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Maria Kastrinou: Looking at ethnic cleansing in Palestine from the occupied Syrian Golan

The unfolding genocide in Palestine today is a continuation of Israel’s 75-year-old occupation and ethnic cleansing. This article provides a perspective on the ongoing tragedy from the vantage point of the Golan Heights – often referred to as Israel’s ‘forgotten occupation.’ How are the stateless Syrians experiencing this war? And why do ‘ethnic cleansing’ and ‘genocide’ reverberate as strongly here as in the rest of Palestine and Israel? By threading the current genocide to the story of occupation and ethnic cleansing in the Golan Heights, this article discusses the underlying settler-colonial assumptions about religious purity and war that have fuelled imperialist projects in occupied Syria and Palestine, and in the wider region.[1]

Fear and messages on WhatsApp

On Sunday, 8th of October, my friend Kamel[2] wrote on WhatsApp: ‘the kids are worried so much… I bought food and water for them… we are preparing ourselves for a big war in the area…’ With his wife and three young children, Kamel’s family have been staying inside for the past month, working and going to school on Zoom.

We became friends in Damascus in 2009. Kamel had just finished his degree in English Literature at Damascus University, while I was doing fieldwork for my PhD. We’ve kept in touch and I’ve visited him and his family in the Golan Heights. Last time this May, I promised Salam, his wife, that I’ll bring my own young children to Majdal Shams, the biggest of the occupied villages in the Golan, next time I visit in February 2024. Our kids are of similar ages, our families in similar stages. If we lived closer, we’d have playdates and family dinners.

Image 1: The border fence between occupied Majdal Shams and Syria, Druze flag [Photo taken by the author, 2015]

People, Kamel tells me, are really afraid to go outside their houses. Out of fear of arrests and, even more, out of fear of pogroms against Arabs, most dare not leave their villages to travel into Israel. For friends from the Golan Heights that live and work in Israel and in the West Bank, the situation is sheer terror. ‘We are afraid to go to work, we are afraid to speak Arabic in public,’ Kamel adds. People have been arrested by Israeli police for writing pro-Palestinian posts on social media. Throughout Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories people get arrested and held without charges, university students and workers, Arab and Jewish Israelis. Sara, one of the stateless Syrians in the Golan Heights, has stopped going to work in the Israeli eco-project that she was working with before the war on Gaza: ‘Israeli society has become, overnight, so extreme, so racist,’ she tells me.  

Others, especially from the older generation, are not surprised by the state of Israel’s genocidal attack on Palestinians. ‘The tree of occupation never bears good fruit,’ Salman tells me on the phone. The ‘tree of occupation’ is the 75 years of occupation, killing, dispossession, and apartheid that Palestinians have endured in the hands of the state of Israel. This is the ‘root cause’ of violence.

Salman is one of the community’s leaders and revolutionaries, also a former political prisoner in Israel. He is a friend and a co-author, whose field research and hospitality have shaped my own field visits in the Golan over the past years.  We speak on the phone often, he is worried about the ‘total siege on Gaza,’ and emphasises that Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant ordered a ‘complete siege on Gaza’ saying that they are fighting ‘human animals.’ In his speech, and throughout the past month, Palestinians have constantly been dehumanised in the Israeli press. ‘They don’t show any pictures from Gaza, nothing!’ Salman exclaims.’ In a state of war, Israeli public media focus on Hamas’ massacre and Israel’s ‘right of self-defence,’ egging on the ‘flattening of Gaza.’ Like many others, Salman is afraid because Netanyahu, Gallant and others sense that their time is up, and they want to cause as much destruction as possible. From academics to the UN, the word genocide is used to describe the collective punishment of Palestinians unleashed by Israel.

Back to Kamel, we send each other video messages and funny things that the kids do. I keep thinking: how do you keep young kids busy amidst a war? In what stories do you translate your fears? Do you speak to them about the killing of so many children? How do you contextualise the sound of rockets across the border, and the constant humming of drones over your head? Do you tell them that the Israeli soldiers in their streets use them as human shields when they fire from the military bases within the Golan, to Syria and Lebanon? Can you make the rockets that get intercepted by the Iron Dome seem like fireworks or early Christmas lights?

As human beings and anthropologists, how can we make sense of this brutality? We watch live the purposeful and vengeful collective punishment of the Palestinian people, the indiscriminate bombing of refugee camps, hospitals, schools, residential buildings, mosques and churches. We (mis)measure again the different value of being a human, where Palestinian children are cast ‘outside of humanity’ (Fernandez 2023). We bear witness to state terrorism and murder (De Lauri 2023), to starvation and siege, to war crimes, and to the genocide of a people by the machinery of one of the most highly armed nuclear states in the world. These techniques of extermination are a continuation of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that started with the al-Nakba, furthered through the wars of 1967 and 1973, and has continued unabated until today (Pappé 2007).

Although I don’t have answers to the above questions, this piece is a way to make sense of the pain, war, and defiant hope that come out of years of ethnographic fieldwork, and of the most recent genocidal war and the reign of fear. For, although the Israeli occupation in the Golan has been the least violent in comparison to the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), we can see that from ethnic cleansing to the religious engineering of a compliant minority, the sectarianism of the occupation is part of a larger arsenal, one of the means towards the same ends.

The weaponization of religious difference, or, how the Israeli occupation in the Golan was from the start ethnic cleansing and religious engineering

“If you live, live free. If you die, die standing like a tree.” These lines are carved onto the tombstone of Hayel Abu Zeid (1968-2005), who died, the epitaph continues, ‘for the resistance and hope.’ Hayel is one of the martyrs and revolutionaries from the Israeli occupied Syrian Golan Heights who dedicated their lives to the cause of liberation from Israeli occupation. Next to his tomb is a commemorative plaque for Amir Abu Jobal, a boy of 5 years who was killed by an Israeli mine near his home. In the cemetery in Majdal Shams, the largest remaining occupied village, there are many other tombstones commemorating resistance, heroism, and the unjust loss of life as a result of war and occupation.

Occupation, ethnic cleansing and resistance have deep roots among the indigenous stateless Syrian people. From the very start of Israel’s invasion during the Arab-Israeli war of 1967, ethnic cleansing was an important strategy of war and occupation. 95% of the Syrian indigenous population was forcibly displaced and only five villages, out of 340 villages and farms, remained. These villages were predominantly Druze (the villages are Majdal Shams, Mas’ada, Buq’atha and Ein Qiniya. The village of Sahita was later destroyed by Israel, Ghajar is an Alawi village). Israeli army officials believed that the Druze, a religious community with historical links to Isma’ili Islam, would inflict a ‘stab in the back’ to Arabism. The sectarian logic of the Israeli occupation from the start, thus, was clear: displace the indigenous population, render them prostrate, or engineer them so that they cannot unite with Palestinian resistance and no longer pose a threat. Sectarianism is the more insidious continuation of ethnic cleansing outside of war.

Image 2: Much of the occupied territory is designated by Israel as military zones [Photo taken by the author, 2015]

The belief that the ‘Druze’ would be compliant peons in maintaining a state founded upon religious and ethnic difference was not unfounded. Israel had already by 1949 achieved an alliance with the religious Druze elites in the regions of Carmel and Galilee, in what became Northern Israel (Firro 1999). This alliance with the state of Israel isolated the Druze community in Israel from their co-religionists in Syria and Lebanon. In exchange for becoming political representatives of a new religious ethnicity (not unlike the created roles of tribal chiefs in other colonial settings), the sectarianisation of political identity in the greater context of Israeli ethnocracy (Yiftachel 2006) was moulded, and the ‘Israeli Druze,’ thus, created.  The creation of the ‘Israeli Druze identity’ became henceforth an ongoing project between local Druze elites and the Israeli state, a project of producing ‘ethnic difference’ in the process of ‘inventing religious traditions’ (Firro 2005).

And so, the ‘Israeli Druze’ were the first Arabs ‘to be trusted’ to serve in the Israeli Defence Forces, and until recently, they were the only Arabs to be conscripted to do so (Kanaaneh 2008). Their so-called loyalty to the state of Israel turned ‘Druze identity’ into a laboratory for the manufacturing of sectarian difference, as the Israeli state and military worked hand-in-hand with local elites to produce and fund new ‘Druze traditions,’ as well as a comprehensive and specifically ‘Druze’ educational curriculum to educate the new generations. While this project was successful in funding the architecture of religious politics, it has not done much to address the chronic poverty and impoverishment of this region. Indeed, the Druze in Israel continue to be second-class citizens living under a settler colonial apartheid state. As such, all state policies are essentially discriminatory on the basis of religion, as shown during the 2018 Druze protests against the Jewish Nation-State Law.

The Druze in the occupied villages of the Golan Heights are Syrians and different from their ‘Israeli Druze’ counterparts described above. As the tombs in the cemetery proclaim, the heroes and martyrs of this mountain community have fought Israeli occupation, sacrificing their lives to either Israeli bullets or inside Israeli jails. Although individuals can be killed, memories of such resistance, here as in Palestine (see Swedenburg 2003), are not easy to kill.

