Tag Archives: Ukraine

Image 1: Screenshot from the *Mariupol Memory Park* website

“On the form, I ticked that I had got enough pads. I ticked that I had been instructed. I ticked that I had applied for microloans, more than once. I ticked that I had been encouraged. I ticked that I had nowhere to live. I ticked that I had nowhere to study. I ticked that I had nowhere to go. I ticked that I had nothing to lose. I ticked that I didn’t mind the NGO using my personal data for their future projects.”

This quote is an excerpt from a Sashko Protyah short story, where a citizen of Mozambique makes a deal with a people smuggler. The business offers an innovative method of (post)human trafficking, promising to turn their clients from the Global South into a bird, and flying them to European shores, where they can regain human form and continue their way to the European Union. To her ill fortune, the protagonist reaches European land in Mariupol, Ukraine, in the spring of 2022, when the Russian invasion of the city was in full force. Eventually, she manages to escape with a group of volunteers who evacuate pets from the occupied territory, but her transformation fails, and she is caught in a netherworld between being animal and human, with no acceptable form, identity or document to prove her belonging to any official entity. Falling through the cracks of state assistance, she is approached by humanitarian NGOs that work in the conflict zone and recruit vulnerable people for well-worded but questionable development projects. In the end, the protagonist is hired in an “apocalypse theme park” that recreates the siege of Mariupol as an infotainment experience, engaging the visitors with authentic scenarios of explosions, looting, and no running water.

The author of the short story, Sashko Protyah from the Freefilmerz art collective was one of the speakers at the workshop “REMEMBERING / RECLAIMING / RECONSTRUCTING SPACE: Working with local heritage in times of war and displacement” I organized at the University of St Andrews as a knowledge exchange event during my ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship., The workshop invited Ukrainian cultural practitioners working with precarious heritage during the Russian invasion to share their experiences with a group of international researchers studying similar topics. Besides broadening our knowledge about pragmatic aspects of heritage work in the context of war, the short lectures delivered by Ukrainian participants highlighted a set of ethical issues equally relevant in the work of ethnographers and other researchers working with vulnerable communities.

Protyah talked about his experience of creating Mariupol Memory Park, an online archive that commemorates and celebrate life in Mariupol. The website collects testaments about the city from a variety of authors in different genres, all of them affectionate while reflecting the multivocality of urban life and the complicated emotions elicited by the place. As Sashko pointed out, and his short story addresses in a critical self-reflexive manner, one of the major risks of creating this kind of archives is the exploitation of traumatic memories. Since the start of the full-scale invasion, refugees from Mariupol and other places have been asked on countless occasions by journalists, researchers, NGO workers and others to share their experiences of war and displacement for various projects. While these conversations require significant temporal and emotional investment from the participants and can have a re-traumatizing effect, interlocutors are rarely compensated or offered psychological support. The dynamics of this exchange reflect a deeper running process that Asia Bazdyrieva (2022) termed the “resourcification of Ukraine”, referring to the continuing tendency of Western and Soviet geopolitical thinking to reduce Ukrainian land and people to a “resource that qualifies for a long list of services.”

The idea of resourcification, when applied to people, recalls long-standing conversations in anthropology regarding the inequality of researcher and interlocutor. Even in times more peaceful than the current moment, academics need to confront the dilemma of waving goodbye to our interlocutors and returning to Western institutions to advance our careers using the knowledge they have shared with us, leaving them with… what exactly? In a context of war or other forms of violence, this situation gets complicated by concerns about personal safety, stigmatization and psychological trauma, reiterating the question: on what ground do we expect people to share their most difficult life experiences with us? How do we make participation beneficial for them in the short as well as the long term? What is our role as researchers in a time when the communities we work with are fighting for survival?

Image 2: Screenshot from the online workshop (image courtesy of Victoria Donovan)

While in certain cases, interlocutors think about sharing traumatic experiences as a politically or psychologically important act of giving a testament or gaining recognition of the injustices they have suffered (see Veena Das’ essay “Our work to cry: Your work to listen” (Das 1990)), the expectations of the research relationship can also become a source of frustration to the members of “over-researched and underserved” (Yotebieng 2020) communities.

Mariupol Memory Park addresses the problem of exploitation by commissioning new works to construct an archive, shifting the emphasis from the extraction of painful memories to the process of creation and reflection. Contributors retain the agency to tell their story in a way they feel appropriate instead of being used as information sources or credibility props in someone else’s project. Importantly, they are all paid for their work from the funding received by Western European NGOs and government research agencies.

In anthropological practice, financial compensation for research participation is rarely used due to issues around voluntary consent and authenticity of information. However, this should not discourage academics from contemplating the place of money in supporting interlocutors, especially in a time when communities face the ongoing existential threat of war and genocide. One way to do this is acknowledging the role of participants as co-creators and channelling institutional funding to financially honour their contribution. Another avenue might involve collaborative projects with local organizations using research funding from Western institutions. Area studies professor Victoria Donovan (2023) evokes the figure of the “trickster” to propose a strategy for academics to facilitate this process within the often rigid institutional hierarchies, suggesting “using the power (and, crucially, the funding) that we are assigned to manifest the changes that we want to see.”

