For Heraclitus, war was the father of all things. Charles Tilly later gave this dictum an institutional form by arguing that wars make states. Instead of the optimistic end-of-history narrative in which market democracy reigns supreme, the fall of the Leninist regimes and the advance of globalization have ushered in a new era of conflicts and full-scale wars. For some commentators—Georgi Derluguian among them—we were already teetering on the verge of a third world war as early as the 2010s. Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine can be read as a harbinger of a hot global conflict that has given a rejuvenating impetus to the coercive capacity and military resilience of states in an ostensibly liberal era.

This return of the fiscal-military state, and of the rhetoric and policies of military Keynesianism, should not overshadow the historical experience of those East Asian polities that converted military resilience into postwar reconstruction under the guidance of the developmental state. When Ukraine is discussed, academics, politicians, and the media understandably concentrate on its military resilience—that is, on its capacity to stave off Russian aggression. Yet resilience is not merely the ability to bounce back. It is the ability to come back stronger and more inventive, both in the structure of social action in general and in the capacity to modernize and to innovate in particular. This thematic issue accordingly moves beyond the exclusive concern with military resilience, security, and state capacity under conditions of full-scale war and instead dwells on the diverse paths leading from wartime endurance to postwar reconstruction and development.

Several East Asian states of the Cold War period—a war that was frequently hot in the region—did not merely survive their conflict-ridden environment but emerged as developmental polities with reconfigured institutional frameworks and advanced, research-intensive economies. The trajectories of Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore, diverse as they were, demonstrate how effective state institutions enabled war-ravaged societies to accomplish far-reaching economic and social transformations—in a word, modernization—with democratic transitions following in due course. In the European context, the Celtic Tiger illustrates both a meteoric rise and its subsequent reversal. The question is how parallels between Ukraine and these cases may legitimately be drawn, given the shared imperative of sustaining wartime resilience while pursuing sustainable peace, democratic order, and long-term development, and given Ukraine’s markedly different geopolitical position, with its commitment to EU and NATO membership enshrined in the constitution.

Key questions include:

• Under what conditions does wartime state-building translate into peacetime developmental capacity rather than into entrenched militarization?
• Which institutional arrangements allow the coercive and extractive capacities forged by war to be redirected towards modernization and innovation?
• What makes the East Asian developmental state a legitimate comparator for Ukraine, and at which point do the analogies break down?

Analytical Dimensions

• War-Making, State-Making, and the Fiscal-Military State. The Tillyan proposition that wars make states has re-acquired an uncomfortable topicality. Contemporary rearmament, conscription, and industrial mobilization revive the fiscal-military repertoire in polities that had declared it obsolete, and they invite renewed scrutiny of how coercion, extraction, and administrative penetration are bound together in the making of state capacity.
• From Military Resilience to Developmental Capacity. Resilience is too often invoked as endurance alone. Treated analytically, it names the conversion of wartime organizational learning—logistics, procurement, engineering, rapid iteration—into durable developmental capability, and it raises the question of which conversions succeed, which stall, and why.
• Regime Type, Bureaucracy, and Developmental Agency. The developmental state was often authoritarian, and its democratic successors inherited institutions built under duress. The relation between regime type, bureaucratic autonomy, and economic breakthrough remains contested, as does the sequencing of development and democratization in societies emerging from war.
• Ideologies of War and Ideologies of Development. War generates its own ideological repertoire—of sacrifice, unity, and emergency—which does not dissolve with the ceasefire. How such repertoires are reworked into developmental programmes, and how this reworking avoids both statist capture and neoliberal abdication, is a question at once ideological and institutional.