What is being Golani? The complexity of citizenship, belonging and resistance

‘Israel wants us to be Druze,’ explained Fahed, the president of a local autonomous organisation, during an interview in May 2023, ‘Israeli Druze.’  Here, being ‘Israeli Druze’ means being compliant to Israeli authority. For deeply pious shaykhly families in the Golan, being somehow connected, or dependent upon the worldly authority of an occupying power is a religious anathema, and the most religious among them, have abided by strict regimes of independence and autonomy (see Kastrinou et al 2020).

Nevertheless, Israeli propaganda posits that the Druze of the Golan do not take Israeli citizenship because they are afraid of repercussions from the Syrian regime, should the Golan return to Syria. Yet none of my interlocutors has ever mentioned this reason. Instead, during the height of the Syrian war in 2015 I heard that ‘We will still be Syrians, even if Syria ceases to exist!’ Like inside Syria, the stateless Syrians in the Golan Heights underwent a similar process of anti- and pro-regime protests, while more recently from this August, some have been protesting in solidarity to the Druze protests ongoing in the Syrian province of Sweida.

Image 3: Barbed wire at a UN post on the border [Photo taken by the author, 2015]

On the basis of estimates from local representatives and academics, between 10 and 25% of the stateless population has accepted Israeli citizenship. The vast majority of Syrians in the Golan Heights remain stateless. Getting Israeli citizenship is a contentious subject for a community that is known for its resistance to Israeli occupation (Mason et al. 2022). When I asked Nidaa, a member of the women’s committee in the Golan, whether she’d still want to be part of Syria while there is a war, she adamantly said: ‘I’m part of the Syrian body, I’ll go through what the people go through.’ Yet, taking Israeli citizenship has increased after the Syrian war, but it happens for complex, and sometimes contradictory reasons – out of losing hope at the aftermath of the Syrian revolution (Al-Khalili 2023), or to be able to work within the Israeli job market and advance one’s career, rather than because people ‘feel Israeli.’ Rabiah, a young man in his late 20s, for example, took Israeli citizenship so that he would not lose his land after living outside the country for three years – ‘I did it so that Israel does not confiscate my land,’ he told me.

In the 1980s and 90s it was the norm that people who took Israeli citizenship suffered social ‘death.’ Branded as being ‘traitors’ and ‘collaborators,’ they were excommunicated from social and religious affairs. Jawad’s father was one of the first people in Majdal Shams to publicly declare his support for Israel and also one of the first to get Israeli citizenship. He lost most of his business and social capital in doing so. Jawad mentioned bitterly that, when his father died, the local religious shaykhs refused to carry out the mortuary prayers and rituals; the family had to bring in Israeli Druze shaykhs from the Galilee. Yet, when I asked him where he feels his identity lies, to my surprise he replied that he feels ‘Syrian’ even though he has Israeli citizenship. And, like most people who have acquired Israeli citizenship from the Golan Heights, Jawad was exempt from serving in the IDF: ‘I don’t like the army,’ he says. ‘I’m a pacifist.’

Settler-colonial assumptions, imperialist projects

Underpinning the process of ethnically cleansing the Golan and the sectarianisation of political identities that Israel undertook lies a simple colonial logic, namely that religious groups are, basically, homogeneous. This logic assumes that there is one homogenous Druze community running through the occupied Golan Heights and the Druze villages in Northern Israel. This assumption is simplistic, filled with colonial connotations (i.e. same religion = same everything else), and simply not correct. We can see this assumption supported by Israeli policy and propaganda which has historically tried to imprint a sectarian logic and ‘Druzification’ on the occupied Syrians in the Golan Heights. The same colonial logic underpinned USA’s ‘tribal’ policies during the invasion of Iraq (González 2009).

It is the same logic, extended, that we see used by Israel to explain the large-scale genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. In the words of Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, “it is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” The Israeli ex-defence minister Avigdor Liberman said that “there are no innocents in Gaza.” Indeed, this is the logic that was used from the very start of the Zionist project, with ethnic cleansing ongoing since its inception (Pape 2007). The murder in Gaza is blatantly obvious whilst the occupation of the Golan is, in comparison, less bloody. But the underlying assumption of homogeneity within religious and ethnic groups is the same. The settler colonial state, then, either engineers homogeneity or works to expel or exterminate it.

Image 4: Inside a civil building in the deserted town of Quneitra, now used as an Israeli military training ground [Photo taken by the author, 2015]

But “religion is precisely the recognition of man in a roundabout way,” wrote Marx whilst exploring how capitalist states, in general, pretend but essentially fail to keep their secular, emancipatory promises.  And creating a homogenous, religiously pure social entity is a risky, unstable business.

The French had already tried it. During their colonial mandate, they divided Syria into territorial chunks on the basis of the colonial assumption of obedience in exchange for religious homogeneity. It was at the end of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of Western colonialism and imperialism in the Middle East that what Ussama Makdisi (2005) calls the ‘culture of sectarianism’ was born, as a thoroughly new and modern phenomenon.  And, as it was born it was also resisted: the Syrian revolt against the French colonial rule was started in the Druze province by a Druze, Sultan Basha Al-Atrash, one of the greatest Syrian national heroes. The French collectively punished the Druze for their disobedience by burning down the village of Majdal Shams and collectively punishing its inhabitants. Indeed, it was this memory that was cited as a deterrent for villagers in leaving their village during the 1967 invasion (Kastrinou et al 2020). No one wants to be uprooted twice. The Israeli plan to move more than a million Palestinians from North Gaza to the south, along with the possibility of a further displacement in Egypt’s Sinai, could be a history repeated thrice: as tragedy, farce and genocide.

As with French colonialism and USA imperialism, the Israeli operation to ethnically cleanse the Golan Heights and to homogenise Druze identity in exchange for obedience, did not go to plan. When Israel decided to unilaterally and illegally annex the Golan Heights in 1981, the occupied people responded by going on a six-month strike. In their vast majority, the Syrian people of the four occupied villages, some 25,000 people, are stateless because they have not accepted Israeli citizenship. Their status is legally the same as that of Palestinians in East Jerusalem (see al-Marsad 2011, and Delforno 2019): they are ‘permanent residents’ in Israel and as such they do not serve in the IDF. Legally stateless, they don’t have passports but laissez-passer documents where their nationality is ‘undefined’. They have trouble travelling inside and outside of Israel, trouble getting jobs, accessing basic services, and they are constantly under the threat of the military occupation that steals their land (the ongoing conflict with the wind turbines is a point in green colonialism), and creates a host of other problems.

This experience of colonial taxonomical imposition, violence and ethnic cleansing resonates from French colonialism in Syria to Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank today.

Sowing resistance, sowing hope

A different heritage, that of resistance, is knitted into the town’s urban landscape, the most emblematic of which is Hassan Khater’s statue ‘The March’ (1987), which depicts Sultan Basha al-Atrash, the Druze leader of the Syrian revolt against the French in 1925, surrounded by contemporary figures such as a man of letters, next to a traditionally dressed man, a mother holding her dying son – a new martyr of the resistance. On the back of the statue there are three kids, the future, holding books and wheat. Instead of religious homogeneity, the threading theme is resistance to outside occupiers. The French missed that, and so did the Israelis.

Image 5: ‘The March’, statue by Hassan Khater (1987) at the central square of Majdal Shams [Photo taken by the author, 2023]

History teaches that colonial assumptions of religious purity lead to imperialist projects of ethnic cleansing and genocide, like the televised genocide in Gaza and the occupation of the Golan Heights. Look closer, though, in the continuities of everyday practices and the threads of another history become visible: the history of ordinary resistance, what the Palestinians have exemplified and gifted to struggles far and wide: ‘sumud’ – steadfastness. In combating the ‘bad fruit’ of occupation, the occupied people of the Golan Heights, and the occupied Palestinians, continue to sow resistance and hope, what the poet Mahmoud Darwish described in his poem ‘A state of siege’:

Here, where the hills slope before the sunset and the chasm of time

near gardens whose shades have been cast aside

we do what prisoners do

we do what the jobless do

we sow hope

Maria Kastrinou is Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Brunel University London. Her research interrogates the politics of sectarianism, statelessness and resistance through the lives and stories of her ethnographic interlocutors from Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Author of Power, Sect and State in Syria (I.B. Tauris 2016), she is currently working on the project ‘Lives across divides: Ethnographic stories from the Golan Heights.’

Endnotes

[1] Acknowledgement: Many thanks to colleagues and friends in the Golan Heights who despite the war read through and made suggestions; to colleagues at Brunel University, especially Isak Niehaus, Gareth Dale and Mark Neocleous; to Vera Sajrawi, and to Steven Emery. Kastrinou’s current research about the Golan Heights is supported by the Druze Heritage Foundation, London.

[2] All names are pseudonyms and some details have been altered in order to ensure my interlocutors’ anonymity.

References

Al-Khalili, Charlotte, 2023. Waiting for the Revolution to End: Syrian displacement, time and subjectivity. London: UCL Press.

Al-Marsad, 2011. ‘Suggested issues for Consideration Regarding Israel’s third Periodic Report to the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) To Be Held On November 14-December 2, 2011.’ NGO Report. (https://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cescr/docs/ngos/Al-Marsad_ISRAEL_CESCR47.doc) Accessed: Nov. 13, 2023.

