cold War is dead. Long live the new old Cold War.” Kaldor’s answer is blunt. She thinks the situation is different from the old Cold War because it doesn’t come with the same order or rules. The old Cold War. she says. was an “imaginary war” that divided the world into spheres—US hegemony over Western countries. Russia’s own spheres of influence—with “non-interference” as a key principle.

Today. she argues. the world is more “unpredictable and transactional.” It isn’t centered on international politics so much as on “what can be gained” through deals. including “mineral deals.” So “new old Cold War” doesn’t fit. she says. And she worries that arming for an imagined scenario with both Russia and China is happening while “many real wars” continue—leaving her concerned about a shift toward “a global new war.”.

In that scenario, she says, turbulence, instability, and violence against civilians become normal, alongside a rise in crime. She draws a comparison to the Balkans. and ties it to the same ingredients she identified earlier: anti-migrant sentiment. polarization around ethnic issues. and the tightening of violence into something self-reinforcing. Her fear is not abstract. It’s about whether Europe will be able to “escape this kind of scenario” at all.

The war economy, for Kaldor, is where these abstractions start to break peoples’ lives.

In “new war economies. ” she says. armed groups finance fighting through violence and extortion: “looting. pillaging. charging at checkpoints. smuggling.” Russia’s war economy. she adds. is “more classical. ” driven largely by oil revenues devoted to military production. But oil prices falling. she predicts. could make the Russian economy “do really badly this year.” And she emphasizes who benefits and who doesn’t: “only 20% of the Russian population benefits from its war economy. ” so “many people are really feeling the pinch.”.

She doesn’t claim economic pressure will force an end to the war. Instead, she says Putin believes he can continue—counting on Ukrainians giving up after Russia destroys the country’s energy infrastructure and its hospitals and schools.

If the economics explain why wars continue, the shape of peace negotiations explains why they may deepen the damage.

Kaldor co-wrote a PeaceRep report with Luke Cooper published in September 2025, comparing the US peace proposal and the Ukraine-Europe proposal. Asked whether Trump’s idea amounts to “old peace. ” she answers directly: “That’s exactly what it is.” She calls it transactional. with the core structure built on territorial lines.

In her view. peace-making in these situations is structurally wrong if it focuses on bargaining among “old war actors.” When peace negotiations surged after 1989. mediators tried to reach compromises between warring parties. But armed groups that profit from violence are hard to draw to the table. she says—and even when they do appear. she argues that negotiation becomes possible only if their political and economic positions are acknowledged as part of the settlement.

That top-down approach. she says. “entrench[es] warring parties” and “entrench[s] ethnic warlords.” She points to the 1995 Dayton Agreement that ended the Bosnian War. It’s often treated as a peak. she says. but it still required NATO and European troops to keep it going and involved “more money per head” than Marshall Plan aid. Yet, she says, Bosnia remains dysfunctional because ethnic warlords were guaranteed positions and there was “no way of changing that.”.

Her description of the American model for Ukraine follows the same line: the proposal. she says. treats the conflict as an agreement at the top between Zelensky and Putin about territory and ethnicity. rather than tackling underlying drivers. She says Russia “seems to have no interest in reaching an agreement. ” and that the US proposal is transactional because of Trump’s interests. She also says the only sections fully worked out are those concerning American access to minerals and US and Russian access to seized assets.

But she adds that Trump’s interests are secondary to Putin’s calculation: Russia, she says, is demanding territory it hasn’t captured and is “absolutely unwilling to compromise on that.”

Ukraine, she notes, said it would withdraw troops from some territory if it could be internationally administered. Russia, she says, is saying no. Her conclusion is skeptical: “I’m quite sceptical about whether any peace agreement can be reached this way.”

The alternative she and PeaceRep describe starts from who gets protected, not which map gets redrawn. Their report came from a discussion with Ukrainian human rights groups and Russian anti-war activists. The argument. she says. was that “people should come first in negotiations. not ethnicity and territory.” That discussion led to a campaign called “People First. ” which she describes as pushing for the release of prisoners of war. Ukrainian civilians captured by soldiers in occupied territories and forcibly deported to Russia—“especially the 5. 000 children”—and “the over 900 Russians” imprisoned for protesting against the war.

