Dani Belo, "Russian Warfare in the 21st Century" (Routledge, 2025)

Sep 17, 2025

Dani Belo, Assistant Professor of International Relations and Security, dives into his latest work on Russia's gray-zone warfare. He discusses how Russia's military strategies since 2014 reveal a complex interplay of systemic incentives and local opportunities. Belo highlights misconceptions about Russian power, emphasizing the importance of ethnic dimensions and local movements in conflict. He champions the idea of strategic empathy for conflict resolution and calls for protecting minority rights as a means to mitigate future interventions, urging a nuanced understanding for effective policy.

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INSIGHT

Geopolitics Plus Identity Drive Russian Choices

Russia's interventions blend geopolitics with affective ties to territory and compatriots, not just cold strategic calculations.
Understanding both ideological attachments and on-the-ground ethnic dynamics is essential to explain Russian behavior.

INSIGHT

Gray Zone Is Conflict Between Peace And War

Gray zone conflicts sit between peace and full-scale war and rely on nonmilitary tools like cyber and influence operations.
They deliver similar outcomes to military force at lower financial and political costs over longer periods.

INSIGHT

Active Measures Often Precede Kinetic Steps

Russia frames many tactics as "active measures" focused on shaping narratives and long preparatory campaigns.
Preparatory influence work can span decades and consumes more resources than short kinetic operations.

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Dani Belo's Russian Warfare in the 21st Century: An Incentive-Opportunity Intervention Model (Routledge, 2025) provides a comprehensive analysis of Russia's foreign policy in gray zone conflicts, with a particular focus on its interventions in Ukraine.

Challenging conventional views, the book contends that Russia's use of varied gray zone tactics is influenced by both system-level incentives and domestic-level opportunities, which are integrated here into the Incentive-Opportunity Intervention (IOI) Model. The book examines case studies including Abkhazia, Crimea, Odesa, Kharkiv, and the Donbas, demonstrating how local ethnic-based movements and perceptions of regional retreat shape Moscow's coercive strategies. It highlights the reactive nature of Russia's tactics, driven by perceived threats to its protector role, and the significant role of ethnic and political dynamics in the region. The study underscores the importance of understanding these motivations for effective conflict resolution and suggests that protecting minority rights could mitigate such interventions. Policy recommendations emphasize the need for nuanced approaches that address both geopolitical and local dynamics. Ultimately, the book calls for future research to apply the IOI Model to other great powers, enhance the generalizability and applicability of the findings, and highlight the potential for multilateral coordination in promoting minority rights as a strategy for conflict prevention.

This book will be of much interest to students and policy practitioners working on Russian foreign policy, international security, Eastern European politics, and International Relations.

Dani Belo is an Assistant Professor of International Relations and Security and Director of the Global Policy Horizons Research Lab, Webster University in St. Louis, USA.

Stephen Satkiewicz is an independent scholar with research areas spanning Civilizational Sciences, Social Complexity, Big History, Historical Sociology, Military History, War Studies, International Relations, Geopolitics, and Russian and East European history.

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