Delforno, Alessandro. 2019. More shadows than lights: Local elections in the occupied Syrian Golan. Majdal Shams: Al-Marsad. (https://golan-marsad.org/wp-content/uploads/More-Shadows-than-Lights-Local-Election-in-the-Occupied-Syrian-Golan-1.pdf) Accessed: Nov. 13, 2023.

De Lauri, Antonio 2023 “The Courage of Historical Truths” Focaalblog 30 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/10/30/antonio-de-lauri-the-courage-of-historical-truths/

Fernandez, Júlia 2023 “Outside of Humanity: Palestinian Children and the Value of Life” Focaalblog 31 October. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/10/31/julia-fernandez-outside-of-humanity-palestinian-children-and-the-value-of-life/

Firro, Kais. 1999. The Druzes in the Jewish state: A brief history. Vol. 64. Brill.

Firro, Kais M. 2005. “Druze maqāmāt (shrines) in Israel: From ancient to newly-invented tradition.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 32, no. 2: 217-239.

González, Roberto J. 2009. “On “tribes” and bribes: “Iraq tribal study,” al-Anbar’s awakening, and social science.” Focaal 2009, no. 53: 105-116.

Kanaaneh, Rhoda Ann. 2008. Surrounded: Palestinian soldiers in the Israeli military. Stanford University Press.

Kastrinou, A. Maria A., Salman Fakher El-Deen, and Steven B. Emery. 2020. “The stateless (ad) vantage? Resistance, land and rootedness in the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights.” Territory, Politics, Governance 9, no. 5: 636-655.

Makdisi, Ussama. The culture of sectarianism: community, history, and violence in nineteenth-century Ottoman Lebanon. Univ of California Press, 2000.

Marx, Karl. 1843. The Jewish Question. Proofed and Corrected: by Andy Blunden, Matthew Grant and Matthew Carmody, 2008/9. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/) Accessed: Nov. 13, 2023.

Mason, Michael, Munir Fakher Eldin, and Muna Dajani, eds. The Untold Story of the Golan Heights:: Occupation, Colonization and Jawlani Resistance. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022.

Pappé, Ilan. 2007. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Simon and Schuster.

Swedenburg, Ted. 2003. Memories of revolt: The 1936–1939 rebellion and the Palestinian national past. University of Arkansas Press.

Watenpaugh, Keith David. 2022.  “Kill the Armenian/Indian; Save the Turk/Man: Carceral Humanitarianism, the Transfer of Children and a Comparative History of Indigenous Genocide.” Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 29, no. 1: 35-67.

Yiftachel, Oren. 2006. Ethnocracy: Land and identity politics in Israel/Palestine. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Cite as: Kastrinou, Maria 2023 “Looking at ethnic cleansing in Palestine from the occupied Syrian Golan” Focaalblog 16 November. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/11/16/maria-kastrinou-looking-at-ethnic-cleansing-in-palestine-from-the-occupied-syrian-golan/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Volodymyr Artiukh: The political logic of Russia’s imperialism

The debate around the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including the previous contributions in FocaalBlog, has shifted from the ‘either NATO or Russia’ dichotomy to a more nuanced exchange along the lines of ‘it is NATO, but…’ versus ‘it is Russia, but…’. In a welcome development, discussants started following Tony Wood’s (2022) advice to ‘ascribe weights’ to the factors leading to Russia’s invasion. It is also the intention of this text. However, rather than doing so quantitatively, and ascribing ‘weights’ to each individual actor, I aim, like Don Kalb (2022), at presenting a relational narrative.

Beside my interrupted fieldwork in Ukraine (2021), this contribution to the war debate is based on my fieldwork in Belarus (2015-2017) and my conclusions on how Lukashenka’s ‘Caesarist regime’ mutated when faced with popular and geopolitical challenges to its ‘passive-revolutionary strategy’ (Artiukh 2020, 2021), to use Gramsci’s vocabulary. Drawing on my insights from Ukraine and Belarus, I sketch the political logic of Russia’s aggressive territorial expansion against the backdrop of US hegemonic decline. I claim that this expansion, driven by the logic of legitimism whereby Russia offers its prospective clients a new anti-revolutionary ‘Holy Alliance,’ as Tsarist Russia did in the 19th century, and engenders a system of ‘anti-Maidan’ regimes that share important cultural and political commonalities.

Image 1: Head of states, among them Ukrainian and Russian presidents taking part in a meeting in Minsk on August 26, 2014, photo by Mykola Lazarenko/Ukrainian Presidential Press Service

This political logic, clearly formulated in Putin’s 2015 UN speech follows a shift in Russian imperialist strategy. According to the political economist Ilya Matveev (2021), Russian imperialism transitioned from the economic logic to the territorial logic around the year 2014, when the Russian state resigned from the strategy of expanding private businesses to Ukraine and other post-Soviet republics and started waging political control over these territories even at the expense of the interests of private capital. The most salient example of this new strategy was the annexation of Crimea and the support for the pro-Russian rebels in Donbass. However, the strategy seems to be broader and includes the reactivation of other ‘frozen conflicts’ (Georgia 2008, possibly Moldova), involvement in domestic conflicts (Ukraine 2014, Belarus 2020, Kazakhstan 2022), and provision of military services (Syria and several African countries).

The central tenet of this legitimist territorial strategy was the conservation of neopatrimonial regimes threatened by popular discontent. The Donbass break-away statelets were the first in a series of regimes that started appearing in the post-Soviet space since 2014 in reaction to the real or perceived threat of popular protests. I call such forms of governance ‘anti-Maidan’ regimes in reference to their first legitimizing narrative of resisting Ukraine’s Maidan protests. What unites them is the fact that they are reactions to populist uprisings, foster the demobilization rather than mobilization of their populations, and rely on police and military coercion rather than hegemonic projects. As elites in need joined this Holy Alliance, their regimes transformed accordingly: these include Assad’s Syria, Lukashenka’s Belarus, most recently Kazakhstan, and the newly occupied regions of Ukraine. Bringing this logic back home, Russia’s own regime has undergone a transformation into an authoritarian police state with post-fascist tendencies.

This project should be traced back to the continued organic crisis that burst to the surface in 2008 and made the situation on the eve of the 2013 Maidan uprising possible. The Ukrainian Maidan protests were one of the localized ‘worldwide mobilizations’ (Kalb & Mollona, 2018) against neoliberalized neopatrimonial regimes under the strain of the crisis, best epitomized by the Arab Spring. Formed around the territorialized condensation of political passions, such uprisings were rooted in something akin to Sorel’s political myth that was able to create a cleavage between ‘us and them’ but unable to produce lasting change because of the lack of organizational frameworks and leadership. Therefore, it was the more radical violent groups that took advantage of such movements, the contemporary condottiere that, nevertheless, were not able to embody the collective will (Gopal, 2020).

These post-developmental neopatrimonial regimes were in different stages of decline and stood in different relations with their neighbours. Thus, the Tunisian and Belarusian regimes, being able to rely on their patrons and having stronger states, were able to incorporate the uprisings in their continuing passive revolutionary strategies. Others suffered from the intervention of their neighbours, as it happened in Bahrain, Yemen, and Ukraine. Still others plunged into a prolonged civil war, such as Libya or Syria, and became a battleground of competing US, Turkish, and Russian imperialisms.

Contrary to wide-spread preconception, the US demonstrated a failure of its hegemony when faced with these situations. Here I use hegemony in a Gramscian-Arrighian sense, as a set of institutions and ideologies buttressed by the potentiality of the use of credible force that can overcome crises and align the interest of core and peripheral elites. Whereas the US central bank managed to relatively successfully mitigate the crisis of 2008 in Europe, it failed to establish order in its periphery (Tooze, 2019). Similarly, the US military operations brought unintended consequences. Once this hegemonic hole opened and the US showed its weakness, a ‘shitshow’ emerged, in Obama’s words, as the contenders immediately sprang to action offering their help to restore order.

One hegemonic contender was Russia, one of the neopatrimonial regimes whose decline was only beginning to show itself. The first signs of this decline appeared in the urban middle class protests of 2011-2013 and were quickly suppressed. Since domination in international relations, according to Gramsci, is an extension of the modes of domination of the ruling class, Russia’s system of neopatrimonial international dependencies was also slipping away. Thus, Russia came up with a doctrine of the support of ‘legitimate regimes’ against the hybrid war waged by the west (Göransson, 2021). As an alternative of the faltering US hegemony based on the ‘promotion of democracy’ including the support of popular uprisings, Russia came up with an offer of a Holy Alliance for the 21st century. In Gramscian terms, this was an offer of the preservation of the historical bloc that is based on Ceasarist domination rather than hegemony. Thus, as opposed to the faltering US hegemony, Russia offered an international system of domination without hegemony. Such an offer would solve two tasks: bolster the rule of the Russian domestic regime and ensure the stability of the regimes of the states that join the Holy Alliance.

