Global Alliances and Geopolitical Shifts: Analyzing the Impact of the Russia-Ukraine War on the Liberal World Order Through UN Voting Patterns

Abstract

The escalation of hostilities in Ukraine following Russia's full-scale invasion in 2022 serves as a critical inflection point within the broader tapestry of the liberal world order that has been on the decline. Analyzing the global response to this conflict paves the way to further understanding the current organization of the world and what impacts it to be that way. This study aims to answer the question of what influences the development of informal alliances, using the Russia-Ukraine war as a case-study and a proxy for indicating preference for or against the liberal order; countries that support Ukraine uphold the values of the liberalism, while countries that choose to ally with Russia or hide under the umbrella of neutrality desire to see a shift in the geopolitical status quo. Using a logistic regression to analyze two critical UN-GA votes regarding the condemnation of Russia’s invasion in March and November of 2022, as well as any change between them, I test a series of socio-political, economic, geographic, and ideological factors that could be potential determinants of global allegiance during an international bilateral armed conflict. Ultimately, both UN votes indicated that the level of democracy and current experience with interstate armed conflict had a positive effect on voting in support of Ukraine. Intuitively, the same variables were statistically significant in helping explain why countries modified the way they voted in regard to the second resolution. That being said, I find that the data fails to explain the full scope of rapidly shifting alliances in the Russia-Ukraine war; through a qualitative supplementation of missing explanations, I defend the notion that diplomatic courting and incentivized diplomacy is heavily relied upon when creating an effective and rapid response strategy to build or recalibrate informal alliances on the international stage.