Image 3: Screenshot from the *City in the Suitcase* website

Approaching the theme of collaboration from another angle, Kateryna Filonova from Mariupol Local History Museum and Iryna Sklokina from Lviv Center for Urban History presented during the workshop their initiative City in the Suitcase: Saved (Family) Archives. The project addresses the problem of museum heritage lost in the war due to physical destruction, looting, and the logistical problems created by relocating whole museums from the occupied territories. Attempting an alternative route to reconstruct lost local heritage, the curators published a call inviting residents from occupied cities of Eastern Ukraine to share their family photography collections. The call, while it received valuable material, had a relatively low response rate. Having worked with IDPs from the Donbas since 2014, Kateryna from Mariupol Local History Museum remarked that this was more or less expected: the experience of the previous ten years suggests that people who need to flee in a hurry do not prioritize taking family albums. As a result, the call received less material from Mariupol, and more from other places where residents had more time to prepare evacuation. The other limitation of the entries is related to the specific status of digital media in contemporary conflicts. While digital data becomes more important in conditions of material destruction and displacement, as people are often left with their phone memory as their only source of personal photos, phones and social media accounts were thoroughly examined by Russians at the military checkpoints. As a result, several people had to delete their photos and apps on the road, and many of them got locked out of their accounts, losing access even to the digital memories they had left.

In the end, the project received eighteen collections of family photography from different cities of Eastern Ukraine. The material collected this way offers “an alternative history of the Donbas”, featuring elements of Ukrainian culture, the democratic movement of the 1990s, as well as the pro-Ukrainian and Anti-Maidan demonstrations of 2014. Discussing the potential of representing “history from below”, Iryna emphasized the importance of reflexivity in their curatorial practice. Archives are instruments of power, and the decisions made by the archivist determine what story will be told for future generations of historians and the public. In the case of personal collections, the curators paid extra attention to avoid imposing their own interpretations while processing the data according to archival standards. To achieve this, they employed what they call a “non-institutional approach to documenting”, archiving what respondents chose to include and annotating the material in a continuous conversation with the owners of the photos. At the same time, they emphasized that the owners’ interpretation was also situated, reflecting their current position in relation to the post-independence political history of Ukraine.

Lessons from the project City in a Suitcase reiterate the idea that there is no “view from nowhere” during the creation of an archive (Zeitlyn 2012), making it inevitable to reflect on the position of each stakeholder. For an anthropologist, such an approach evokes familiar debates on reflexivity in social research. Both in archival and anthropological practice, discussions on reflexivity question the neutrality of knowledge produced within a hegemonic system of institutions by members of privileged social groups (Al-Masri et al. 2021). Restructuring the research process into an act of co-production, as it happened with the contributors of the photo archive, offers a way to decolonize the hierarchical relationship between the knower/known (Casagrande 2022).

Image 4: Screenshot from *Contemporary History of Ukraine* by Oksana Kazmina

The last major theme emerging during the workshop was the relationship of traumatic memories and global heritage regimes. The “apocalypse theme park” described in Sashko’s short story is an exaggerated version of memory parks that turn places of collective trauma into profitable tourist attractions, disregarding the needs of the affected communities (Meskell 2002). As Sashko said, similar projects are already taking place in relation to Mariupol, and it is important to speak up against the commodification of people’s loss and sorrow. However, as it was abundantly demonstrated in recent years in Ukraine, Gaza and elsewhere, the destruction of cultural heritage is not simply a by-product of contemporary warfare, but an integral part of genocide and cultural erasure (Tsymbalyuk 2022). The “dark heritage” of such cynical and calculated destruction demands a tactful approach of representation that allows the world to learn about what happened while prioritizing the needs of community members. Discussing the case of the 9/11 memorial in Manhattan, Lynn Meskell observes a growing “desire for grounded materiality” (Meskell 2002) in a moment when the broader public collectively encountered the experience of a virtually broadcasted, real time terror attack for the first time. The present context of urbicide and displacement can evoke a similar longing for tangible markers of commemoration, presenting the challenge to find new ways of representation that avoid commodification and the creation of genocide-disneylands.

The work of Oksana Kazmina, another member of the Freefilmerz art collective, offers a possible answer to this dilemma. Contemporary History of Ukraine is a series of “performative walks” composed of digital media fragments: video footage, online maps, zoom recordings and photos are combined on the screen to (re)construct landscapes of memory. In the virtual walk created for the workshop, Oksana explores the transformative potential of the “yebenya”, a concept denoting a place of abandonment and decay in the East European urban typology. Walking through the ruins of a former Soviet pioneer camp in a coastal village near Mariupol in 2018, she contemplates the role of these material structures in making sense of the past and our own place in it. “Maybe we did need these places of abandonment, which are also traces of how things used to be. We needed them to be conserved like this for us to come here and look in the mirror.” Similarly, to the debris of Soviet urban infrastructure, material traces of violence have a potential beyond erasure or sensationalism: approached with care, they can serve as an object of reflection in the difficult process of making sense of experiences that should have never occurred.

The initial aim of the workshop was to explore the strategies Ukrainian cultural workers use to address unprecedented experiences of destruction, displacement and trauma. The resulting dialogue about extractive humanitarianism, the commodification of traumatic heritage, and the politics of representation has shown alarming resonance with the geopolitical developments of the recent weeks. As I am finalizing this text, the Trump government has stopped all military and most of the humanitarian aid to Ukraine, while working out the details of a blatantly late-colonialist and exploitative rare minerals deal that would push the country further into economic deprivation. The projects presented during the workshop are highly critical regarding the role of Western assistance in local cultural practice. In the current circumstances, their critique offers a constructive alternative to the deliberate dismantling of vital support networks in the region.