This is how one can read the post-Maidan developments. The fall of Yanukovych signalled the fragility of the neopatrimonial regimes and thereby threatened Russia as the provider of security guarantees after Yanukovych accepted such offer in late 2013. The weak political-mythical quality of the Maidan uprising ended in the ‘us and them’ cleavage, thus alienating a considerable part of Ukraine’s population (Zhuravlev & Ishchenko, 2020). Expectedly, it followed by the stage of far right condottierism that further widened the cleavage. Europe was disoriented and the US was cautious to get involved in yet another ‘shitshow.’ The annexation of Crimea and the fuelling of the civil war in Ukraine was the logical application of the legitimism doctrine. This first move was a typically Ceasarist one, a special operation of Putin’s ‘praetorian guard’. The goal of bolstering domestic legitimacy was attained by the so-called Crimea effect, while the goal of establishing the legitimate order in Ukraine was in process.

Russian analysts expected that the post-Maidan government would not differ much from the previous one and thus would need a donor of security against the separatist threat that Russia itself fuelled. Russian leadership also knew that neither the EU nor the US would be willing to become such donors to the full extent required. Thus, they offered the package of the so-called Minsk agreements which was a military-diplomatic consecration of Russia’s military victory over the weak post-Maidan regime. The Minsk agreements envisaged the presence of the de facto Russian political and military forces within a federal Ukrainian state that would potentially win the ensuing civil war (Koshiw, 2022). The EU had no other choice than trying to freeze the ‘no war no peace’ situation hoping that it would solve itself in the future. The US largely kept at a distance during the Trump interregnum.

However, the Kyiv authorities and the heirs of the Maidan condottiere fought to avoid this situation tooth and nail. They imposed the post-Maidan consensus, profiting from the cleavage opened by the Maidan political passions and supported by the condottiere. With some limited help from the EU and the US, the Kyiv authorities managed to re-establish state institutions and rebuild the army. The West had no choice but to accept the new Kyiv Caesarism. This time Russia decided to wait while developing the separatist republics in Donbass as the outpost for the coming battle.

By that time, the LNR/DNR, kept together by the perpetual state of emergency and harsh repressions against dissident political, cultural and labour activists, became a grey zone controlled by the Russian public and private agencies (Savelyeva, 2022). Having consolidated its sovereignty over the anti-Maidan outpost in Donbass, Russia claimed an undisputed success in Syria by reviving Assad’s rule over most of the country and burying the remnants of the 2011 uprising. Finally, the post-2020 Belarus, which switched from authoritarian populism to an outright dictatorial police state (Artiukh, forthcoming), was undoubtedly the most successful case of Russia’s international assistance within the Holy Alliance. Similarly to the leadership of LNR/DNR, Lukashenka constructed his post-protest legitimacy as a machine-gun brandishing saviour of the country from a west-inspired coup attempt, which explicitly compared to Ukraine’s Maidan. Not only did Russia’s political, media and economic support succeed in stabilizing Lukashenka’s regime but also managed to tie it to Russia, thus securing a military lodgement.

This series of successes against the background of the American and European failures emboldened the Russian elites. While Russia reinstated the power of Assad in Syria, exported its services to African countries, and crashed protests at home, the US was mired in the Trump ‘shitshow’ internally, nearly losing NATO allies, announcing a pivot to Asia, and losing miserably at the withdrawal from Afghanistan. The only unfinished business for the Holy Alliance was Ukraine. Since the beginning of 2020, Russia started integrating the separatist statelets in Donbass into the Russian ideological, economic, and political sphere while simultaneously pressing the Ukrainian authorities to hastily implement the political part of the Minsk agreements.

After a brief flirtation with Putin, Zelensky’s government realized it could not reinstate sovereignty over the separatist regions if the Minsk process was supervised by Russia and domestic politics was contested by nationalists. Russia’s actions hinted at the possibility of either fully integrating these statelets into Russia following the Crimea example or using them as the outpost of the ‘Russian world,’ as proclaimed in the ideological doctrine of LNR/DNR in early 2021. According to some analysts, that’s the time when the Russian authorities started preparing for the eventuality of a full-fledged military operation against Ukraine. Next steps were only a question of time and opportunity.

This opportunity came in late 2021 or early 2022. Many factors converged that would weaken the West and embolden Russia, and Russian elites understood this. Not only were the US and Europe hit by the pandemic, but they also faced political transitions: the new and weak president in the US who continued the pivot to Asia, the new chancellor in Germany and the coming elections in France. Things were going much better for Russia: Belarus was securely under Russia’s control as a poster child of the Holy Alliance, Russia’s economy stabilized and accumulated all-time high resources, the lighting fast special operation in Kazakhstan would prove Russia as a reliable donor of security. Thus, Russia announced its assault with the first war scare of the April 2021 that seemingly opened a dialogue on the matters of strategic security between the US and Russia. After that Putin and Medvedev wrote their texts about Ukraine and Zelensky, essentially offering an ultimatum: either Ukraine would be destroyed as a state, or it would be refashioned according to the Russian will.

Zelensky was probably aware of the coming danger, therefore he stepped up the cleansing of the domestic political domain and tried to improve the army as much as possible while still clinging to the ceasefire in the Donbass. He hoped to balance his way out of the narrow road ahead of him. Russia meanwhile rolled out another ultimatum in December 2022 that already asked for the withdrawal of the NATO infrastructure from the former Warsaw Pact countries in addition to a ban on accepting new NATO members. Much like Austria’s ultimatum against Serbia in 1914, Putin’s was also not meant to be met. After some initial setbacks, the Russian army has continued to occupy Ukraine’s territory beyond LNR/DNR, keeping the political goals of the war deliberately vague.

Three months into the war, the newly occupied territories in the south of Ukraine are controlled by the methods developed by other anti-Maidan regimes, primarily Belarus and LNR/DNR. The tremendous success of Lukashenka’s crackdown against those who protested the results of the unfair elections in 2020 relied on unprecedented police brutality, long-term jail sentences, and the demoralization of dissenters. Having abandoned his trademark populism, Lukashenka proved that brute force alone might work if people are sufficiently atomized in cities and on the shopfloor. Initial mass demonstrations against the Russian occupation have been dispersed as Russia strengthened its policing capacity in the rear of the invading army. There are reports of political activists being kidnapped and tortured, repeating the Donbass experience. One of the methods used in Belarus, the systematic video-taping of forced self-denunciations, was recently repeated in Kherson oblast, where people unhappy with the occupation were forced to apologize on camera and say that they have ‘completed a denazification course.’ This is not accompanied by any coherent ideological narrative; instead, Russian media project a wild mix of Soviet, Tsarist, and vaguely fascist symbols whose sole purpose is to intimidate and show that the resistance is futile (Artiukh, 2022).

While constructing the system of anti-Maidan regimes, Russia has also transformed itself from a ‘managed democracy’ into a police state with post-fascist tendencies and imposing a postmodern mix of ideologies that are not meant to truly persuade the masses (Budraitskis, 2022). If the US presided over the emergence of post-Soviet world by promoting neoliberal textbooks and failing to create a hegemonic security paradigm, Russia’s anti-Maidan strategy accomplished the end of post-Sovietness by destroying all remnants of the Soviet civilization that the successor states fed on. On the one hand, this is symbolic decommunization – from the literal destruction of monuments in Ukraine to the zombification of Soviet symbols which are being turned into symbols of the colonial conquests of the Russian Federation; on the other hand, it is political and economic “decommunization” – the delegitimization of the borders of the former republics and the destruction of the centers of Soviet industrialization in the Donbass, Mariupol, or Kharkov. The long decline of pax postsovietica is almost over.

Volodymyr Artiukh is a Postdoctoral Researcher at COMPAS with the ERC-funded project EMPTINESS: Living Capitalism and Democracy after (Post)Socialism. He completed his PhD in Sociology and Social Anthropology at the Central European University in 2020 with a dissertation about labour and bureaucratic control in Belarus. His research interests include the anthropology of labour and migration in post-Soviet countries, the anthropology of populism, and the study of hegemony in Eastern Europe.

This text was presented at the conference ‘New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Capitalism’ in Budapest 26-27 May, organized by the Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies and the Commission of Global Transformations and Marxian Anthropology-IUAES in cooperation with the Working Group for Public Sociology ‘Helyzet’, ‘Capitalism Nature Socialism’, ‘Focaal – Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology’, and ‘FocaalBlog’.

References

Artiukh, V. (2020). The People against State Populism. Belarusian protests against the “Social parasite law.” Schweizerisches Archiv Fur Volkskunde, 116(1), 101–116.

Artiukh, V. (2021). The anatomy of impatience: Exploring factors behind 2020 labor unrest in Belarus. Slavic Review, 80(1), 52–60.

Artiukh, V. (2022). Destruction of signs, signs of destruction. Emptiness, May 9. https://emptiness.eu/field-reports/destruction-of-signs-signs-of-destruction/.

Artiukh, V. (Forthcoming). Dramaturgy of Populism: Post-electoral protest ideologies in Belarus. New Europe College Yearbook. Pontica Magna Program.

Budraitskis, I. (2022). From Managed Democracy to Fascism. Tempest, April 23. https://www.tempestmag.org/2022/04/from-managed-democracy-to-fascism/

Gopal, A. (2020). The Arab Thermidor. Catalyst, 4(2).

Göransson, M. (2021). Understanding Russian thinking on gibridnaya voyna. In M. Weissmann, N. Nilsson, B. Palmertz & P. Thunholm (Eds.), Hybrid Warfare: Security and Asymmetric Conflict in International Relations (pp. 83–94). London: I.B. Tauris.