Key Research Areas

We welcome submissions addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:

• Despotic and Infrastructural Power: the relationship between the two faces of state power; Michael Mann’s fourfold typology of military, economic, ideological, and political power, and the question of which combination best serves wartime endurance and peacetime development.
• Pathways to Reindustrialization: technological reindustrialization and the growth of knowledge-intensive economies in the civil sector and in the military-industrial complex; the respective contributions of career bureaucrats and elected politicians to state-building and economic breakthrough.
• Regime Type and Performance: who fights better, autocracies or democracies? The temptations of autocracy and the challenges of democracy in war and in development; democratic transition and democratic backsliding in postwar settings.
• From Society at War to Society after War: the militarized society in peacetime; the soldier and the state revisited, and the switching of the military’s modus operandi from war-fighting to economic development; trust, solidarity, and coercion in times of war and of peace.
• Ideologies of Development: the passage from an ideology of war to an ideology of development, and the avoidance of both statist and neoliberal pitfalls; public opinion and political culture in decision-making from war to peace.
• Theoretical Reconstruction: structure and agency in the building of military resilience and in peacetime developmental breakthroughs; resilience as an analytical category rather than a buzzword or propaganda trope; the possibility of a productive reconciliation between realist (Hobbesian) and normativist accounts of the state and of state action.
• Prerequisites of the Developmental State Today: what demographic, migratory, cultural, and political conditions must obtain for a developmental state to emerge under present circumstances?

Methodological and Empirical Approaches

We encourage submissions that combine theoretical innovation with empirical depth, including:

• Comparative-historical studies that identify, modify, or produce conceptual frames of reference for explaining the causes and effects of state-building in wartime, with attention to the relevance of such theory-building for the Ukrainian case;
• Case studies of particular institutions, agencies, and industrial policy regimes, addressing failed as well as successful attempts at state transformation from wartime imperatives to peacetime reconstruction;
• Analyses in the tradition of the historical macrosociology of systemic transformations (Giovanni Arrighi, Immanuel Wallerstein, Georgi Derluguian);
• Contributions drawing on developmentalist political economy (Friedrich List, Joseph Schumpeter, Raúl Prebisch, Hans Singer, Erik Reinert, Ha-Joon Chang) and on the political economy of the East Asian developmental state (Chalmers Johnson, Alice Amsden, Robert Wade, Peter Evans, Bruce Cumings, Meredith Woo-Cumings);
• Studies in the comparative politics and political sociology of state institutions and state capacity (Samuel Huntington, Charles Tilly, Theda Skocpol, Michael Mann, Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson), and work engaging the findings of resilience science.

We are looking for contributions that will enable academic commentators and policy practitioners alike to make better sense of the ideas and issues surrounding the transition from wartime imperatives to peacetime reconstruction and development, and that treat military resilience, state capacity, institutional evolution, industrial policy, authoritarian rule, democratic transition, and democratic backsliding within the broader framework of modernity and modernization.

Submission Details

Authors are invited to submit an abstract (maximum 300 words) no later than January 15, 2027, to Prof. Georgi Derluguian, Prof. Pavlo Fedorchenko-Kutuyev and Dr. Anton Finko at the following email address: sociology.modernity [@] gmail.com. The Editorial Board will review all abstracts and inform selected authors who will be granted the opportunity to submit a full paper for publication.

The deadline for the selected full paper submissions is July 15, 2027. Articles should be written in American English and range from 6,000 to 10,000 words. However, longer texts are also welcome.

This issue of the Ideology and Politics Journal is expected to be published by March 1, 2028.

All submissions to the Ideology and Politics Journal are subject to double-blind peer review, which determines acceptance for publication. Review and publication in the Ideology and Politics Journal are free of charge.

For detailed information on submission procedures and publication terms, please visit the Instructions for Authors. By submitting an article for review, authors agree to comply with all terms of cooperation outlined by the IPJ Editorial Board.

Editors of the Special Issue:  Prof. Pavlo Fedorchenko-Kutuyev (Institute of Sociology, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine), Prof. Georgi Derluguian (New York University Abu Dhabi) and Dr. Anton Finko (Institute of Philosophy, National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine). Editor-in-Chief of the Ideology and Politics Journal: Dr. Mikhail Minakov.

Further information about the Ideology and Politics Journal can be found at About the Journal.