The Myth of Peace: Imperialism and Control of Occupied Lands from Ukraine to Gaza

Warfare is often viewed through a Eurocentric lens, framing conflicts as binary events—war or peace—that oversimplify global realities. Rooted in European concepts (e.g., Westphalian sovereignty, nation-states, formal declarations of war), this view assumes war is a temporary rupture in an otherwise peaceful status quo, followed by negotiations and treaties. However, conflicts from Ukraine to Gaza demonstrate that traditional notions of war fail to capture the continuous, structural violence experienced in regions where force is a routine tool of dominance.

The annexation of Crimea, the war in Donbas, and Israel’s internationally recognized illegal occupation of Palestinian territories challenge traditional notions of war. These regions remain in perpetual insecurity, blurring the lines between war and peace. By studying such “irregular wars” on the global periphery, we can move beyond this binary framework and see war as a permanent condition, tied to imperial legacies.

Imperialism shapes not only borders and governments but also leaves behind structures of exploitation and inequality that fuel ongoing violence. Rethinking conflict this way allows for more meaningful peacebuilding, addressing the root causes of violence in both historical and modern contexts.

Consider, for instance, Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine in 2014. Many Western analyses viewed this as the start of a new phase of conflict, marking a deviation from the prior “peace” in the region. However, this perspective overlooks the long-standing historical tensions between Russia and Ukraine, which have roots in imperial control, cultural suppression, and Soviet-era policies that destabilized Ukrainian sovereignty. The annexation itself was presented by Russia as a “reunification” rather than an act of war, reflecting a different understanding of conflict that sees war and peace as more fluid concepts. This continuous assertion of Russian dominance over Ukraine, not just through overt military aggression but through economic coercion, political subversion, and disinformation campaigns, blurs the traditional boundaries between war and peace.

Moreover, the situation in the Donbas region underscores the inadequacy of the war/peace binary. The Donbas (short for Donetsk River Basin) is an industrial and mining hub in eastern Ukraine, historically populated by both ethnic Ukrainians and Russians. Its strategic importance increased in the Soviet era due to its coal and steel production, making it a key economic zone. Following Ukraine’s independence in 1991, the region maintained strong ties to Russia, and this connection became a flashpoint after the 2014 Ukrainian revolution and Russia’s annexation of Crimea, which ousted the pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych.

Following Russia’s annexation of Crimea (2014), pro-Russian separatists in Donbas, with Moscow’s support, declared the independence of two self-proclaimed republics, Donetsk and Luhansk. This sparked a war between Ukrainian forces and these separatist groups, leading to thousands of casualties and mass displacement. Although often described as a “frozen conflict” since the Minsk agreements in 2015, low-intensity fighting, covert operations, and proxy warfare have persisted, creating an environment of sustained violence and instability. For the local population, this is not a period of peace but a condition of perpetual insecurity. Elements of insurgency—territorial defense units, protests, and popular uprisings—complicate the narrative. Civilians have been turning into fighters overnight, with localized forces disrupting Russian logistics and infrastructure. This blending of conventional war with asymmetric, insurgent tactics challenges not just the binary of war/peace but a simplistic division of war into “small” and “big” conflicts.

This nonbinary nature of war and peace is also seen in how Western powers have responded to the Russo-Ukraine conflict, offering sanctions, arms, and training rather than engaging in full-scale war. These actions reflect a strategic engagement that operates in the gray zone between war and peace—another reminder that modern conflicts rarely adhere to the binary model.

Elsewhere, similar dynamics can be seen in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where outside powers –like Iran on one side and the United States on the other—offer arms and training but are restrained when it comes to engaging in a full-scale war. Moreover, in the internationally recognized illegally occupied territories, settler expansion and systemic violence exist in a state of neither full peace nor full war. It extends into everyday life, shaped by systemic violence, economic exploitation, displacement, and racialized oppression. In places like Gaza or the West Bank, occupation and structural violence blur the boundaries between what is conventionally understood as “war” and “peace.” Here, peace does not mean the absence of violence but is instead a continuation of different forms of domination. The binary model fails to capture the lived experience of continuous violence in these regions, challenging the notion of war as an exceptional event.

So, what happens if we use the history, cultural narratives, and sociologies of so-called ‘irregular wars’ to rethink the very category of war? That is, what if we make the periphery the center? By rethinking the definition of war through the lens of imperial and settler-state conflicts, we reveal new insights into the nature of warfare.