Kalb, D. (2022). War: New Times. FocaalBlog, 21 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/21/don-kalb-war-new-times/

Kalb, D. & Mollona, M. (2018). Introductory Thoughts on Anthropology and Urban Insurrection. In D. Kalb & M. Mollona (Eds.), Worldwide Mobilizations: Class Struggles and Urban Commoning. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Koshiw, I. (2022). Everyone is talking about Minsk but what does it mean for Ukraine? Open Democracy, 4 February. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/russia-ukraine-what-are-the-minsk-agreements/

Matveev, I. (2021). Between Political and Economic Imperialism: Russia’s Shifting Global Strategy. Journal of Labor and Society, 25(2), 198–219.

Savelyeva, N. (2022). Eight Years of War before the War. Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, March 25. https://www.rosalux.de/en/news/id/46205.

Tooze, J. A. (2019). Crashed: How a decade of financial crises changed the world. Penguin Publishing Group.

Wood, T. (2022). Matrix of War. New Left Review, 133/134.

Zhuravlev, O., & Ishchenko, V. (2020). Exclusiveness of civic nationalism: Euromaidan eventful nationalism in Ukraine. Post-Soviet Affairs 36(3), 226-245.

Cite as: Artiukh, Volodymyr. 2022. “The political logic of Russia’s imperialism.” Focaalblog, 9 June.
https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/06/09/volodymyr-artiukh-the-political-logic-of-russias-imperialism/

Blog

Markus Virgil Hoehne: Perpetuating conflict through democratization: Presidential elections in Somalia

Presidential elections will happen in Somalia on Sunday, 15 May 2022. This will most likely not bring peace and stability to the war-torn Somali society. To the contrary, the elections and their aftermath will, in all probability, perpetuate and even worsen to political crisis in the country. On the one hand, the electoral process has already dragged on for almost two years, producing violent clashes between government and opposition forces and instigating vote buying and other forms of political corruption (Gaas and Hansen 2022).  On the other hand, and this might even be worse, the country’s “democratization process” is out of tune with important political realities in Somalia, namely with the fact that the government only holds nominal power in parts of Somalia.

Militant Islamists control much of southern Somalia; the northwest of the country has declared its independence 30 years ago and exists since as the secessionist Republic of Somaliland. Other areas in central and northeastern Somalia are to some degree autonomous, partly controlled by clan militias. This means that the government controls only around 20 percent of Somalia’s territory. Foreign troops have to assist the government to hold its areas. Southern Somalia, where most of the resources and the economy of Somalia are concentrated, is still in a phase of active war (EASO 2021).

It can be assumed that the government in Mogadishu would, without external support, collapse even quicker than the Afghan government did in the wake of the US-withdrawal in mid-2021. Moreover, in the areas controlled by the government and its external allies, hardly any services are delivered to the ordinary population. The hallmark of the nominal Somali governments since many years is internal wrangling and massive embezzlement of the state’s budget including the income from foreign aid. The question is: what does the presidential election bring at all? My answer is: it helps to keep up a façade, which serves external actors, including the USA, Ethiopia, the EU and many INGOs and UN organizations, in that it allows the conduct of “business” (development business, counter-terrorism business, political stabilization business, humanitarian business) which enriches a few international and local elites, while it keeps the bulk of Somalis in extreme poverty and caught up in protracted conflict.

A story of many missed deadlines

Somalia should have had a new parliament and a new president long ago. The term of office of the current president Mohamed Ali Farmajo ended in February 2021. The UN and western donors including the USA and the EU have been pushing for free elections already for years (since around 2018). At the same time, the “one person one vote” formula introduced into Somalia’s politics was and remains unrealistic. While external actors, mainly UN officials, tried to push this voting-scheme through, President Farmajo actively undermined it by not taking any steps to prepare elections. This led to conflicts between the president and the prime minister, with the latter trying to steer the preparations of the elections. Eventually, as ACLED (2021) outlined, also in the face of ongoing war in southern Somalia, the major political actors agreed in mid-2020 to holding indirect elections in Somalia – in a similar way as the last elections in 2017.

This indirect election process is complicated: At the local level, family elders nominate a total of almost 30,000 electoral women and men. These then determine the 275 members of the lower house of parliament, the seats of which are not distributed according to party-membership, but according to belonging to patrilineal descent groups (and according to personal networks and who can pay which bribes). The 54 members of the upper house are nominated by electoral committees of the Somali federal member states. Together, the two houses then elect the president (Elmi 2021). President Mohamed A. Farmajo prefers indirect elections because they are strongly controlled by the presidents of the federal member states, some of whom are his supporters. Yet, he even did not push very energetically for the completion of this process. When his term ended on 8th February 2021, no members of parliament had been elected so that Farmajo was able to extend his mandate by decree for two years. This was, I would argue, the easiest way for him to stay in power.

However, it led to violent reactions. Temporarily, armed opposition supporters occupied parts of Mogadishu. The crisis finally calmed down in mid-2021 when Somali elites and external supporters agreed on indirect elections to be concluded by the end of February 2022. Although this deadline was missed, by the end of April 2022 all members of both houses had finally been elected and nominated. During the indirect election process, massive influence (buying of votes and exercising political pressure, even intimidating members of the electoral committees, elders or candidates) was exercised. The complete parliament can now vote for one of the more than thirty nominated presidential candidates. Again, much money is clandestinely changing hands these days in Mogadishu; and gun-prices are going up on the capital’s markets, according to The New Humanitarian.

Elections in a long-term battlefield

Violence in Somalia escalated from the end of the 1970s. In the context of the Cold War, first the Soviet Union and then the US and their respective allies (such as German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany) supplied arms to the dictatorship under Siyad Barre (1969-91) – even when it was evident that human rights violations would be committed with them. In 1991, rebels overthrew the dictatorial regime, but they were unable to agree on a new government. The state arsenals were broken open, and the population armed itself. Chaos and violence led to a famine that claimed hundreds of thousands of victims by the end of 1992. As a result, the USA and the UN intervened with up to 30,000 blue helmets to guarantee the supply of the civilian population with humanitarian aid and to restore political order. It was the first time in the history of the UN that blue helmets were deployed in a country without the government’s consent. The operation failed: the famine was alleviated admittedly, but the armed intervention intensified the fighting. The USA and the UN cooperated with some warlords and attempted to capture others, such as Mohamed Farah Aideed.
This led to the solidarity of many Somalis with Aideed, who, as a former army officer, was involved in the overthrow of dictator Barre. When American special forces tried to seize him in October 1993, fighting broke out in Mogadishu. Hundreds Somalis and 18 American soldiers were killed in the house-to-house fighting (depicted, albeit with an extreme US-centric [and racist] bias, in Ridley Scott’s movie Black Hawk Down). Subsequently, all intervention troops withdrew from Somalia by May 1995. The weapons and the warlords remained. The latter made “dirty” deals with foreign companies, for instance for dumping toxic waste off the Somali coast (VOA 2009).

Only after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the Muslim nation of Somalia returned to the attention of Western governments. The USA and its allies – in the Horn of Africa especially Ethiopia – cooperated with several warlords to capture and eliminate Islamist terrorist suspects in southern Somalia. At the same time, the international community initiated a peace conference for Somalia in Kenya, at which, in mid-2004, former militia leader Abdullahi Yusuf Ahmed was elected president by a Somali interim parliament. However, he and his government could not enter the capital because the local population rejected him. Most Somalis were now aligned with the lslamic Courts, which promised an alternative political and economic order for Somalia, based on Sharia law. These lslamists were the only ones to ensure peace in the urban neighborhoods under their control and offered effective jurisdiction (Ibrahim 2018).

Image 1: Elections in Somalia through the lens of the United Nations (their caption: “Members of the Somali Federal parliament queue to cast their ballots for round two during the presidential election held at the Mogadishu Airport hangar on February 8, 2017. UN Photo/ Ilyas Ahmed”)


From early 2006, tensions erupted into fighting between the Islamists on one side and the government and allied warlords on the other. The militias that fought for the Islamic Courts finally gained the upper hand. They soon controlled large parts of southern Somalia. The Ethiopian army intervened in December and dispersed all but a small core of Islamist forces. This was the nucleus from which Al-Shabaab (The Youth) emerged in 2007. In the following years, Al-Shabaab evolved into the strongest Somali force, which temporarily (between 2009 and 2011) ruled southern Somalia including Mogadishu and other urban centers and was then from 2011 driven out by a massive campaign of more than 10,000 African Union-troops deployed to Somalia. As of 2022, some 22,000 AU forces are stationed in southern Somalia. Together with around 10,000 Somali National Army soldiers and a smaller number of USA special forces (waging drone war) they have not managed to defeat Al Shabaab, which not only fights a guerilla war against the Somali government and its allies but actually also governs substantial rural areas, delivering justice and security at the local level and building-up some basic legitimacy in this way, despite the fact that the violence of the extremists, exercised through harsh punishments of (alleged) criminals or enemies and through regular terror attacks with many civilian casualties mainly in Mogadishu appalls many Somalis (Hoehne and Gaas 2022; Bakonyi 2022).

