INCOMPLETE SECESSION AFTER UNRESOLVED CONFLICTS POLITICAL ORDER AND ESCALATION IN THE POST-SOVIET SPACE, by Ana Maria Albulescu (Routledge, 2022)

Anuarul Laboratorului pentru Analiza Conflictului Transnistrean / The Yearbook of the Laboratory for the Transnistrian Conflict Analysis Vol. VIII, No. 1, 2025 157 Ruslana GROSU Armed Forces Military Academy ”Alexandru cel Bun”, Chisinau REVIEW: INCOMPLETE SECESSION AFTER UNRESOLVED CONFLICTS POLITICAL ORDER AND ESCALATION IN THE POSTSOVIET SPACE, by Ana Maria Albulescu (Routledge, 2022) DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17944884 Abstract: Ana Maria Albulescu’s monograph, published by the prestigious Routledge in 2022, stands out as essential reading within the relatively small corpus of substantial contributions to the conceptualization of secessionist conflicts in the post-Soviet space. This volume synthesizes the theoretical, conceptual, and empirical insights developed throughout the analysis, serving as a genuine point of convergence in which observations on Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia are reintegrated into the proposed conceptual architecture. This final synthesis confirms the model’s relevance for contemporary studies of postSoviet space conflicts and, more broadly, for political theory concerning contested entities and incomplete secessions. Keywords: Incomplete secession; Unresolved conflicts; Political order; Post-Soviet space. Contact details of the authors: E-mail: ruslana.g[email protected] Ana Maria Albulescu’s monograph, published by the prestigious Routledge in 2022, stands out as essential reading within the relatively small corpus of substantial contributions to the conceptualization of secessionist conflicts in the post-Soviet space. Two paradigmatic contributions shape, structure, and illuminate the entire volume. First, the author convincingly argues that the conflicts in Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia cannot be adequately understood through the traditional paradigm of “frozen conflicts”. She introduces the notion of political order under conditions of incomplete secession, an analytical framework that captures the dynamic evolution of interactions between the metropolitan state and the de facto entities. Through this lens, the study reopens debates on the subtle mechanisms through which authority and legitimacy are continuously renegotiated in the absence of a comprehensive political settlement. Anuarul Laboratorului pentru Analiza Conflictului Transnistrean / The Yearbook of the Laboratory for the Transnistrian Conflict Analysis Vol. VIII, No. 1, 2025 158 Second, the volume highlights the role of electoral processes in shaping escalation dynamics: elections held in both entities, the metropolitan state and the de facto entity, operate as mechanisms of information-gathering and legitimation, directly influencing the intensity of antagonism and the shifts from accommodation to confrontation. In doing so, A.-M. Albulescu introduces a dimension rarely explored in studies of post-Soviet conflicts, positioning electoral processes at the centre of post-conflict political order analysis. The first part of the book provides a rigorous mapping of concepts such as secession, non-recognition, and de facto statehood, alongside a systematic assessment of the existing literature. The author works with a rich, coherent, and well-integrated set of fundamental concepts, such as incomplete secession, political order, legitimacy, and patron-client relations, complemented by operational notions such as group cohesion, parallel authority, and legitimacy claiming. The outcome is an interdisciplinary conceptual model with genuine theoretical value for research on unresolved conflicts and contested political spaces. A.-M. Albulescu critiques the limitations of static approaches in the scholarship on frozen conflicts and proposes a model that captures the nuances of Anuarul Laboratorului pentru Analiza Conflictului Transnistrean / The Yearbook of the Laboratory for the Transnistrian Conflict Analysis Vol. VIII, No. 1, 2025 159 political and institutional interaction. Her analysis is well anchored in international literature, and the integration of theories of sovereignty (S. Krasner), de facto states (S. Pegg, N. Caspersen), and international recognition (R. Kaplan, M. Fabry) lends the study remarkable conceptual consistency. Despite its theoretical density, the text remains accessible and offers a valuable comparative framework for scholars, foreign policy analysts, and security studies experts. Methodological rigor is visible in the construction of a solid conceptual apparatus before engaging in empirical analysis. Among the strengths of the work are the coherent triangulation of specialized literature, conceptual definitions, and critical positioning; the introduction of theoretical innovation with clear potential for future research; and the integration of the electoral dimension, a significantly underexplored area in scholarship on post-Soviet conflicts. Nevertheless, several directions for further inquiry emerge, including refining the causal mechanisms linking elections to escalation, specifying operational criteria for distinguishing moments of accommodation, chronic stalemate, and confrontation, and examining more closely borderline or ambiguous cases (e.g., periods of technical cooperation, tacit collaboration, or selective de-escalation). Overall, the first part of the book constitutes a solid, well-argued, and conceptually ambitious endeavor that recalibrates the theoretical framework through which unresolved conflicts in the post-Soviet space are analyzed. It shifts the emphasis from the static to the dynamic, from the purely legal to the political, and from conflict per se to competitive political order. Taken as a whole, the author’s contribution is substantial, particularly for scholars interested in de facto states, conflict escalation, the interplay between elections and political order, and the post-Soviet area as a conceptual laboratory of contested sovereignty. The book represents a significant addition to the field, offering a compelling platform for understanding how political order evolves in contexts characterized by non-recognition and institutional competition. Notably, the researcher succeeds in establishing an analytical framework with considerable potential for future studies, one that