The Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 initiated the deadliest military conflict in Europe since World War II. Since then, tens of thousands of civilians have been wounded or killed by Russian strikes against residential areas and civilian infrastructure, including energy grids in the dead of winter.
In the fourth year of the invasion and its resistance, Miranda Loli, Max Weber Fellow at the EUI’s Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, argues that the war in Ukraine is happening not only on the battlefield and in negotiation talks; it is also happening on and through time.
Your research takes something we don't usually think about politically — time itself — and argues it's actually a site of power. Can you explain what you mean by that?
We tend to think of time as neutral background, just the clock ticking while politics happens. But in practice, whether we call a situation an "emergency" or a "recovery", whether we treat something as urgent or deferrable, has enormous consequences for who gets to act, how fast, and with how little oversight.
When a situation is framed as an emergency, governments and international organizations can move quickly: cut through red tape, suspend normal procurement rules, act with fewer checks. When it's framed as rebuilding, recovery or reconstruction, a different rulebook applies —environmental assessments, competitive tendering, long-term accountability mechanisms. Same crisis, very different governance.
In the case of ongoing reconstruction planning in Ukraine the conventional model is broken entirely. The standard assumption in international peacebuilding is that there is a sequence: conflict ends, things stabilise, then rebuilding begins. In Ukraine, cranes are going up while missiles are still coming down. Since the first Ukraine Recovery Conference in Lugano in July 2022, an annual series of high-level international gatherings — in Lugano, London, Berlin, and Rome — has sought to coordinate reconstruction priorities, mobilise public and private investment, and anchor Ukraine's recovery to its EU accession process. At the EU level, this has taken concrete form through initiatives such as the €50 billion Ukraine Facility, the Ukraine Investment Framework, and most recently the European Partnership Hub, all designed to channel long-term structural support.
You attended the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Rome in July 2025. What did you observe there?
The conference brings together an extraordinary cross-section of people — over 6,000 attendees including government ministers, EU officials, private investors, weapons manufacturers, civil society representatives, and urban planners. On paper, they are all there for "recovery". In practice, they are operating in completely different temporal worlds.
The moment that captures this best happened during a defense panel I attended. Midway through the discussion — which was already covering everything from drone procurement to decade-long infrastructure investment — phones across the room began buzzing simultaneously. Missile alerts from Ukraine. One of the panel organisers, who had helped put the whole event together, stood up quietly and stepped out to contact her family. This moment was analytically revealing. The same room held actors responding to atrocities and active conflict and actors negotiating multi-year governance frameworks and standards— not as opposing impulses, but as simultaneous demands in the same institutional space. The participants stepping out to check on their families and the speakers pitching to investors are not in contradiction, rather they are operating within the same impossible present. What my research examines is how international governance functions under these conditions: who sets the agenda, whose timelines prevail, what gets built, and how international actors continue to plan, fund, and regulate reconstruction while the war continues.
How do actors actually manage that coexistence in practice?
What is striking is how much active work goes into making the paradox functional. Ukrainian and international actors do not simply accept the contradiction of planning reconstruction during ongoing destruction but rather work, constantly and often collaboratively, to make it governable. This happens through language, through institutional design, through the strategic use of timelines and deadlines, and through direct political contestation over whose priorities should organise the process.
One of the clearest patterns is how actors on both sides translate wartime realities into the institutional vocabulary of peacetime governance, such as procurement cycles, project milestones, fiscal year breakdowns. This allows funding to flow, decisions to be made, and accountability systems to function when the conventional preconditions – stability and predictability - are absent.
At the same time, Ukrainian actors have been notably assertive about setting the terms of engagement rather than simply receiving them. They have built their own monitoring and coordination infrastructure precisely to reduce dependence on donor-designed systems and establish Ukrainian networks as the baseline for international engagement. When processes at the Rome conference moved too slowly or didn't reflect Ukrainian priorities, participants organised additional programming themselves.
The broader question this raises for international governance is significant. Ukraine is not adapting to frameworks developed elsewhere but actively reshaping, contesting and, in some areas, replacing them. Whether that represents a durable shift in how the international community approaches reconstruction in protracted conflicts, or remains specific to Ukraine's particular political leverage as a candidate EU member state, is one of the more important open questions the case poses.
What does Ukraine tell us about how international institutions should think about governing under uncertainty — particularly at a moment when the global order itself is re-shifting?
Ukraine’s case shows both why and how institutions are adapting. EU's Ukraine Facility is the clearest example. Committing €50 billion until 2027 while linking disbursement to accession conditionality and governance reforms is not conventional enlargement policy but rather a form of anticipatory governance operating under active conflict, treating European integration and reconstruction as parallel rather than sequential processes. On the Ukrainian side, the DREAM platform materialises this logic in practice: by requiring over 12,000 reconstruction projects to have completion dates, fiscal year breakdowns, and sustainability indicators benchmarked against EU standards, it is constructing a future European Ukraine in administrative form before that future has arrived.
What this contributes to how we think about anticipatory governance more broadly is a clearer account of how institutions make futures actionable not by resolving uncertainty, but by building frameworks authoritative enough to organise action. At a moment when international institutions face pressure from multiple directions through geopolitical realignment, the erosion of multilateral frameworks, the acceleration of crises, that is a capacity worth understanding carefully. Whether this mode of governance represents a durable shift in how the international community approaches reconstruction in protracted conflicts, or is particular to Ukraine's unique political leverage as an EU candidate state, remains one of the more important questions the case leaves open.
Miranda Loli is a political scientist, specialising in international relations. Her research explores the role of international organisations; she has a keen interest in how local non-governmental actors make space for themselves in the international arena. Miranda is a Max Weber Fellow at the EUI’s Robert Schuman Centre. She is the Principal Investigator of the research project Forging reconstruction governance: global networks, authority and institutions (FORGE) and her recent publications include Inside out: internal and external pressures in the Western Balkans amidst global transformations and counter-peace dynamics.