No one is legitimate

While a new war – one characterized as “counter-terrorism war” – escalated in Somalia and has cost tens of thousands of lives between 2007 and today, international actors have been trying to establish a government in Mogadishu, based on a new federal constitution (which was partly drafted by German legal specialists working for the Max Planck Foundation, which contrary to the name is not a basic research institute but a consultancy firm). Based on that constitution, indirect elections were held for the first time in 2012, and Hassan Sheikh Mahamoud became president. He sought to implement the federal constitution and establish federal states. The idea was to achieve some division of power in the state and between (patrilinear descent) groups through federalization. Traditionally, in Somali society, affiliation is regulated less by territory than by descent in the paternal line. Mahamoud’s government succeeded in establishing some federal states, at least nominally. Nonetheless, Al-Shabaab still controlled the hinterland of southern Somalia.

Also Mahamoud’s government was extremely corrupt. Approximately 70 percent of the funds given from outside disappeared into the private pockets of government actors, as documented by the World Bank, among other sources. The term of office of the following president, Mohamed Abdullahi Farmajo, was accompanied by massive accusations of corruption as well. Farmajo negated the federal model of government and worked toward the centralization of power.

Given the limited function and low legitimacy of Farmajo’s government and the state in Somalia as a whole, the question arises why elections are nevertheless organized at great expense. It is common knowledge how corrupt the political actors are and that they have little support among the population. A leading UN representative said in a briefing end of 2021, at which the author participated, that “no matter how the election process turns out, it will not contribute to any improvement”. A German NGO worker told an expert panel in January 2022 (again, the author was present at this meeting) that his biggest concern was how the losing side would react after the corrupt election. Some fear a new escalation of violence.

One explanation is that Somali elites and external aid workers benefit from elections. Somali elites make sure that they get well paid for their participation in the farce that the elections are. In order to continue to carry out projects in the crisis-ridden country, Western aid organizations need administrative partners to sign off on projects – which is obviously an end in itself, because the aid often does not benefit the ordinary population, but the external actors and their Somali elite partners. Moreover, the elections formally support the narrative of Western governments that things are “getting better” in Somalia. In the end, even Al-Shabaab benefits from the election disaster. Although the militant extremists do not have a broad basis of legitimacy either, they only need to do things a little better than the government, and they can gain some support from the conflict-weary population.

Instead of holding elections, Somali political actors should seek reconciliation and strive for political dialogue with all relevant powers in Somalia, including Al Shabaab. Yet, in Somalia, this seems to be made impossible by an (informal) doctrine of military counter-terrorism mixed with a focus on formal democratization and institution building, no matter how hollow the construct of the thus erected “government” is.  

Markus Virgil Hoehne is a social anthropologist at the University of Leipzig researching on conflict, identity, state-building, and dealing with the violent past in Somalia and Peru. He has been working on Somali issues since 2001. He is the author of Between Somaliland and Puntland: Marginalization, Militarization and Conflicting Political Visions (Nairobi: Rift Valley Institute) and the co-editor of Dynamics of Identification and Conflict: Anthropological encounters (New York: Berghahn).

Bibliography:

ACLED 2021: A Turbulent Run-up to Elections in Somalia. https://acleddata.com/2021/04/07/a-turbulent-run-up-to-elections-in-somalia/

Bakonyi, Jutta 2022: War’s Everyday: Normalizing Violence and Legitimizing Power. Partecipazione&Conflitto Vol. 15, No. 1: 121-138

EASO 2021: Country of Origin Information Report: Somalia Security situation. https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/2021_09_EASO_COI_Report_Somalia_Security_situation.pdf

Elmi, Afyare 2021: The Politics of the Electoral System in Somalia: An Assessment. Bildhaan: An International Journal of Somali Studies: Vol. 21: 99-113, available at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/bildhaan/vol21/iss1/10

Gaas, Mohamed Husein and Stig Jarle Hansen 2022: A Near End to Somalia’s Election Conundrum? RAAD Policy Brief 1:2022.

Hoehne, Markus Virgil and Mohammed Hussein Gaas 2022: Political Islam in Somalia: From underground movements to the rise and continued resilience of Al Shabaab, in J.-N. Bach and Aleksi Ylönen (eds.): Routledge Handbook of the Horn of Africa. London: Routledge, pp. 411-427.

Ibrahim,Ahmed Sheikh 2018: The Shari’a Courts of Mogadishu: Beyond “African Islam” and

“Islamic Law”.  Dissertation, the Graduate Faculty in Anthropology, City University of New York.

Somalia Corruption Report July 2020, available at: https://www.ganintegrity.com/portal/country-profiles/somalia/

The New Humanitarian 12 May 2022: Gun prices soar ahead of Somalia’s presidential elections https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2022/05/12/gun-prices-soar-ahead-of-somalias-presidential-elections

VOA 30.10.2009: Waste Dumping off Somali Coast May Have Links to Mafia, Somali Warlords, available at: https://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2005-03-15-voa34/306247.html

Cite as: Hoehne, Markus Virgil. 2022. “Perpetuating conflict through democratization: Presidential elections in Somalia.“ FocaalBlog, 13 May. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/05/13/markus-virgil-hoehne-perpetuating-conflict-through-democratization-presidential-elections-in-somalia/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Chris Hann: The Agony of Ukraine

After nearly two weeks of violent conflict in Ukraine, it is increasingly difficult to stand back and see the bigger picture. The West has lined up behind the charismatic President Zelensky, who has addressed parliaments in Brussels and Westminster to rapturous applause. In Britain, football stadia and Oxbridge colleges (including my own) have draped themselves in the Ukrainian national colours. There is little or no attempt to representation of the Russian perspective. It is light versus darkness, innocent victims versus post-communist megalomaniacs, Europe versus Oriental Despotism. In her recent contribution to this blog, Elizabeth Cullen Dunn presents the binary in terms of the right of smaller peoples to choose freedom in the face of Russian neo-imperialism.

The evidence seems so clear cut that only a Putin stooge or an idiot could argue differently. But anthropologists have a habit of complicating matters and they are not alone in doing so. You don’t have to be a Marxist to highlight the humiliation heaped upon Russia by Western leaders unable to discard their Cold War blinkers; but David Harvey addresses this emotional dimension particularly well. The West bears a lot of responsibility for creating the monster called Putin: it rebuffed Russian efforts to integrate into western institutions, instead targeting their closest relations for admission to the world’s most militarily powerful and economically prosperous alliances (Kalb 2022). Elsewhere, Michael Hudson has pinpointed the American interests that lie behind spectacular demonstrations of renewed Western unity; the catastrophe in distant Ukraine is already a defeat for Europe, and especially Germany, by the military-industrial complex of the capitalist hegemon, in combination with the key sectors of resource extraction and finance.

Image 1: The CIA was actively involved in the maidan demonstrations of 2014; it did not trust Ukrainian “civil society” to secure an optimal outcome for Washington, photo by Ivan Bandura

Few of the analyses I have read so far engage with the history and geography of the places where the violence is unfolding. I suspect most Western Europeans and North Americans perceive Ukraine naively as the historic homeland of the Ukrainian people, regrettably complicated by a subversive Russian minority. In fact, the territory of contemporary Ukraine has been occupied by many diverse populations since prehistoric times (Magocsi 2010 provides a dispassionate and comprehensive history). The dominant elements in the last millennium have been Slavic. Kyiv was the centre of the first Rus’ polity. The city was conquered by the Mongols in 1240 and was not reintegrated into a Slavic state until centuries later. A Ukrainian national consciousness emerged only in the late Tsarist era. When the great empires of the region collapsed at the end of the First World War, the majority of former subjects hardly knew what their identity was (or should become) as citizens of a nation-state. In the case of Ukraine, this learning process has dragged out over a century. It is being completed before our eyes in the most tragic way imaginable.

This particular history needs to be born in mind constantly when commentators write about “the Ukrainian people” as an entity of great antiquity. It goes without saying that the writers of history books in today’s post-Soviet Ukraine can evoke national heroes who repelled invaders in the distant past. This is in fact easier terrain than the twentieth century. Elizabeth Dunn is right to note that the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic was a product of forcible incorporation into a new empire, that of the USSR. She does not describe the chaotic and violent circumstances in which very different Ukrainian polities were constructed on the ground in 1918-9, when the national flag was already the flag in use today. She does not mention the large-scale pogroms that characterized the larger of these embryonic Ukrainian states. The dark history of repressed Ukrainian nationalism continued during and after the Second World War (see also Kalb 2022), when most of its leaders collaborated with Nazi occupying forces and instigated new campaigns of terror against Poles as well as Jews. Dunn cites the result of the referendum of 1991 as evidence that the overwhelming majority of Ukrainian citizens wished to regain their sovereignty. She does not detail the circumstances in which this referendum was held, following an attempted coup in Moscow, when the socialist empire had already imploded. Earlier in that same year (despite a national revival in the years of perestroika), a large majority of Ukrainian citizens voted not for independence but for a continuation of the Soviet Union in some form.