The workshop was supported by ESRC UK (grant ID: ES/X006182/1). Video lectures by Ukrainian participants were commissioned and each speaker was paid an honorarium for their work. Many thanks to Sarah and Sandra from the Research Administration team of School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies at University of St Andrews for their help.

Anna Balazs is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, Södertörn University, Stockholm. She received her PhD in social anthropology at the University of Manchester in 2020. Her work focuses on the infrastructural and cultural legacies of socialism in Eastern European cities, and the temporalities of geopolitical conflict in Ukraine. The present text was written during the ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of St Andrews, UK.

References

Al-Masri, Muzna, Samar Kanafani, Lamia Moghnieh, Helena Nassif, Elizabeth Saleh, and Zina Sawaf. 2021. ‘On Reflexivity in Ethnographic Practice and Knowledge Production: Thoughts from the Arab Region’. Commoning Ethnography 4 (1): 5–22. https://doi.org/10.26686/ce.v4i1.6516.

Casagrande, Olivia. 2022. ‘Introduction: Ethnographic Scenario, Emplaced Imaginations and a Political Aesthetic’. In Performing the Jumbled City: Subversive Aesthetics and Anticolonial Indigeneity in Santiago de Chile. Manchester UK: Manchester University Press.

Das, Veena. 1990. ‘Our Work to Cry: Your Work to Listen’. In Mirrors of Violence: Communities, Riots and Survivors in South Asia, 345-399. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Meskell, Lynn. 2002. ‘Negative Heritage and Past Mastering in Archaeology’. Anthropological Quarterly 75 (3): 557–74.

Tsymbalyuk, Darya. 2022. ‘Erasure: Russian Imperialism, My Research on Donbas, and I’. Kajet Digital (blog). 15 June 2022. https://kajetjournal.com/2022/06/15/darya-tsymbalyuk-erasure-russian-imperialism-my-research-on-donbas/.

Zeitlyn, David. 2012. ‘Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogates’. Annual Review of Anthropology 41 (Volume 41, 2012): 461–80. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-092611-145721.

Cite as: Balazs, Anna 2025. “War, displacement, and cultural heritage: reflections on a workshop” Focaalblog 18 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/03/18/anna-balazs-war-displacement-and-cultural-heritage-reflections-on-a-workshop/

Blog, War: New Times

Chris Hann: Humiliation, Hubris and Hamartia: the emotional history of the Ukraine war

March 13, 2025 Focaal Web Editor

Image 1: Pro-European integration manifestation in Kyiv on 29 November 2013. Photo by Mstyslav Chernov

Introduction

Soon after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in an earlier post on this blog (Hann 2022), I emphasized the geopolitical and economic interests of the west, especially US corporations. I extended my analysis in 2024 in the Focaal journal itself (Hann 2024a; 2024b), where my article benefited from the critical insights of Denys Gorbach (2024) and Volodymyr Ishchenko (2024).

But political outcomes are also shaped by emotions, moods and personalities. The world has recently witnessed dramatic tensions between the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and the US president, Donald Trump. Sooner or later the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, will also move to centre stage. These leaders strive simultaneously to mobilize mass sentiment in their respective countries and to win the battle for the moral high ground internationally. While media coverage focuses on the traits of these individuals, anthropologists tend to be more interested in the subjectivities of larger communities.

At present, Trump’s efforts to initiate peace negotiations are widely perceived as a crude capitulation to Putin, sometimes as appeasement. These unprecedented frictions have generated an outpouring of moral outrage and intensified support for the Ukrainian cause in western Europe. The solidarity of the European Community (minus Hungary) and the demonising of Putin follow 30 years of the humiliation of Russia and western hubris after congratulating itself on having won the cold war. The best word to describe the role of Ukraine right now is perhaps hamartia – a “fatal flaw” that leads to the downfall of a tragic hero. I argue that Ukraine is the nationalist hamartia sealing the fate of post-cold war Europe.

Humiliation in Moscow (and elsewhere)

German historian Ute Frevert (2020) has shown that humiliation is an emotion deeply rooted in European society as well as a significant political force. The cold war preserved a semblance of equivalence between the two camps, but the disintegration of the Soviet Union became a humiliation for Russia. Mikhail Gorbachev’s vision of a “common European home” was forgotten as he himself disappeared from the political scene. By the time Putin replaced Boris Yeltsin as president at the end of 1999, the Russian Federation was on its knees both politically and economically. Three former Soviet republics were on course to join NATO, which had already admitted other former satellite states to full membership.

After three years of warfare, humiliation remains a powerful emotion as events unfold. Donald Trump humbles Zelensky at the White House, but he also humiliates his nominal allies in western Europe as they scramble to save the agenda they were dragged into by previous US presidents and to avoid a humiliating defeat for Ukraine.

Hubris in Washington

The obverse of Russia’s humiliation was the sentiment of hubris in the United States, accompanied (as Jeffrey Sachs has repeatedly argued) by a refusal to consider a pluralist geopolitical world order. As Jonathan Haslam (2024) has documented in detail, this hubris began in the 1990s and has continued to shape US foreign policy in the new century. An early flashpoint came in 2008 when the leaders of the US and the UK argued in support of Ukrainian (and Georgian) membership of NATO. Other European members, principally Germany and France, opted to respect Moscow’s emphatic opposition and further enlargement was put on hold. It is important to note that Atlanticist sympathies did not in this period enjoy mass support among Ukrainian voters, who in 2010 elected a president more oriented toward Moscow (Viktor Yanukovych, who was deposed in the course of the Euromaidan revolution of 2013-14).

