Centre-periphery relations: means for advancing state resilience

This article identifies key factors that helped reducing the conflict potential in centre-periphery relations in Ukraine and enabled their contribution to state resilience in 2022−2023. The analytical framework is based on rational choice institutionalism and cleavage theory. The article argues that the conflict potential of center-periphery relations in the past was triggered by political competition between key central political actors for a subordination of subnational political actors, in order to strengthen their own positions in the Center. The article specifies two factors that helped reducing the conflict potential of centre-periphery relations and enabled a positive input from them into Ukraine’s state resilience in 2022−2023. The first factor is an institutional one, i. e. the decentralization reform (2014−2020), which strengthened duties and resources of local self-government rather than regional administrations. The second factor is a non-institutional one; it is a „nationalization” of electoral behaviour in democratic contests that led to the emergence of a dominant central political actor and turn away from competitive struggles between central political actors with the help of subnational actors. A shift in the pattern of center-periphery relations was visible in changing interaction of the dominant central political actor with subnational actors during the 2020 regional elections. Still, the article acknowledges that such institutionalized and non-institutionalized changes cannot automatically neutralize clan or oligarchic structures at the local level. Finally, the article identified three types of concrete contributions of Ukraine's new center-periphery relations to increasing state resilience in 2022−2023. They happened via enabling the input of local self-government into territorial defense, the support of internally displaced persons, and Ukraine’s recovery from the Russia’s war.