It is easy to get lost in such details and anthropological case-studies are unlikely to help. We need tools for comparative analysis at the macro level. In an original comparison of the demise of the Habsburg and Ottoman empires, Andre Gingrich (2002) proposed the concept of “dethroned majorities” to help grasp the virulence of national sentiment both inside and outside the boundaries of the shrivelled states that emerged from imperial collapse. It is instructive to consider contemporary Ukraine in this light, where the “dethroning” was interrupted for almost a century by socialist federalism. In this post-imperial conjuncture, the familiar range of ressentiments at the former imperial centre has been intensified by the broken promises of the West. Simultaneously, emotions also run high among those motivated by a mission to consolidate a new nation-state on exclusivist principles, with a particular distaste for co-citizens suspected by virtue of their nationality of identifying with the ancien régime.

Structurally, the comparative analysis of socialist empires should be extended to China. While copying many aspects of Soviet nationalities policy, Mao was careful to maintain continuity with the Qing dynasty: thus even “autonomous” regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang were integral components of the sovereign nation-state. Although few Cold War scholars in the West took Soviet federalism seriously, without this “decorative fiction” the constituent republics would not have been able to proclaim their independence as they did, hastening the final disintegration of the USSR.

Does each sovereign state have the right to seek out new partners freely and without restriction? International law guarantees this, but again it is worth considering real-life comparisons. Elizabeth Dunn invokes Canada and Mexico hypothetically, but the case of Cuba seems more pertinent. When the Soviet Union (responding to Western initiatives in Eurasia) sought to place missiles on the territory of its ally in 1962, President Kennedy triumphed in the ensuing diplomacy. So much for sovereignty. If we are to avoid double standards, it is incumbent on us in the West to see the expansion of NATO through Russian eyes, i.e. as aggression.

The Russian Federation has swallowed the admission to the Western military alliance of several former allies and even the Baltic states that were formerly inside the empire. But it has always stressed that Ukraine was different. Vladimir Putin’s rhetoric concerning Ukraine is open to the same objections as that of his neo-nationalist opponents: essentialist notions of the Eastern Slavs as one people eternally are no more convincing than Adolf Hitler’s justifications for the Anschluss of Austria. So Dunn is right: Ukrainian citizens should have the right to opt for new allegiances. Some observers may object that they have not done so freely, that the CIA played a key role in the Maidan demonstrations that toppled an elected government. The circumstances were tarnished. Yet it is reasonable to assume that the “European” course would in any case have triumphed eventually. With millions of Ukrainians already working in the West as labour migrants, the material incentives to benefit from consolidating this affiliation were overwhelming.

At the supra-national level, the European Union must be similarly free to decide who is eligible for “priority partner” status and who is to be left out in the cold. But those who formulate and justify these policies in the name of “democracy promotion” have elementary obligations to reckon with the consequences of their implementation. The combination of geopolitical security considerations and intimate historical connections make for a complex configuration in which it was irresponsible of the West to forge ahead in transforming Ukraine into a neoliberal “vassal state” (Kalb 2022) while isolating Russia.

Almost thirty years have passed since Samuel Huntington put forward his own distinctive vision of how cultural factors would come to dominate geopolitics in the wake of the Cold War (Huntington 1996). The conservative political scientist, though hardly an expert on East-Central Europe, paid considerable attention to Ukraine. He saw the country as divided by a “fault line” between east and west. In the west, Galicians had been free to nurture national sentiment under the Habsburgs, while the Greek-Catholic Church had introduced elements of pluralism characteristic of the West. No such pluralism was tolerated in the Russian-controlled territories, which according to Huntington belonged to a distinct civilization. This binary makes anthropologists uncomfortable but it is not entirely fabricated. East-west differences have been clearly visible in Ukrainian voting patterns since the 1990s, as the country oscillated between pro-Russian and pro-Western governments. Nationalist sentiment has always been strongest in western cities such as Lviv. This is not the sort of nationalism that commends itself to liberals in Brussels. In practice it has meant, for example, significant constraints on the evolved rights of Hungarian and Rusyn minorities in Transcarpathia.

Might any positives emerge from this tragedy? It is hard to be optimistic. Persistent nationalist blemishes in Ukraine might be excused in light of the post-imperial conjuncture, and corrected once the country is inside the European Union (though the examples of neighbouring Hungary and Poland are not encouraging in this regard). Another pious hope would be that the corruption riddling Ukraine’s post-Soviet kleptocracy (until now so similar to that of Russia) might be more effectively addressed following accession.

In any case, rapid accession is surely inevitable. When the “dethroned majority” resorts to such brutal action, Huntingtonian fault lines will finally be transcended. Ukraine will not have to oscillate any longer. Having paid a ghastly price in blood, it will be welcomed as a worthy member of the Euro-American civilization, thereby taking its long history of imperial peripherality to a new level. Fast-track admission may also be offered to Moldova and Georgia. NATO membership will perhaps have to be postponed for all three, but only for as long as Western Europe remains highly dependent on Russian gas and oil.

It is hard to see any grounds for optimism at all concerning Russia. The Kremlin will dig in and continue to behave badly in fogs of nationalism. Putin and his eventual successors will emphatically deserve to remain in that category of “other” (for the free West), with all glimmers of a post-Soviet escape route extinguished. Russia will continue to occupy that slot at least until an alternative “other” has taken shape (perhaps the socialist empire that rejected the federal model?).

Meanwhile the immediate winners of this catastrophe are Washington, numerous large American corporations, and generally the manufacturers of weapons and flags.

Chris Hann is Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.

References

Gingrich, Andre 2002. “When ethnic majorities are ‘dethroned’: towards a methodology of self-reflexive, controlled macrocomparison” in Andre Gingrich and Richard G. Fox eds. Anthropology, By Comparison. London: Routledge. pp. 225-48.

Hudson, Michael. 2022. “America defeats Germany for the third time in a century.” Monthly Review online blog, 28th February: https://mronline.org/2022/02/28/america-defeats-germany-for-the-third-time-in-a-century/

Huntington, Samuel P. 1996. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon and Schuster.

Kalb, Don. 2022. “‘Fuck Off’ versus ‘Humiliation’: The Perverse Logic towards War in Europe’s East.” FocaalBlog, 1 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/01/don-kalb-fuck-off-versus-humiliation-the-perverse-logic-towards-war-in-europes-east/

Magocsi, Paul Robert. 2010. A History of Ukraine. The Land and Its Peoples. (Second Edition) Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Cite as: Hann, Chris. 2022. “The Agony of Ukraine.” FocaalBlog, 11 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/11/chris-hann-the-agony-of-ukraine/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn: When Western Anti-Imperialism Supports Imperialism

The invasion of Ukraine has been a shock not just to Eastern Europe, but to the post World War II international order.  While the fundamental tenets of postwar geography—that national boundaries would not be moved, that each country had the right to territorial integrity, and that every nation-state could govern its own territory without interference—might have been weakened before, now they have been quite literally blown up. Making sense of these world-historical changes will take time. A recent article on FocaalBlog by geographer David Harvey argues that the post-Cold War policies of the West played an important role in pushing Russia towards the current war in Ukraine. Harvey argues that the West’s failure to incorporate Russia into Western security structures and the world economy led to Russia’s political and economic “humiliation,” which Russia now seeks to remedy by annexing Ukraine. By focusing on Western imperialism, however, Harvey ignores the politics of the USSR’s successor states as well as regional economic dynamics. It is Russian neoimperialism, not the West’s actions, that motivates the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Harvey’s argument rests on the idea that in the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, Western institutions inflicted grave “humiliations” on Russia. He argues that “the Soviet Union was dismembered into independent republics without much popular consultation.” But this begs the question of consultation with whom. Estonia declared national sovereignty in 1988, and both Latvia and Lithuania declared independence from the USSR in 1990–all of them before the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 (Frankowski and Stephan 1995:84). All three of these countries were independent prior to 1940, and, like Ukraine, were forcibly incorporated into the USSR; all three saw declarations of independence after 1988 as a restoration of previous national sovereignty.  Georgia, too, elected a nationalist government in 1990 and formally declared independence in 1991. Like Ukraine, Georgia claimed a restoration of national sovereignty that was held prior to forcible incorporation in the USSR in 1921.  Like Ukraine, each of these countries held referenda on independence which passed with over 74% percent of citizens voting to leave the USSR permanently. Ukraine’s own referendum passed with 92.3% of the population voting “yes”  (Nohlen and Stover 2010:1985). There was thus plenty of consultation with the people who mattered–the citizens of countries formerly colonized by Russia who demanded the right to decide their own futures. Why Russia should have been consulted on the independence of nations that had been incorporated into the Russian empire and the USSR by force is unclear; colonizing countries are rarely asked for permission when their colonies declare independence.

Dimly lit firefighters stand amid smoke and ruined buildings.
Image 1: An apartment block in Kyiv (Oleksandr Koshyts Street) after shelling, 25 February (Credit: Kyiv City Council, Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine?fbclid=IwAR3ieAzQ7Nt8LBf62tYs1P2fORG-QVNV1uP-8DNiZqlZ6j1tJHFRaI1Rrzg#/media/File:Житловий_будинок_у_Києві_(вул._Кошиця)_після_обстрілу.jpg)

Second, Harvey argues that Russia was “humiliated economically.”  He writes,“With the end of the Cold War, Russians were promised a rosy future, as the benefits of capitalist dynamism and a free market economy would supposedly spread by trickle down across the country. Boris Kagarlitsky described the reality this way. With the end of the Cold War, Russians believed they were headed on a jet plane to Paris only to be told in mid-flight ‘welcome to Burkina Faso.’”