Russia’s annexation of Crimea and occupation of significant territory in Donbas in 2014 threw a spanner in the works. But throughout the ensuing violence (never effectively curbed by the Minsk agreements, which were transgressed by both sides), the US continued to promote ever closer integration into NATO. Volodymyr Zelensky’s election in 2019 as a “peace president” did not reduce the pressure: the intention remained to yank the whole of Ukraine away from Moscow’s orbit.

Irritation in Brussels

As Russia stabilized under Putin, European leaders too had to decide how to handle the former superpower. With admission to NATO precluded very early on, they had to determine who would be eligible for full membership of the EU and who would be allowed to snuggle up alongside as partners. Under Italian (Romano Prodi) and Portuguese (José Manuel Barroso) leadership, EU diplomats found it much easier to spread liberal messages and support NGOs in Kyiv than in Moscow, where all approaches seemed to generate only obstruction and irritation. Ukraine was granted preferential partner status and Russia consigned to its familiar position of otherness.

This negligence of Russia was short-sighted. It gave Vladimir Putin the perfect excuse to ramp up his repressive regime. Having sought closer ties with the west in the early years of his presidency, successive NATO enlargements were interpreted by Putin as aggression. The mixture of hubris and irritation in the west has distorted politics in Russia, deepened the east-west division of Europe and hindered the eastwards expansion of liberalism in a deeper societal sense.

To be fair, the EU has also experienced considerable irritation in the other direction. It was well illustrated by Angela Merkel when responding to state department official Victoria Nuland’s vulgar criticism of EU diplomacy during the Euromaidan crisis. The EU (and also the UK) may currently feel it has been left in the lurch by the change of course in Washington; but subscription to the Biden principle of “fight to the last Ukrainian” and concomitant emotional solidarities left them with little choice.

Charisma and the moral high ground

In December 2021 Russia stipulated its conditions for resolving the latest escalating crisis. Putin again highlighted the “red line” precluding Ukrainian membership of NATO. But this attempt to enter into negotiations was ignored in the west. Nobody should have been surprised when Putin launched his “special military operation” in February 2022. Western media have not ceased to speak of an “unprovoked invasion” but the long-term structural provocation of NATO expansion could hardly be denied.

Despite winning his presidential mandate as a peace monger, Volodymyr Zelensky soon put all his charisma and media skills in the service of those factions seeking to purge the country of Russian influence and to join not only NATO but also the EU. For large sections of the population, Putin’s invasion served to strengthen a national identification not strongly felt hitherto. His leadership also made an emotional impact on western audiences. A colourful David to Putin’s ugly Goliath, he has appealed to left and right alike. He is a hero to legal scholars who make holy writ out of national sovereignty. And he appeals to idealist enthusiasts of human rights and to students of postcolonialism, who have been taught to see Russia as an empire in urgent need of dismantling. This perspective, which attributes the war entirely to Russian “neoimperialism”, is also popular within western anthropology (Dunn 2022).

Zelensky and the Ukrainian cause have come to enjoy a monopoly of the moral high ground in western Europe. Russia is once again the barbaric other and anyone questioning this narrative is accused of being Putin’s “useful idiot.” This highly emotional mood of moral superiority grows with the uneasy prospect of sordid deals brokered by Trump, in which the ethical causes of freedom and the preservation of human life are contaminated by calculations of the value of Ukraine’s mineral wealth. A deep well of angry moralizing emotion now exists in the UK and the EU, powerful enough to countenance previously inconceivable increases in military spending (Hungary’s Viktor Orbán is the only EU political leader brave enough to question this consensus).

Towards uncivil society in a monoethnic state

A few academics have dared to critique the consensus by showing the political and moral stakes to be more complex. Perhaps the best known is Jeffrey Sachs, who makes a case for the “Finlandization” of Ukraine. However persuasive in cold rational terms, this is incompatible with fierce national pride, which has reached new heights in light of sacrifices on the battlefields. Volodymyr Ishchenko (2023) offers penetrating analyses of Ukraine’s post-Soviet political economy, its regional patterns, and ongoing class struggles in both Ukraine and Russia; but he too perhaps underestimates the importance of emotions. American political scientist Nikolai Petro (2023) has drawn attention to long-term civil society deficits in Ukraine and continuing discrimination against those who wish to hold on to an ancient Russian cultural identity. Does the holy writ of national sovereignty entitle power holders to make a considerable proportion of their population second class citizens by constraining the use they make of their mother tongue?

One significant strand in the nationalizing policies of Zelensky’s government has been to detach eastern Christians from the Moscow patriarchy to which most of them have been affiliated for centuries. Millions of ordinary Orthodox believers have resisted these machinations. They resent having to shift their Christmas celebrations to conform to the foreign, western calendar.

Hamartia in the common European home

The nationalist objective is to force 40 million Ukrainians into a homogeneous container, as different as possible from the equivalent Russian container. This kind of homogeneity was the aspiration of 19th-century nation builders. It is hardly compatible with democratic flourishing in the 2020s.

