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In this article, I shall demonstrate that several of the arguments made in favour of an offensive realist explanation of Russian actions in Ukraine as part of a power balancing process are inconsistent both with available empirical knowledge of the conflict in Ukraine and with the structural logic postulated by offensive realist theory itself. Rather than a conflict about power in a material sense, I will argue that the war in Ukraine is better understood as a conflict about the incompatibility of the Russian state structure to cope with the imperatives of functional differentiation as understood by theories of world society. © 2018, Macmillan Publishers Ltd., part of Springer Nature.

In this article, I argue that while the Global South has replaced the Third World as the prevalent term for describing structural global inequalities in International Relations, little research is directed at its theoretical implications. I discuss the conceptual evolution of the term from the Third World narrative, interpreting the literature as an implicit rejection of myopic ontologies relying on economic, cultural, or political hierarchies. I then suggest connecting the terminology to the theory of functional differentiation. By avoiding forms inherited from classical social theory, the Global South can be conceptualized in a more productive way that is better attuned to contemporary theoretical discussions. © The Author(s) 2018.