Harvey blames the collapse of the Russian economy in the early 1990s on the Western-led practice of so called “shock therapy,” or rapid marketization, saying that it resulted in a decline in GDP, the collapse of the ruble, and disintegration of the social safety net for Russian citizens. But an explanation of economic collapsed based solely on “shock therapy” negates the internal dynamics of state-socialist economies, which were already in free-fall as the supply-constrained planned economy succumbed to its own internal contradictions (Dunn 2004:Chapter 2). As the Hungarian dissident economist Janoś Kornai aptly showed, soft budget constraints, which allowed state socialist enterprises to pass their costs onto the state, and thus prevented them from ever failing, led to intense cycles of shortage and hoarding. In turn, endemic shortage led to limited and low-quality production, which in turn led to more shortage and hoarding. All of this disincentivized investments in industrial modernization. Why invest in modern equipment or production methods, when a firm could sell whatever it made, and when there was little incentive to improve profit margins? It was the Soviet economy that kept Soviet industry technologically behind, not the West. The result of the dynamics of state-led planning meant that when Soviet industries were exposed to the world market by shock therapy mechanisms eagerly adopted by reformers in their own governments, they were not at all competitive. Thus, the deindustrialization of the USSR was a product of state socialist economics.  

Shock therapy, too, was largely a local production rather than one led by the West, despite Jeffrey Sachs’ relentless advocacy of it. The point of shock therapy was not just to make East European economies look like Western economies as quickly as possible. Rather, local non-communist elites argued that it was a tool to prevent a Communist restoration. They argued that if the Communist nomenklatura, which controlled both politics and production, was allowed to dismantle state owned enterprises and repurpose state-owned capital for their own private gain, its members would oppose political reform or seek to regain political power (Staniszkis 1991). As Peter Murrell, an ardent critic of shock therapy, writes, shock therapy was thus pushed most heavily by East Europeans:

“These reforms were condoned, if not endorsed, by the International Monetary Fund; they were strongly encouraged if only weakly aided, by Western governments; and they were promoted, if not designed, by the usual peripatetic Western economists.” (Murrell 1993:111).

The result, as we now know, was the destruction of state-owned enterprises, the rise of mass unemployment, and the creation of oligarchs whose wealth was founded on formerly state-owned assets.  But this was not the result of policies pushed by the West, but rather of the devil’s bargain necessitated by internal political dynamics in Soviet successor states, including Russia.  As Don Kalb points out in his response to Harvey, “When all modernist projects had collapsed in the East, as it seemed in the mid 1990s, the supposedly universalist Western project of democratic capitalism was simply the only available project left. The post-socialist East was happily sharing for a while in Western hubris.” This was as true about free-market ideologies as it was about the political support for NATO that Kalb discusses.

Third, Harvey decries the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, citing this as a further humiliation as well as a security problem. His formulation of this problem is odd: he seems to assume that NATO expansion is entirely a question of relations between the Western powers and Russia, which can make decisions on behalf of smaller countries without consulting them. Nowhere in all this are the security imperatives of Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova, the three countries who wanted to join NATO at the Bucharest Meeting of NATO in April, 2008, each of whom had legitimate reason to fear Russian invasion (Dunn 2017). The right of smaller countries to decide their own foreign policy and to join alliances for their own strategic reasons is entirely absent from Harvey’s account. This absence of the Ukrainian state as an actor in determining the country’s future is an implicit acceptance of Putin’s claim that the former Soviet republics are rightfully in Russia’s sphere of influence. But imagine this argument applied in a different context: Should Canada’s security interests give it the right to occupy upstate New York? Is Arizona rightfully in Mexico’s sphere of influence, given the dangers that US military adventures might pose? Both of those propositions are obviously untenable. Yet the same argument, which is most often made by Vladimir Putin, is taken by many on the Western left as a legitimate basis for Russian action in Ukraine (Shapiro 2015, cf. Bilous 2022).

The notion that the Russian invasions of Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2014, and Ukraine again now are defensive actions on the part of Russia is deeply wrongheaded. They are pure aggression. They are first of all aggression towards the peoples and territories forcibly incorporated into the Russian Empire in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. As the experience of Chechnya shows, Russia is willing to utterly destroy places and people that seek to leave the empire (Gall and DeWaal 1999). Russia continues to signal that willingness with the presence of the Russian 58th Army in South Ossetia for the past 14 years, where it has been poised to overrun Georgia at the first sign that it is unwilling to be controlled by Moscow (Dunn 2020).  Likewise, the current invasion of Ukraine is not defensive. There was no realistic possibility of Ukraine joining NATO in the foreseeable future, and Ukrainian sovereignty posed no credible threat to Russian security. (As German Chancellor Olaf Schultz said, “The question of [Ukrainian] membership in alliances is practically not on the agenda”). The invasion of Ukraine is about Russian control of what it believes is its historical sphere of influence, rather than any particular defensive imperative.

David Harvey clearly believes that his analysis is anti-imperialist. But it is in fact a pro-imperialist argument, one that supports Russian irredentism and the restoration of empire under the guise of a “sphere of influence.” (As Derek Hall points out in his response, nowhere in Harvey’s argument does he condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.) Russian imperialism has always worked on different principles than Western imperialism, given that it has been largely non-capitalist, but it is imperialism nonetheless, in cultural, political and economic senses of that term. Blaming the West for “humiliating” Russia occludes Russia’s own expansionist ideologies and desires for restoration of empire, and justifies the violent military domination of people who can and should decide their own destinies.  

Elizabeth Cullen Dunn is Professor of Geography and Director of the Center for Refugee Studies, Indiana University.  Her work has focused on post-Communist Eastern Europe since 1992.  Her first book, Privatizing Poland (Cornell University Press 2004) examined the economic dynamics of post-socialist property transformation.  Her second book, No Path Home (Cornell University Press 2017) looked at the aftermath of the 2008 Russian invasion of the Republic of Georgia and the effects of Western humanitarian aid on IDPs.  Dunn also serves on the board of two refugee resettlement agencies.

References

Bilous, Taras. 2022. “A letter to the Western Left from Kyiv”, Commons, February 25, https://commons.com.ua/en/letter-western-left-kyiv/

Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen. 2020. ” Warfare and Warfarin: Chokepoints, Clotting and Vascular Geopolitics”. Ethnos https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00141844.2020.1764602

Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen.  2017. No Path Home: Humanitarian Camps and the Grief of Displacement. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.

Dunn, Elizabeth C. 2004.  Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business and the Remaking of Labor.

Frankowski, Stanisław and Paul B. Stephan (1995). Legal Reform in Post-Communist Europe. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.

Gall, Carlotta and Thomas De Waal. 1999. Chechnya: Calamity in the Caucasus. New York; NYU Press.

Hall, Derek, 2002. “Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: A Response to Harvey.” https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/02/28/derek-hall-russias-invasion-of-ukraine-a-response-to-david-harvey/

Kornai, Janoś. 1992. The Socialist System. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Murrell, Peter. 1993. “What is Shock Therapy? What Did It Do in Poland and Russia?” Post-Soviet Affairs 9(2):111-140.

Nohlen, Dieter and Philip Stöver (2010) Elections in Europe: A Data Handbook, Baden-Baden: Nomos

Shapiro, Jeremy. 2015. Defending the Defensible: The Value of Spheres of Influence in US Policy. Brookings Institution Blog, March 11. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2015/03/11/defending-the-defensible-the-value-of-spheres-of-influence-in-u-s-foreign-policy/.

Staniszkis, Jadwiga. 1991. .Dynamics of the Breakthrough in Eastern Europe: the Polish Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cite as: Dunn, Elizabeth Cullen. 2022. “When Western Anti-Imperialism Supports Imperialism.” FocaalBlog, 3 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/03/elizabeth-cullen-dunn-when-western-anti-imperialism-supports-imperialism/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Don Kalb: “Fuck Off” versus “Humiliation”: The Perverse Logic towards War in Europe’s East

Image 1: Czar Vladimir, by BakeNecko.

I like the tone and the global historical perspective of David Harvey’s FocaalBlog article. Harvey’s socialist internationalism versus competitive nation-statism should be the only national flag allowed in the 21st century. It was always already essential to make that point against the  environmental and public health catastrophes we are facing. It has become even more essential now that humanity is obviously sliding into a deadly phase of imperial competition of which Russia’s criminal assault on Ukraine is a first episode; as is the West’s emerging reaction to it, and the duplicitous self-serving pro-Russia position of China as well (I am writing 27 February). We should be aware that these are just early moments in a developing story that has been incubating in the dying post-1989 world order for some time.

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Blog, Features, War: New Times

David Harvey: Remarks on Recent Events in the Ukraine: An Interim Statement

Image 1: Young girl protesting the war in Ukraine, photo by Matti.

This is a provisional text David Harvey prepared for the 2022 American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting. He allowed us, nevertheless, to publish it here because of the escalating Russia-Ukraine crisis.

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