Ukraine is the hamartia of post-cold war Europe. Whatever the eventual territorial compromises, this war has been a monstrous victory for nationalism, while cementing a modified east-west divide. It is tragic to observe western European leaders so caught up in this mood that they are prepared to undermine their own welfare states in order to produce more weapons and prolong violence in a remote location about which they know very little.

How many more east Slavs have to die on both sides? In the most optimistic scenario, it will take a very long time before the Ukrainian state qualifies for the EU. Is it not possible to return to the vision of Gorbachev and negotiate new pathways to a truly unified Europe, one that would allow military spending everywhere to be reduced?

An earlier version of this post was briefly published on 5^th March by The Conversation. I thank Jonathan Este, Senior International Affairs Editor at The Conversation UK, for his help in shortening my original draft and changing the style to make it more accessible; of course, I alone am responsible for the final text. Jonathan was also helpful in locating some of the hyperlinks. He is not to blame for the fact that his more senior editors pulled the piece within hours.

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

References

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/

Frevert, Ute. 2020. The Politics of Humiliation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Gorbach, Denys. 2024. ‘Is civilizational primordialism any better than nationalist primordialism?’ Focaal 98: 114-116.

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

Hann, Chris. 2024a. ‘The proxy war in Ukraine. History, political economy, and representations’. Focaal 98: 100-109.

Hann, Chris. 2024b. ‘Rejoinder’. Focaal 98: 117-118.

Haslam, Jonathan. 2024. Hubris. The Origins of Russia’s War against Ukraine. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.

Ishchenko, Volodymyr. 2023. Towards the Abyss. Ukraine from Maidan to War. London: Verso.

Ishchenko, Volodymyr. 2024. ‘Class, values, and revolutions in the Russia-Ukraine war’. Focaal 98: 110-113.

Petro, Nikolai N. 2023. The Tragedy of Ukraine: What Classical Greek Tragedy Can Teach Us About Conflict Resolution. Boston: de Gruyter.

Cite as: Hann, Chris 2025. “Humiliation, Hubris and Hamartia: the emotional history of the Ukraine war” Focaalblog 13 March. https://www.focaalblog.com/2025/03/13/chris-hann-humiliation-hubris-and-hamartia-the-emotional-history-of-the-ukraine-war/

Blog, War: New Times

Mihai Varga: Crisis-tested, yet forgotten: Family farms in wartime Ukraine

February 14, 2023 focaal_admin

It was often said, in the course of the transition from communism to capitalism in the 1990s and 2000s, that Eastern Europeans are good at surviving. The IMF and the World Bank praised the local population’s capacity to “subsist” through small-scale agricultural production, “relieving” welfare budgets or helping shoulder the liberalization of prices. In fact, this focus on subsistence obscured a broader societal trend in much of post-communist Eurasia, the emergence of what one could term a new ‘great social divide’ between family farms and large corporate farms. Thus, on the one hand, throughout the post-communist region, local mega-corporations grew on the ruins of former collective farms to expand into world-level global producers. On the other, the region also experienced the contrasting trend of large shares of the population returning to or intensifying agricultural production to maintain their livelihoods through a combination of selling and self-consuming their products.

Farms workers harvesting the potato crop in Ukraine in 1991, Photo by Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

Ukraine is no exception to this trend of what the World Bank and other international organizations call the dualization of agriculture: together with Russia and Kazakhstan, Ukraine saw the emergence of some of the world’s largest agro-corporations in rural landscapes populated by millions of “subsistence” family farms. “Subsistence” though was somewhat of a romantic myth, here as much as elsewhere in the world. Rural and peri-urban populations were far more diverse than that term suggests. Few survived solely on their own produce. Rural people were getting by through a combination of self-consumption, petty entrepreneurship (selling some produce on local markets), sending family members abroad for work, and collecting meagre social benefits. Some 20% of Ukraine’s approximately four million rural households were selling more than half of their production already in the early 2000s, mostly informally. Many families have amassed enough land for participation in the same markets as corporate actors, sending produce such as soy, maize, and sunflower products to sea ports for export.

A hallmark of the approach advocated by states and international organizations vis-à-vis post-communist populations of small-scale producers was a complete break with the communist procurement system, which had been buying up the production of small farmers in order to process it in specialized units (factories). Post-socialist states have allowed that communist procurement system to collapse, and since the 1990s have either failed or explicitly refused to support family farms by means of buying up their production. They assumed that simply freeing markets for land, energy, and food would miraculously spur an entrepreneurial drive that would lead to the disbandment of collective farms and provide the cure to poverty (or at least limit it). Instead of such an entrepreneurial revolution, post-communist countries experienced in the 1990s a pattern of extreme property fragmentation, the return of small-scale farming, and the survival and transformation of the former collective farms. As of the 2000s, authorities and international organizations (the World Bank in particular) expected that land markets would “consolidate” agriculture to produce farmers more akin to Western European ones, incentivizing those “too small to grow” to sell their land and leave agriculture.

Ukraine, a latecomer to land markets liberalization, faced particularly intense criticism from the European Union, World Bank, and IMF for its agricultural land sales moratorium and finally lifted it following intense IMF and World Bank pressure in March 2020. The argument was that higher prices for agricultural products and land would drive investment and production growth. But the reality is that uncertainties over marketing possibilities, access to credit, subsidies, and leasing schemes abound. Three decades after the collapse of communism and facing a largely unprecedented combination of drought and war-induced cost increases, smallholders in Ukraine and elsewhere in post-communist Eurasia are still virtually on their own in the task of commercializing production from below. In Eastern European EU member states, many are excluded from subventions, which are usually only available to larger actors, above 1 hectare, and have no political representation. Links between corporate actors and the smallest family farms do exist. Still, these do not amount to any marketing or production support for small holders. Instead, rural households lease out their land to corporate actors in exchange for animal fodder, and market their small production surpluses locally, reaching global markets only via numerous intermediaries.