merits recognition by the academic community. The second part constitutes the theoretical-analytical core of the monograph and stands among the most compelling recent efforts to reconceptualize the dynamics of political order in areas marked by incomplete secession across the post-Soviet space. Whereas the first part of the book clarifies terminology and conceptual positioning, this section activates the entire theoretical apparatus, operationalizing it within a comparative analysis of the relationships between metropolitan states such as the Republic of Moldova and Georgia, and their neighboring separatist entities such as Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia. At the centre of the author’s approach lies the concept of political order, reframed as a relational configuration that captures how authority, legitimacy, and institutional capacity are distributed and contested. In contrast to traditional Anuarul Laboratorului pentru Analiza Conflictului Transnistrean / The Yearbook of the Laboratory for the Transnistrian Conflict Analysis Vol. VIII, No. 1, 2025 160 approaches that treat frozen conflicts as static structures, A.-M. Albulescu advances an interpretation in which political order becomes a continuously reconfigured system, shaped by the interactions among actors and by how they interpret and instrumentalize the broader context. The chapter’s key innovation is the introduction and analytical use of the concept of escalation of political order, articulated through the categories of mutual accommodation, chronic stagnation, and acute confrontation. This analytical scheme functions as a map of political, institutional, and security tensions between the parties to the conflict. While the classical literature on the post-Soviet region remains dominated by the notion of the frozen conflict, the author demonstrates that such contexts are far from static; they are instead marked by predictable or unpredictable fluctuations shaped by elite interaction, external pressures, and internal mechanisms of political order. A central methodological contribution, articulated with considerable rigour in this section, is the treatment of elections as a causal mechanism in the evolution of political order. Elections are not mere rituals of legitimation; rather, they fulfil two fundamental functions: an informational function, through which actors learn about the positions and relative strength of others; and a legitimizing function, which can be instrumentalized to claim authority, concessions, or autonomy. Through this lens, elections in unrecognized entities and, symmetrically, those in metropolitan states, become events capable of precipitating accommodation, reinforcing stagnation, or catalyzing confrontation. This integration of electoral logic into the analytical algorithm of unresolved conflicts represents one of the volume’s original contributions, offering a perspective rarely explored in the literature on secession and de facto states. The operationalization of concepts is coherent and methodologically transparent. A.-M. Albulescu employs a longitudinal comparative design, examining three cases (Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia) through a shared evaluative framework that enables both the identification of common patterns and the differentiation of case-specific particularities. The result is a consistent, well-structured analysis that captures not only moments of political inflection but also the causal mechanisms that account for them. In this regard, the author succeeds in correlating internal electoral developments, shifts in leadership, elite behaviour, and Russia’s responses in a manner that reflects the complexity of the phenomena under study. Epistemologically, the second part is situated within a relational paradigm in which political order is understood as the outcome of actor interaction rather than as a pre-existing stable structure. This approach aligns with contemporary directions in international relations theory and conflict studies, where emphasis is placed on processes, dynamic change, and the contingent distribution of legitimacy. The section exemplifies analytical rigor, theoretical coherence, and methodological innovation, offering a nuanced perspective on how political order Anuarul Laboratorului pentru Analiza Conflictului Transnistrean / The Yearbook of the Laboratory for the Transnistrian Conflict Analysis Vol. VIII, No. 1, 2025 161 evolves under conditions of incomplete secession and illuminating processes often overlooked in previous analyses. By integrating electoral mechanisms into the study of unresolved conflicts and by constructing a conceptual framework capable of capturing the internal dynamics of ostensibly frozen conflicts, this part of the book provides the academic community with a valuable analytical instrument, one with significant applicability to the study of the post-Soviet space and beyond. The third part of the monograph provides the theoretical-explanatory core of the entire study, examining how post-conflict political order evolves under the pressures generated by incomplete secession. The analytical approach deliberately distances itself from purely geopolitical or strictly politico-legal interpretive traditions and instead aligns with a relational epistemology oriented toward causal mechanisms and political processes. Within this paradigm, interactions between the metropolitan state and the de facto entities are interpreted not as strictly bilateral dynamics but as outcomes of a constellation of interdependent factors: elections, legitimacy, political mandates, nationalism, external pressures, and the dynamics of violence. Through this shift, the author transcends the traditional disciplinary boundaries separating security studies, comparative politics, and scholarship on hybrid regimes, offering an integrated framework for understanding political logic across the post-Soviet spaces. At its centre, this part of the book is structured around the idea of postconflict political order, understood not as an outcome but as a dynamic field in constant transformation. Political order is disaggregated into three functional domains, such as politics, governance, and security, that operate simultaneously yet may evolve asynchronously. The political dimension encompasses discourse, electoral mandates, strategies of legitimation, and elite orientations; the