First, the binary between war and peace begins to break down. In the occupied territories of a settler-state and on the frontier of empires alike, there is no clear distinction between wartime and peacetime—war is a permanent condition, with force being an ordinary part of politics. As historian Isabel Hull notes, imperialism is war.

Second, the notion of the sovereign nation-state as the primary unit of war and world politics dissolves. Eurocentric war studies typically assume two main types of war: interstate wars and civil wars. This framework cannot apply to imperial and settler-state contexts, where conflicts do not fit neatly into these categories. For example, the conflict in Gaza cannot be recognized as either—Palestinians there in the territories occupied by Israel do not have their own state nor are they citizens of Israel.

Third, war is not a horizontal relation between so-called “peer competitors” or even “near peers” but is embedded in transnational contexts and international hierarchies. This shifts the focus from state-on-state conflict to a broader analysis of power dynamics, which include imperial and settler-state settings.

Each of these points offers not only a new perspective on imperial and settler-state war but also forces us to reconsider warfare in the West. In examining imperial and settler-state conflicts, we gain new insights into the fundamental nature of war itself. In other words, don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater—don’t throw out Carl von Clausewitz. Instead wage anthropology; that is, enrich Clausewitz by incorporating particular histories, cultural narratives, and local politics into your general theorizing. There’s perhaps no more clear example of this than the use of the Peace of Westphalia to theorize about world politics. A little event somewhere on the continent of Europe in 1648 pervasively used today to make sense of world politics as a whole.

From Empire to Nation-State and Sorting

The conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza also invoke memories of the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s, where national and ethnic identities were violently contested after the collapse of Yugoslavia. In the Balkans, the dissolution of a multi-ethnic state led to brutal ethnic cleansing and population sorting—Serbs, Croats, Bosnians—through forced migrations and mass violence. The same process of sorting is evident in Ukraine, where the Russian invasion is redrawing lines between Ukrainians and Russians, a forced sorting of populations in the post-Soviet imperial space. Ukraine’s struggle for sovereignty against Russian imperialism echoes the Balkans’ dissolution, while Gaza represents an unresolved settler-state question. The sorting of people—whether through territorial lines, ethnic cleansing, or forced migration— echoes other events in history, like the 1830 U.S. Indian Removal Act—and binds these conflicts across different geographies and moments in history.

What further unites these conflicts is the racialized dimension of global responses. The international reaction to the Ukraine war has been unprecedented, partly because it disrupts an imagined “civilizational” hierarchy. The shock of war in Europe—”How could this happen in Europe?”—is framed in racial terms (ignoring the series of crises in the Balkans), as if Europe is somehow immune to such violence. Media coverage has emphasized how Ukrainian victims resemble Western Europeans, with references to “blue eyes and blonde hair” surfacing in reporting. This contrasts sharply with the global response to conflicts in places like Syria, Iraq, and Gaza, where the victims, typically coded as non-white, elicit far less concern from Western powers. The prolonged suffering in Gaza, with repeated cycles of conflict between Israel and Palestinian groups, has not inspired the same outcry despite the devastation and human toll.

The Balkan wars, too, exposed this disparity. Although the conflict occurred in Europe, the region’s portrayal as a “volatile” and “backward” part of the continent relegated it to a lesser category in the Western imagination. This, like the restrained responses to conflicts in Gaza or the Middle East more broadly, highlights how Western reactions to war are often shaped not just by the geopolitical interests of the state, but by presumed racial and cultural proximity.

Conclusions

By breaking down the war/peace binary and critiquing state-centric models, we open up space to consider war as a continuous, structural condition rather than an aberration. It allows us to rethink the relationship between force and politics, blurring the lines between distinct periods of war and peace. In imperial settings, war is ongoing—imperialism is inherently a form of war. This rethinking has far-reaching consequences for how we approach international law, humanitarian interventions, and conflict resolution. Rather than focusing on “endings” to war, these fields must evolve to recognize the ongoing nature of violence, particularly in settler-state, postcolonial, and imperial contexts.

Incorporating the histories, cultural narratives, and sociologies of small wars into the study of warfare forces us to confront the fact that war is not simply a clash between equal or unequal opponents but a product of deeper power dynamics. Just as war itself cannot be understood globally through a Eurocentric framework, peace too must be redefined. Effective peacebuilding must address the imperial and settler-state legacies that continue to drive conflict.

By expanding our frameworks beyond the limited concepts of war and peace developed in the West, we can better understand the full scope of global conflict and, perhaps, craft more meaningful paths to resolution.