In Ukraine, the war exacerbates the divide between corporate actors and family farms; the latter, on their own in marketing their products, are facing depressed prices. Russia’s blockade of the Ukrainian Black Sea ports (until July 2022) and the occupation and destruction of the Azov Sea ports have made agricultural prices in Ukraine collapse. The impact on export routes was dramatic: before the war, trucks delivered agricultural products to the Azov and Black Sea ports, which had important storage facilities. With the blockade, export routes lengthened over several countries, alternating truck, rail, and river barges, to Danube and smaller Black Sea ports in Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania with far smaller storage capacities. Corporate actors were able to cover the associated costs and were well positioned to profit from steep world price increases; at least until July 2022, when a Russian-Ukrainian deal allowed agricultural products to leave Black Sea ports again (the Grain Initiative). The deal made world grain prices, that had doubled at the start of the war, fall. But not even the Ukrainian producers that actually reached the remaining Black Sea export facilities received world prices for their production, as few shippers risked entering Ukraine’s ports and demand premiums that pushed Ukrainian prices far below world levels.

In contrast to large exporters, Ukraine’s millions of family farms were thus confronted by the collapse of inner-country prices for export-intended goods that could not leave the country. Whatever transport and storage infrastructure is left is accessible only at exorbitant prices, and the prices on local markets for export-intended agricultural production have collapsed. In fact, in the summer of 2022, the cost of storing production was as relevant as the market price, as it became difficult to move produce around given the greatly damaged transport and storage infrastructure. Prices have varied more widely for goods intended for local consumption such as potatoes, a key staple for local survival under crisis conditions. Keeping in mind that potatoes are a favoured crop for smallholder specialization, prices went from 46% increases to the prior year to close to zero by the end of 2022, in both cases making it extremely difficult to sell production. The sudden price fall in October 2022 resulted from producers close to Russia – and Belarus seeking to sell as much as possible rather than store, fearing further attacks and disruptions. Depressed prices did not even cover the cost of seed material and according to market analysts will endanger the harvest for 2023.

The state should act as a last-resort buyer for small holders, especially for crops and products in which small farmers specialize, which are difficult to store and costlier to export. Still, such self-evident steps for which there are many workable global examples in the 20^th century are not among the options that have ever been considered in the last three decades. What is also not on the table is a centralized state distribution of seeds and fertilizers. The main strategy advocated internationally for preventing hunger and helping agricultural producers get access to increasingly expensive inputs is to remove trade barriers (also for fertilizers). But this will predictably fail to tackle problems as varied as the collapse of infrastructure or speculation via agricultural derivatives which produce hunger and volatile food prices.

The little export that Ukraine achieved in the summer of 2022 – at one fifth of its pre-war capacity – required unprecedented efforts of trans-border cooperation. Before the war, Ukraine’s grain, soy, and sunflower oil left the country to Asian and African countries by ship directly from the Ukrainian Black Sea and Azov Sea ports. From March to August 2022, Ukraine’s agricultural products had to pass three countries by truck, train, or river barges: Ukraine, Moldova, and Romania, before reaching the Black Sea. Even with the Grain Initiative corridor opening in August and the accessibility of Ukraine’s Black Sea ports in and near Odessa assured, the three-country land-and-sea route stayed an important export avenue. Authorities had to repair abandoned rail tracks within three months; and expand the storage capacities of – until then – less-used Danube ports. Another new trans-border land-and-sea route now connects Ukraine via Poland by rail to the Lithuanian Baltic Sea port of Klaipeda for Western European markets.

The outcomes of such logistic efforts – as beneficial as they are to the rest of the world – deepen the local divide between export-capable corporate actors and small-scale farmers. While corporate actors have their own transport capacities (“truck fleets”) and can access export routes, the latter continue to face the dramatic situation of exploding production prices for fuel and fertilizers and collapsing prices for locally-sold produce.

Finally, while the drought in Europe drove up prices for the late 2022 and 2023 harvests, Ukrainian producers hardly benefit, as local consumers cannot pay the higher prices and imports of vegetables and fruit to counterbalance the price hikes. In summer 2022, Ukrainian traders were already replacing the lost harvests in fruits and vegetables in the Russian-occupied Kherson area – which they used to market within Ukraine – with products from Moldova and Romania (fieldwork respondents, July and August 2022).

The present-day crisis will, therefore, yet again – such as during the 1990s transition – test and reproduce the local population’s survival skills. Rather than retreating into the imagined peasant subsistence economy of the World Bank technocrats, they will struggle and combine various livelihood sources, from migration remittances and social benefits to small-scale agricultural production. As they are de facto abandoned once more by local and global politics, rural people will above all rely upon each other.

Mihai Varga is a sociologist at the Institute for East-European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. His latest book is Poverty as Subsistence. The World Bank and Pro-Poor Land Reform in Eurasia.