governance dimension concerns the parallel institutions of de facto entities, their administrative capacity, and territorial control; the security dimension reflects riskladen interactions, border incidents, escalation mechanisms, and the resort to force. This conceptual triad allows the author to capture how shifts in one sector (for example, the emergence of radical political discourse) can trigger mutations in the others, ultimately producing transformations in the overall political order. In parallel, the notion of incomplete secession is refined through three cumulative conditions: the absence of international recognition, the persistence of a separatist political project, and recurrent antagonism toward the metropolitan state. This conjunctural triad provides a particularly heuristic framework, as it captures a defining feature of post-Soviet space conflicts: they are not “frozen”, but continually renegotiated through a process combining institutional stagnation with political and strategic dynamism. The three parts of the book represent a complete methodological arc, moving from the delineation of the conceptual framework to its operationalization and, ultimately, to the demonstration of its applicability within a coherent comparative structure. The book excels through its rigor, coherence, and ability to Anuarul Laboratorului pentru Analiza Conflictului Transnistrean / The Yearbook of the Laboratory for the Transnistrian Conflict Analysis Vol. VIII, No. 1, 2025 162 transform a subject often treated descriptively, unresolved conflicts, into an innovative theoretical model of political order under incomplete secession. The volume’s conclusions synthesize the theoretical, conceptual, and empirical insights developed throughout the analysis, serving as a genuine point of convergence in which observations on Transnistria, Abkhazia, and South Ossetia are reintegrated into the proposed conceptual architecture. This final synthesis confirms the model’s relevance for contemporary studies of post-Soviet space conflicts and, more broadly, for political theory concerning contested entities and incomplete secessions. In this section, the author restates the central claim of the monograph: unresolved conflicts are dynamic processes rather than “frozen” phenomena, and incomplete secession generates a distinct form of political order characterized by fluctuating legitimacy, variable electoral dynamics, and persistent tensions between metropolitan states and unrecognized entities. The conclusions demonstrate that the classical frozen conflict paradigm fails to capture the processes unfolding in these spaces, and the book’s major contribution lies precisely in this reframing: political order is not static but reactive, contextual, and subject to continual transformation. In this sense, the concept of escalation of political order, introduced earlier in the volume, is here consolidated as an interpretive tool capable of explaining internal variations within conflicts without reducing them to purely military, security-based, or legal dynamics. The Conclusions also propose an extension of the analytical framework developed in the volume by suggesting its tentative application to other cases, such as Nagorno-Karabakh, Donbas, or Northern Cyprus, while prudently emphasizing the need to adapt it to the structure of external patronage, the degree of internal institutionalization, the broader geopolitical context, and the dynamics of elite legitimation. This balanced positioning reflects the epistemological maturity of the study: the model is not presented as a universal template, but as a flexible scheme capable of adjustment according to the specificities of each case. The Conclusions further distinguish themselves by outlining new avenues for research: micro-political analyses of elites within unrecognized entities; studies of hybrid legitimacy; deeper investigation of patron-client relations as an autonomous causal variable; and intercultural or interregional comparative approaches. In this way, the volume situates itself within a modern interpretive paradigm, one capable of transcending both descriptivism and juridical rigidity, and offers the academic community a solid, versatile analytical framework applicable to a wide range of unresolved conflicts. The bibliography confirms the methodological rigor of the author’s approach, both in terms of theoretical relevance and conceptual consistency. The volume is grounded in a broad, up-to-date, and diversified corpus of sources, encompassing not only literature on post-Soviet conflicts but also major contributions in political theory, studies of de facto states, research on international Anuarul Laboratorului pentru Analiza Conflictului Transnistrean / The Yearbook of the Laboratory for the Transnistrian Conflict Analysis Vol. VIII, No. 1, 2025 163 recognition, theories of political order, scholarship on elections and legitimacy, and contemporary approaches to patron-client relations. Taken together, the references provide the book with intellectual density, rigor, and firm grounding in current interdisciplinary debates. The theoretical relevance of the bibliography is carefully calibrated to the book’s stated objectives, structured around four major bodies of literature essential to the conceptual architecture of the study. First, scholarship on de facto statehood and incomplete secession; second, literature on international recognition and sovereignty; third, research on political order and institutions, which anchors conflict analysis within a broader conceptual frame; and fourth, studies on elections, legitimacy, and political mobilization. About consistency, the bibliography demonstrates internal coherence, contemporaneity, and disciplinary diversity, being integrally woven into the structure of the argument rather than serving as a merely cumulative reference list. In terms of the recency of sources, the majority are from 2000 to 2020, reflecting a strong synchronization with contemporary scholarly debates. The bibliography covers more domains such as Political science, International law, Conflict studies, Political sociology, Geopolitics, and related fields. This disciplinary diversity reinforces the theoretical structure of the monograph by integrating concepts, methods, and explanatory frameworks originating from different but convergent traditions in the study of contested spaces.