EDITORS' FOREWORD.

In mid-June 2023, a curious scene unfolded. The world watched as PMC Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin seemingly took control of Rostov-on-Don, one of the Russian military's primary garrisons and supply choke points en route to Ukraine, before marching on Moscow, only to call off his advance some kilometers outside the capital. The move had seemingly been planned for months and may have been in response to the Russian Ministry of Defense's intention to bring private military companies such as Wagner into the formal military apparatus. Contemporaneous speculation suggested this was a coup attempt, but later reflection, based on the "agreement" supposedly brokered by Belarusian president Aleksandr Lukashenko as well as other evidence, more clearly identified the episode as a mutiny. It remains to be seen how this bizarre event will transform the relationship between Wagner, Russia's most notorious PMC, and President Vladimir Putin.

The response to the incident captures, in microcosm, dynamics at play since the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022: verified intelligence, wildly-divergent expert opinions, wall-to-wall media coverage. In some respects, the war has been the first to be widely accessible (and livestreamed) on social media. Within days of the invasion, groups formed on social media to analyze footage from the front lines as well as to translate Russian and Ukrainian Telegram channels. Experts in once-obscure but now-relevant subfields launched long Twitter threads explaining battlefield dynamics, weapons procurement, or artillery provenance. OSINT (opensource intelligence) identified troop movements, airstrike locations, and materiel losses. One Journal editor remembers seeing a TikTok from January 2022, in which a young Russian soldier is filming his column's advance down a snowy lane, in the late evening, somewhere in western Russia. The video had already received tens of millions of views--and millions of likes.

Such attention is largely well-deserved. A refugee crisis--both external into Europe and internal within Ukraine's borders--has shifted millions across Europe. Movement has been facilitated by the Temporary Protection Directive across the continent, though most Ukrainians do want to return home, at least once hostilities have diminished. Awakening ideological sympathies and the forging of new alliances are reshaping international relations in real time. More broadly, the war may be viewed as just another accelerant, in the same way COVID-19 advanced the progress of certain trends: authoritarian consolidation, institutional reform, economic diversification.

An honest assessment of what has so far transpired, however, would be incomplete without acknowledging widespread ambivalence outside the West. Issue prioritization comes to the fore. Why has the journal not dedicated an issue to the Tigrayan conflict in Ethiopia? Or the ongoing violence in the Sahel region of Africa? Why not any number of other pressing trends within...