Cite as: Varga, Mihai 2023. “Crisis-tested, yet forgotten: Family farms in wartime Ukraine” Focaalblog 14 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2023/02/14/mihai-varga-crisis-tested-yet-forgotten-family-farms-in-wartime-ukraine/

Blog, Conversations on the Left

Focaalblog: New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Global Capitalism

July 5, 2022 Focaal Web Editor

Karl Polanyi Research Center for Global Social Studies and the Commission on 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, organized a conference on the 26-27 May, 2022, in Budapest, addressing the escalating crises of global capitalism.

Since 1989, processes of neoliberal globalization, financialization, the erosion of welfare states, and the decline of ‘the standard labor contract’, have produced deepening inequalities and hierarchies, long time hidden under the mantra of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’. Privatization, gentrification, dispossession, devaluation, and displacement have increased in a multitude of settings despite intermittent mass mobilizations, which were often seen as ‘middle class’. The undermining of democratic possibilities has reinforced the super-exploitation of diverse groups in many places. Globalization, technological speed up and the platformization of labor-markets are threatening ‘middle class’ jobs’ in North and South. Deepening exploitation of labor is increasingly intersected with aggressive rent taking by monopoly sections of capital and states. Issues of nationalism, racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia, sometimes interwoven with waves of migration, have resurfaced, in tandem with the resulting authoritarianism. Accelerating climate change is being addressed in pro-capitalist ways, likely leading to further inequalities, displacements, and challenges to survival. Global imperial rivalries are intensifying and generating new cold wars and ‘global wars’, increasingly of a purportedly ‘civilizational nature’, like the Ukrainian calamity that is playing itself out on the EU border.

The late Immanuel Wallerstein predicted that politics in this ‘decisive era of the world-system’ will be ever more volatile as inescapable choices must be made about democratic or authoritarian solutions. Most of our problems are well known and anticipated, but narrow ideas about ‘proven causation’ and ‘concluding evidence’ paralyze any decision making on behalf of established interests, while national publics are being fed lies and deceptions, both by the technocrats and the ‘authoritarians’ and right-wing populists. Crisis moments are steadily dealt with ‘unprepared’ and in fire-fighting mode. Left wing grassroots movements are specialized on small scale practical utopias but large-scale breakthroughs for the Left seem out of reach.

If this describes roughly where we are now, what can we expect next? Can we responsibly extrapolate and speculate? What sort of a global capitalism might we be inhabiting in thirty years from now? What can we discover as its likely core tendencies, elements, and relations? What modes of resistance are people experimenting with? What are the visions and opportunities to build a more equal and just society? Where is the new counter politics, where are the new counter movements?

Roundtable on War

Taras Fedirko (University of St Andrews) Militarized civil society and the economy of war in Ukraine

Volodymyr Arthiuk (University of Oxford) The expected war: scales of conflict around Ukraine from February 2014 to February 2022

Denys Gorbach (Sciences Po) Identitarian landscapes in Ukraine before and during the war

Volodymyr Ischenko (Free University Berlin) Madman’s war? Ideology, hegemony crisis, and the dynamics of depoliticization in Russians’ support for the invasion of Ukraine

– moderated by Don Kalb (University of Bergen)

Roundtable on Migration

Attila Melegh (Corvinus University/Polanyi Center) Migration turn and the crisis of capitalism.,

Noémi Katona (Centre for Social Science, Hungarian Academy of Sciences/Helyzet) The division of reproductive labor in global capitalism: the case of migrant care workers in Europe,

Béla Soltész (Eötvös Loránd University), “The wanted, the unwanted and the invisible. Interpreting distinctions and selectivity of Hungarian migration policy”

Nina Glick Schiller (Manchester University), Has Migration Studies Lost Its Subject? Migration Studies, Global Disorders, and Shared Precarities

– moderated by Diana Szántó (Artemisszio Foundation/Polanyi Center)

Roundtable on ‘Illiberal capitalism’ I

Luisa Steur (University of Amsterdam) Cuba Update

Marc Morell (University of Bergen) On transformative movements in neither authoritarian nor egalitarian but flawed paths. A Maltese illustration

Attila Antal (Eötvös Loránd University) Illiberalism as Emergency Governance

Gábor Scheiring (Bocconi University) The national-populist mutation of neoliberalism in East-Central Europe

– moderated by Attila Melegh (Corvinus University/Polanyi Center)

Roundtable on ‘Illiberal capitalism’ II

Florin Poenaru (University of Bucharest) Tanks, tankies and think-tanks. Anthropological vignettes from the Romanian garrison

Jeff Maskovsky (The City University of New York) Not Yet Fascist: The Journey from Neoliberalism to Corporate Authoritarianism of the United States

Ágnes Gagyi (University of Gothenburg) Bridge position and regime fixes: semi-peripheral contexts to “illiberalism” in Hungary

Bruno de Conti (University of Campinas) Bolsonaro: the economic agenda behind the smoke screen

– moderated by Dorottya Mendly (Corvinus University)

Roundtable on Our Futures

David Harvey (The City University of New York)

Michael Burawoy (UC Berkely)

Ida Susser (The City University of New York)

Don Kalb (University of Bergen)

– moderated by Mary Taylor (The City University of New York)

Cite as: Focaalblog. 2022. “New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Global Capitalism.” Focaalblog, 5 July. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/07/05/don-kalb-new-times-confronting-the-escalating-crises-of-global-capitalism/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Céline Cantat: The reception spectacle: on Ukrainian displacement and selective empathy at Europe’s borders