The question, in her framing, is not whether negotiations and conflict management matter. It’s whether the process starts too high up. She says it isn’t that you shouldn’t negotiate and shouldn’t manage conflicts. but in new war situations you need mediation at many levels about concrete measures that improve life on the ground. Her list is immediate and human: ceasefires, ending sieges, protecting nuclear power plants. She contrasts that with the drive for a final settlement “in the middle of a war. ” which she says is “of course. Russia’s goal.”.

Kaldor returns to trust when she’s asked about neutrality and the credibility of agreements.

When Russia occupied Crimea and parts of the Donbas in early 2014, Ukraine was “a neutral state,” and yet Russia violated multiple international agreements including the UN Charter, the Helsinki Final Act, and the Budapest Memorandum. Kaldor’s answer is blunt: “They can’t and it’s awful.”

She says the worst was the Budapest Memorandum, when Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons in exchange for security guarantees that Russia revoked. “So, no, they can’t expect anything from an agreement with Russia.”

Her warning widens beyond diplomacy into Europe’s choices about defense spending and the logic of threats.

In the rest of Europe. she says. there is a push to increase defense spending based on the assumption that Russia represents an old-fashioned military threat. Her counterpoint is that Russia aims to undermine Europe—“particularly the European Union”—and Western societies and democracies. Ukrainians. she says. had demonstrations such as the Revolution of Dignity and the Orange Revolution that posed an alternative to Russia’s people: “democracy.” Russia’s main goal. in her telling. is creating disorder through “hybrid threats”: misinformation. sabotage. drone attacks. and attacks on undersea cables. She adds that Russia’s effort includes support for the far right and seeks the disintegration of the European Union.

This is where a cultural-identity question sits under the surface—whether societies decide they are citizens of law, or consumers of fear.

A separate thread in the interview makes that question hard to ignore: the role of corporations and procurement.

Sarah Waring brings up Ivan Krastev’s 2025 talk at Presseclub Concordia in Vienna. where he warned Europe lacks an official body to decide defense strategy or run a unified army. instead leaving decisions to defense companies that shape weaponization and military strategies. Waring asks Kaldor about corporations like Palantir dictating terms of war and international law. and whether the dominance of defense companies will define how Europe handles Russian aggression.

Kaldor calls it an “inflection point” that could go either way.

She says she visited NATO and found the most alarming factor wasn’t Palantir. “although that’s alarming enough. ” but the role of “classic prime contractors.” Because of the relationship between prime contractors and European governments. she argues. increases in defense spending will largely go to “armoured military equipment.” A Kiel Institute study. she says. shows that “90% of procurement budgets in European countries are going on such armaments.”.

Her accusation has a social cost that circles back to welfare and trust. “The tragedy. ” she says. is that Europe is increasing defense spending “at the expense of welfare and foreign aid. ” and is “wasting it.” And she adds. again. the dangerous combination: higher spending plus the rise of the far right.

Even her “hope” arrives in fragments rather than in grand plans.

Asked about “islands of agreement. ” she points to the Zaporizhzhia Agreement for a localized ceasefire to repair powerlines at the Russian-occupied nuclear power plant. She cites the UN-brokered Black Sea Grain Initiative that ended Russia’s grain blockade. while noting that Russia later broke it and Ukraine had to open up a new naval corridor to its ports after attacking Russian ships in the Black Sea.

Local agreements, she says, happen all the time: evacuations of civilians, access to humanitarian aid. Cindy Wittke’s term—“islands of agreement”—captures that idea of small deals that can make life slightly better for ordinary people.

Kaldor draws the line between agreements that reduce suffering and agreements that entrench violence. In new war situations. she says. including Syria. Sudan. and Congo. local agreements can occur that aren’t pro-peace—tactical agreements among armed groups. She also notes “horrible agreements” about mutual deportation of people and mutual ethnic cleansing. Agreements involving Russia. Türkiye. and Iran in Syria. she says. weren’t good because warring parties had the dominant voice.

