Despite signs that an invasion was imminent, many of us were surprised when we turned on the radio, TV or the internet on 24 February 2022 to learn that Russia had attacked Ukraine. The unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine marked the onset of the largest armed conflict in Europe since the end of World War II. The war has raged since then, resulting in widespread loss of life, the displacement of almost six million Ukrainian citizens and massive destruction throughout Ukraine. As the war enters its third year, the conflict has morphed into a very costly trench warfare.The Russian-Ukraine War is not only the largest armed conflict in Europe for decades, it is also one of those events that 'establish[ed] certain directions of change and foreclose [d] others in a way that shape [d] politics for years ' (Collier and Collier, 1991: 27). The conflict poses an innumerable number of questions for political scientists: How could this war happen? What is the influence of this war on great power politics? How will this war impact European cohesion? How will this war affect food and energy (in)security across the world? The war also provides a propitious case study to research war propaganda, human rights abuses and the internal and external displacement of refugees.In the words of Capoccia and Kelemen (2007) the Russia-Ukraine War might amount to a critical juncture, an event that might change Europe and the world as we know it. In this collection of articles, we add to the growing scholarship on the war in Ukraine. While very recent special issues have looked at the moral and political challenges this war poses for Europe (see Delanty, 2023) or considered gender dynamics and patriarchal power structures within the war (see Olimat et al., 2023), we take a broader perspective and begin to decipher the importance of this war for the discipline of political science and the way we study politics more broadly. We hope that the four articles here will be the start of a dynamic and expanding collection that grows as scholarship on the war evolves and as we further accept articles in International Political Science Review (IPSR).The four articles included here are thematically focused on the war in Ukraine but interrogate different dimensions of the conflict. In the opening contribution, Tan (2024) uses the theory of democratic peace to examine the role of regime type on conflict behaviour. Applying the logic of Kant's perpetual peace, he concludes that 'democracies are doing better than expected'. The analysis draws on a wide range of sources and persuasively argues that democratic peace theory has much to offer to international relations scholarship in the twenty-first century. In a conceptually related analysis, Ferraro (2024) also concentrates on regime type and specifically the way that Vladamir Putin has used the invasion of Ukraine as a tool of regime legitimation that has enhanced regime cohesion in Russia. The article draws from interrogation of elite discourses, analysis of 1228355I PS0010.
