Constructivism
Alexander Wendt's international relations tradition (1992: 'anarchy is what states make of it'), arguing that state interests and behavior are shaped by shared ideas, identities, and social meaning rather than fixed by material power or structure alone. Wendt illustrated this with the U.S.-Britain versus U.S.-North Korea nuclear comparison: the raw distribution of power cannot explain why one relationship generates anxiety and the other does not — shared identity and history do. Applied to the Ukraine war through Timothy Snyder's argument that contested Ukrainian and Russian national identity is itself a central stake of the conflict, not merely a backdrop to it.