This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.

The conflict in Ukraine will soon be heading into its third year with no sign of a ceasefire. Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that many in the West are growing impatient with the emerged stalemate and reluctant to provide continued military support to Ukraine.

However, wars do come to an end, often with one side making concessions in exchange for peace. And over the course of the Ukraine war, influential voices in the West – be it those of the late Henry Kissinger, former President Donald Trump or high-ranking NATO official Stian Jenssen, to name a few – have raised the prospect of Ukraine having to cede land to Russia in exchange for peace.

As an expert on Western military interventions in transnational ethnic conflicts, I have seen how well-intentioned peace agreements offered to the perceived aggressor can inadvertently plant the seeds for renewed conflict. This is because such agreements can deliver in peace what the aggressor pursues in war: territory.

Rather than resolve the root cause of conflicts, this can reward revanchism – that is, a state’s policy to reclaim territory it once dominated – and embolden an aggressor to use war to achieve its aim. This is especially true when the West rewards aggression with generous peace agreements.

Take the former Yugoslavia.

It has been more than 20 years since the end of the Yugoslav wars, a series of conflicts that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. During these wars, Serbia sought to unify large swaths of territories populated by Serbs and non-Serbs into a “Greater Serbia.”

The wars ended with military victories for Slovenia and Croatia over Serbia, and NATO intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo. In the cases of the latter countries, NATO intervention was followed by numerous Western-imposed peace plans.

But two decades on, the region borders on renewed conflict as Serbia insists that its survival is dependent on it ability to solely represent and protect all Serbs, wherever they live.

Of course, each war is different, and the circumstances surrounding the invasion of Ukraine are unique.

But I believe the examples of Bosnia and Kosovo show that Western-sponsored treaties, when they sacrifice land for peace, can store up trouble for later – especially when it comes to revanchist nations.

Russia and Serbia revanchism

Russian and Serbian revanchism has been evident ever since the countries they once dominated – the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, respectively – broke up in the early 1990s.

In 1992, Russia seized Transnistria, the Moscow-backed breakaway part of Moldova that borders southwestern Ukraine, under the pretext of securing peace. The same year, Russia intervened in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, autonomous regions within Georgia populated by pro-Russia but non-Georgian peoples, to “end the ethnic fighting.” In 2008, Russia expanded further into Georgia. The same scenario recurred in 2014 when Russia sent forces to Crimea and the Donbas to “protect” ethnic Russians from “Nazi” hordes.

Since the breakup of Yugoslavia, Serbia has similarly sought to reclaim its dominance of that region. It has done this under various pretexts. Serbia’s decadelong wars began in 1991 and included fighting in Slovenia purportedly to “keep Yugoslavia together”; in Croatia, it was to protect ethnic Serbs from the “fascist” regime; in Bosnia, Serbia claimed to be preventing the founding of an “Islamic state”; and in Kosovo, the stated aim was to fight “terrorists.”

Yet, a quarter of a century on – and despite hopes that the fall of former Serbian and Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 might usher in a more peaceful era – political elites in Serbia continue to pursue the unification of all Serb-populated lands, or at minimum gain the West’s acceptance of a “Serb world” – that is, a sphere of Serbian influence in Bosnia, Kosovo and Montenegro where Serbia dominates.

Walking the Balkan path

The various peace treaties meant to stabilize and bring lasting peace to Bosnia and Kosovo have, to various degrees, failed, due in no small part, I would argue, to the very terms of settlement.

In Bosnia, the U.S.-brokered Dayton Accords of 1995 brought the Bosnian War to an end. But it also reorganized the state into two subnational units: the majority-ethnic Serbian Republic of Srpska and the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

The accords awarded 49% of the recently independent Bosnia’s territory to the Republic of Srpska despite Serbs constituting 31% of the general population and having committed genocide and ethnic cleansing in pursuit of crafting a Serb state within Bosnia.

Now, the Republic of Srpska seeks to secede and contravene the Dayton Accords through the establishment of parallel institutions and the withdrawal of its members from Western-brokered institutions.

In Kosovo, with each European Union-sponsored peace agreement to normalize relations between Serbia and Kosovo, security threats from Serbia escalate, as evidenced by a recent armed attack led by Milan Radoičiċ, an associate of Serbia’s president.

Meanwhile, what critics see as Western appeasement of Serbia’s revanchism has led to further concessions in regard to Kosovo. In contrast to Bosnia, the Kosovo model involves incremental appeasement through various peace agreements – the Ahtisaari Plan, Brussels 1 and 2 Agreement, Ohrid Agreement, and the Draft-Statute proposal. These plans offer political concessions to Serbia in exchange for the recognition of Kosovo’s independence.

The same fate for Ukraine?

To suggest that a similar fate to Bosnia or Kosovo may await Ukraine is not beyond the realms of reality.

Any such solution could be an off-ramp to war, but it would hand Vladimir Putin what he wants: control over Russian-speaking people and key strategic territory in Ukraine.

If the West follows either the Bosnia or Kosovo model for peace for Ukraine, the result would likely be the same: First, it would result in the reorganization of Ukraine into two political-administrative units, one under control of a pro-Western government in Kyiv, the other under the influence or direct control of Moscow. Second, it would see the promotion of complex political arrangements, such as ethnic veto powers, dual sovereignty and international representation, that yield institutional dysfunction and political instability. And third, there would be no robust security deployments or guarantees from the U.S. or NATO to deter future Russian aggression.

From Kosovo to Kyiv

The current Western support for Ukraine’s defense will likely lead to its heavy involvement in any peace negotiations.