But she argues that agreements involving the UN or the World Health Organization. with civilians having a bigger voice. are more likely to reduce violence or provide access to humanitarian aid. She says quantitative work on agreements in Africa found that local agreements where the UN was present tend to last longer.

That thread returns in her distinction between objective and subjective risk.

She is asked how to detect objective risks—real threats—when perception and reality diverge at individual, regional, national, and global levels.

Kaldor leans on Ulrich Beck. saying he describes climate change. terrorism. and new wars as global “manufactured uncertainty.” She contrasts that with Trump. Putin. and other right-wing leaders who frame “imagined risks of the past” within a national framework. She says their actions make situations worse because they don’t address transnational, technically manufactured risks. Instead. they try to control the perception of risk by presenting it as coming from external threats. migrants. and other ethnicities.

She illustrates with Britain. where she says a Labour government has taken an extreme anti-migrant position. increased defense spending including spending on nuclear weapons. and that military spending is bad for the economy and increases inequality—while people have lost trust in the government. She also points to Germany taking a similar line.

The counterforce, she says, is movements: support for Palestine, and the growth of anti-corruption movements worldwide. She also frames a legal-cultural contrast that runs through the entire interview—popular belief in international law alongside government disdain. “The wars in Ukraine and Gaza are the most documented wars in history. ” she says. with evidence collection for future court cases against war crimes; and she calls it “positive” that there’s growth in anti-corruption movements.

On documentation and digital evidence, she agrees the law struggles to keep pace.

Sarah Waring describes civilian and institutional documentation projects in Ukraine—audio interviews. photographic evidence. logging social media communication. and fact-checking—and asks about archiving digital material in a way that could be useful in court decades later. and whether the legal frameworks—written before the digital revolution—create a disjuncture.

Kaldor says yes, there is “an awful lot in international law” still relevant, but the situation strains the system. She emphasizes that the growth of human rights law and international criminal law after the post-war period is significant, and that combining them matters.

When the conversation moves to “hybrid peace,” she challenges the word itself.

She says she uses “hybrid” too much in the discourse, but that in her own writing it refers to situations like Bosnia where a peace agreement is reached—better than outright fighting—but the deal freezes the situation because underlying problems are unresolved. “The Balkans typifies that.”

In a recent report on European security. she says. there’s an argument contrasting the Baltic states as the front line of old-fashioned military threats with the Balkans as the front line of hybrid threats. What’s visible there. she says. is the 1990s legacy: ethnic polarization; crony capitalist or oligarchic regimes; privatization of armed forces; militias and armed groups; deep inequalities; and the decline of industry from the Yugoslav period that made people’s lives precarious. All of that makes societies more vulnerable to misinformation and to the political sabotage of technology—classic hybrid threats.

Neutrality, too, fails the test of this war type.

Asked about Austria’s neutrality—its “full legitimacy” marked with a question—and whether neutrality works as a security strategy. Kaldor says neutrality is difficult in a globalized world. New wars don’t respect borders, she argues. If the concern is territorial capture, she says, neutrality “perhaps” has a place, but then again Ukraine was neutral. She notes Russia claims Ukraine’s bid to join NATO changed that position.

She says she believes the proposed NATO expansion was a problem but doesn’t accept that it explains Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She argues NATO is based on “old-fashioned” strategy and could be seen as posing an objective threat. It’s good that countries are integrated into collective security alliances. she says. but NATO needs profound change—possibly even an expansion of NATO if it changes what constitutes security. She prefers something else: after the Cold War. it would have been better to expand the Helsinki process and develop a more humane form of security that by its nature can’t be threatening.

She also says it would be a “huge mistake” for Europe to adopt nuclear weapons and focus on conventional defensive postures now that the US is threatening military withdrawal. More importantly, she says, Europe must think about countering hybrid wars. Neutrality cannot help against hybrid threats, she says. It might help against military threats. but she’s “not even convinced of that.” Neutrality. she argues. is rooted in an old perception of risk and territorial war.

