When Stigmatization Fails: Russia and Aggression in Ukraine

Abstract

Abstract Why does stigmatization sometimes fail? The literature on stigma in international relations has done an excellent job of pointing to the role successful stigmatization processes play in the construction and maintenance of normative hierarchies, but there has been far less exploration of the conditions under which they may fail in this purpose and the potential consequences for international security and society. This article contributes such an exploration by focusing on the attempted stigma imposition on Russia following its annexation of Crimea in 2014 and support for the insurgency in eastern Ukraine. While Russia was stigmatized as an aggressor by a significant part of international society, including through diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions, this failed to deter further Russian aggression, as demonstrated by its 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and thus to reinforce the norm of territorial integrity. The article investigates the reasons for this failure, locating them both in insufficient stigma imposition—the difficulty in building and maintaining a committed “audience of normals” and to impose strong enough status loss and material costs—and to some extent in Russia's counter-stigmatizing stigma management. In conclusion, it considers what could in theory be done differently for stigma imposition to “work,” and calls for further research on the connections between stigma and emotion, as a core under-researched factor in the stigma literature.