But ultimately, the implications of a Western-imposed peace in Ukraine may, if the past is any indicator, do little to appease Russian revanchism and may, in fact, encourage Russian elites to pursue a similar policy in Estonia and Latvia – states where Russians make up a quarter of the population.

The West may hope that a plan based on land for peace helps Ukraine by stopping the bloodshed, while at the same time appeases Russia and solves a geopolitical problem for the EU and the U.S.

But if the cases of Bosnia and Kosovo are anything to go by, it could on the contrary only whet Russia’s appetite for more territorial claims, and leave Ukraine feeling betrayed.

Drita Perezic, a security sector expert with the Balkans Policy Research Group, contributed to this article. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit has earned a reputation for strikingly conservative rulings. One of its recent decisions could put the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau out of business, another could hamstring the ability of federal agencies to enforce regulations, and a third could effectively outlaw medication abortions.

The 5th Circuit today looks very different than it did half a century ago, when it was on the front lines of enforcing civil rights. The 5th Circuit currently handles cases in three states: Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas. Until 1982, it also covered Alabama, Georgia and Florida — the entire Deep South during the civil rights era.

Then as now, the 5th Circuit has had a complicated relationship with a Supreme Court that was ideologically sympathetic with the lower court. At times, the 5th Circuit was willing to go further than the Supreme Court on some issues. But the high court hesitated to rebuke the 5th Circuit.

Understanding the 5th Circuit’s work therefore can provide important insights into broader legal trends in the U.S.

Undercutting federal agency power

The Supreme Court can handle only a limited number of cases each year, so it tries to establish general principles that lower courts can apply.

Federal appellate courts oversee the work of federal district courts that apply those general principles. Because the devil is in the details, an appellate court can interpret those principles broadly or narrowly, and in so doing can support or undermine Supreme Court rulings on a day-to-day basis.

Several recent 5th Circuit decisions threaten to undercut the power of federal agencies.

One notable example is the case of the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone. The 5th Circuit in August 2023 rejected the Food and Drug Administration’s relaxation of the conditions under which that drug can be used. That decision, if upheld by the Supreme Court, could severely curtail the ability of a woman to get an abortion. It could also portend widespread challenges to FDA decisions about the safety and effectiveness of drugs and medical devices.

The 5th Circuit suggested an alternative basis for restricting access to mifepristone. It expressed some sympathy for the plaintiffs’ broad reading of the 1873 Comstock Act, an anti-vice law, as forbidding the shipment of any “drug, medicine, article, or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.” But that interpretation might effectively outlaw all abortions, because not only pills but virtually everything used in surgical abortions gets shipped across state lines.

Other 5th Circuit rulings that went against the federal government are also pending before the Supreme Court this term.

Among those, one notable case could eviscerate the ability of agencies to enforce regulatory laws through traditional in-house hearings. The 5th Circuit ruled that the Securities and Exchange Commission must use jury trials in federal court instead of those in-house hearings, that the statute giving the SEC discretion about using agency hearings was unconstitutional, and that the administrative law judges who preside at agency hearings were unlawfully appointed. That ruling, if it stands, could hamstring numerous agencies that enforce federal regulations via in-house hearings.

In a second case now before the U.S. Supreme Court, the 5th Circuit ruled that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s funding mechanism was unconstitutional, because this agency gets its money from the Federal Reserve rather than from Congress.

That ruling could invalidate not only the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau but also the Federal Reserve itself and the entire Social Security program, including Medicare, which also do not receive their funding from Congress.

The 5th Circuit has also expansively interpreted gun rights in cases that call many firearms regulations into question, rejecting a law that bars persons subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms and invalidating federal regulation of ghost guns.

These rulings are part of a striking pattern of restricting federal authority that makes the 5th Circuit distinctive among federal appeals courts across the nation.

But this isn’t the first time the 5th Circuit has stood out.

Furthering desegregation

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which barred racial segregation in public schools, the old 5th Circuit compiled a courageous record in promoting civil rights.

The 5th Circuit judges wrote or upheld rulings that required the desegregation of public schools, universities and other public facilities throughout the Deep South.

Those judges invalidated the segregation ordinance that was a key target of the 1955-56 Montgomery bus boycott, which propelled Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to prominence and helped to galvanize the Civil Rights Movement. The 5th Circuit even held the governor and lieutenant governor of Mississippi in contempt of court for defying desegregation orders in 1962.

The current 5th Circuit, in short, looks very different from its predecessor. That is no small irony, as the 5th Circuit sits in a courthouse named for John Minor Wisdom, one of the heroic judges of the civil rights era.

Limiting federal power

But it’s not only the 5th Circuit that has changed. So has the Supreme Court, which is now dominated by conservative justices.

The Supreme Court that decided Brown v. Board of Education wanted public schools desegregated, but the justices left implementation to federal district judges, whose knowledge of local circumstances could make the process go more smoothly. That approach too often encouraged foot-dragging and massive resistance. Still, the 5th Circuit’s persistence furthered the Supreme Court’s ultimate goal of breaking down segregation.

Today’s Supreme Court has very different priorities. Now, the justices are more interested in limiting federal power than in promoting civil rights.

The current court has undermined the Voting Rights Act, largely eliminated affirmative action and repudiated abortion rights.

Through its “major questions” doctrine, which requires clear congressional authorization for agencies to address problems that have a significant economic impact, the court has made it harder for agencies to undertake new initiatives.

The 5th Circuit these days is still promoting larger Supreme Court goals. Sometimes the 5th Circuit has gotten ahead of the justices, which might explain why the Supreme Court has reversed or limited some of the appellate court’s decisions and might do so again this year.

Then, as now, the 5th Circuit has had a symbiotic relationship with the Supreme Court. This term’s rulings will further clarify the workings of that relationship.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.