Her critique of pacifism sharpens the moral dilemma.

Waring describes Germany’s extreme left calling to withdraw support to Ukraine from what they call a pacifist position. She asks whether pacifism can save the world from attack. referencing a Eurozine-published article. “What Makes a Humanist Kill?” by journalist Yevhen Shybalov—a pacifist who became a soldier identifying injustice as his motivation to abandon pacifism.

Kaldor answers that she doesn’t believe pacifism can save people. She distinguishes being a peace activist from being a pacifist. People who say not to support Ukraine with arms, she says, are essentially saying people should surrender.

She addresses the argument people make by comparing it to not fighting Hitler in the Second World War: wouldn’t everyone have been better off if the decision had been surrender? She asks whether people would have been better off and doesn’t accept it.

Her deeper position is tied to international law. She says societies have spent centuries building non-violent mechanisms for resolving conflict—elections. courts. policing—while police are permitted to use force and self-defense is allowed if somebody attacks and there’s nobody to help. But she says the laws of war are “much looser than human rights law. ” allowing killing civilians if it’s necessary to achieve a military objective—something she argues should be unacceptable.

She adds that she isn’t a pacifist, but thinks there’s something “in between”: global policing—global, accountable, democratic.

The interview closes by returning to nuclear risk, and it lands as the most chilling thread of all.

When asked whether she sees a nuclear war on the horizon. Kaldor says it’s “perfectly possible.” She says it’s striking that most German elites have become pro-nuclear. Because Russia has nuclear weapons. she says. there’s an assumption Europe should have nuclear weapons too—and she finds that “incredibly dangerous.”.

Her claim turns on taboo and credibility. The only thing that stops countries from using nuclear weapons, she says, is the taboo. She notes a British government claim that the reason Russia hasn’t used tactical nuclear weapons is pressure from China. though she says that may or may not be true. She says Putin is undoubtedly using nuclear threats. And she warns that if Europe “surrender[s] to those threats,” nuclear weapons become more acceptable.

If Europeans go for an independent deterrent, she argues, it becomes more dangerous: the more nuclear weapons are around, the more they are legitimized, and sooner or later someone will use them—or there will be an accident. She says the world has come close “many times.”

She references a good report produced by Chatham House about near accidents. She says no deterrent is ever credible. She adds that a genuinely democratic person would be ready to kill 100. 000 people—she says she can imagine someone. citing Winston Churchill. but she stresses the moral absurdity. She also says arch-rivals Henry Kissinger and James Schlesinger both said the American nuclear guarantee was never credible. while it acted as a psychological prop for Europe.

If war can become a system, she suggests, risk isn’t only measured in battlefields—it’s measured in how societies normalize power.

Toward the end. asked what she’s working on. Kaldor says she is finishing *Experimental Junctures: The social shaping of world order*. a synthesis of her work over the last 50 years. She explains that “experimental junctures” are moments like the ones they’re living through. when political classes have to act but don’t know how—so they “experiment. ” often poorly. She recalls earlier experimental junctures tied to old wars: the Napoleonic wars and the world wars in the twentieth century. when governments made compromises with progressive social movements. proposing experiments like civil rights or the welfare state.

She adds that it’s possible we’ll have a global new war that “never ends.”

When Waring asks about good experimenters, she says she isn’t sure there are any. She mentions Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney talking about emphasizing international law at Davos. She also mentions Pedro Sanchez—“though terrible on Venezuela”—allowing migration in Spain. which she says led to dramatic economic growth. and taking a good position on Palestine.

But she insists global work is needed: she calls for a global financial speculation tax, taxing big multinationals, a global carbon tax, and stronger global institutions. She says the world is going in the opposite direction.

This interview took place on 27 January as a collaboration between wespennest and Eurozine. The edited transcript in German, translated by Andrea Zederbauer, will be published in the 190th issue of wespennest in May 2026.

Mary Kaldor Ukraine war new wars nuclear risk peace negotiations PeaceRep People First campaign Dayton Agreement Budapest Memorandum hybrid threats Palantir defense procurement islands of agreement global policing