June 28, 2022 Focaal Web Editor

Since the beginning of the Russian offensive on Ukraine on February 24th, over 5 million people have registered for temporary protection programmes and other schemes across Europe. By and large, Ukrainians have been granted access to assistance, and extended legal statuses allowing them to enter and settle in EU Member States. While this unusual generosity on the part of European States should be applauded, it has given rise to a range of questions about the differentiated treatment of Ukrainians as compared to other displaced groups. A result of this configuration, the many issues surrounding the engagement with Ukrainian displacement have been mainly framed in comparative terms: How have Ukrainians been received in comparison to refugees who arrived in 2015? Why have Ukrainians been allowed to settle in Europe when there are thousands stuck at the Belarus-Polish border? Why have non-Ukrainians fleeing Ukraine been treated differently? Consequently, the public debate has been largely dominated by calls for the inclusion of Ukrainians, suddenly considered to be Europe’s own, flanked by denunciations of the EU’s selective indignation as hypocritical and racist.

Image 1: Direction sign for Ukrainians Welcome Center at Paris-Beauvais Airport (France), photo by author

Beyond official responses by states and their institutions, civilian and grassroots reactions have also been polarised across such lines. When, in early March 2022, I visited Budapest’s train stations, where a range of NGOs and networks of residents were gathering to welcome people fleeing Ukraine, the question of the specific qualities and perceived features of people arriving were central to conversations. A volunteer with a Hungarian Church NGO, pointing in the direction of a woman and her three children, stated: “Look, they are tired, they are vulnerable women and children: they are the real refugees”. He went on to explain that he also came out to help people passing through Budapest in the summer 2015 even though, according to him, many at the time were not refugees but, “migrants or Islamic terrorists”. When I highlighted that, to my knowledge, what legally identified a refugee was the conflict or persecution they were fleeing from, rather than undefined notions of worth connected to their perceived gender, age, or religion, he emphasized that some people deserved asylum while others did not.

Clearly, the discourse reiterated by some of the volunteers in Budapest went beyond their personal feelings: it built on categories produced by the European border and asylum regime over the last three to four decades. A cornerstone of that is the meticulous construction of a separation between (deserving) refugees and (undesirable) migrants. Within the category of refugees there is a further hierarchisation of deservedness, with different types of assistance (e.g., resettlement to the EU versus humanitarian aid abroad) being extended based on racialised profiling of their capacity for integration into the imagined community of Europe. In the volatile context of the “migration crisis” declared in the region in 2015, this discourse has gained centrality in Hungary and other Central and Eastern European countries. Injunctions to distinguish between “bad migrants” and “good refugees” became articulated with local regimes of social valuation and their racialised, gendered, class- and religion-based hierarchies in the context of regional capitalist transitions. This is closely connected to their own paths of ‘Europeanisation’: former Eastern bloc countries were unequally included into its regional divisions of labour, and have themselves been subjected to, and productive of, racializing dynamics. ‘Becoming European’ has involved claims to superiority, modernity, and whiteness, which have led to the renewed marginalisation’s of various groups – both domestic and non-domestic – and has given rise to articulate forms of racism.

In other words, unequal treatment of different displaced groups is not new and does not happen in a vacuum: even if the refugee as a legal construction claims to be a universal figure, it is in reality always embedded in local social relations. Quite the opposite, a longue durée examination of the relation between states and displacement shows that it has always been a story of selective engagement: systematically, the way states engage with certain groups teaches us more about their projects and political architectures than about the displaced individuals themselves. It is therefore important to go beyond moralised assessments of Europe’s current response to Ukrainian displacement, and to reflect on how states interpellate people moving across borders in relation to specific moral and political economies, which are themselves underpinned by broader projects such as nation-building and capital accumulation. From this perspective, the questions raised by the Ukrainian displacement in Europe become: under which circumstances do states welcome or reject displaced people? How is refugee reception shaped by larger historical processes and their legacy, including state-building, capital expansion and related projects such as colonial domination? How do moral hierarchies and constructions of race, gender, class, and religion, in the receiving states and nations, structure responses to displacement?

Statecraft and the reception spectacle

As I have argued elsewhere (Cantat 2015), the refugee as a category and a figure is shaped and made in ways that are congenial to furthering states’ aims. My point is not that formal frames overdetermine responses to displacement. Yet informal initiatives still respond to dominant discursive and political reception regimes: the space for creative responses remains moulded by their opposition and denunciation of overarching power structures. To further reflect on the parallels and contrasts between current responses to Ukrainian displacement and engagement with previous episodes of forced mobility, I will reflect on specific displacement episodes and assess how the figure of the refugee has been built historically. This historicization will help us understand the differences and similarities in states’ mechanisms of interpellation of different groups, both over time and across categories.

A classic example in recent history of how the category of the refugee has been shaped by states’ circumstances can be found in the Geneva Convention itself. Presented as a text with universal validity in order to protect people fleeing persecution, the definition of the refugee in fact (re)produces a very specific figure: that of a man fleeing the USSR in the context of the Cold War aiming to join the capitalist West. The restrictive criteria outlined in the Convention regarding refugee status constantly prove to be inadequate for providing appropriate protection to people fleeing a range of violent situations. First, of course, those fleeing economic violence and devastation, considered outside the scope of asylum. But also, those fleeing different configurations of political and social persecution that do not abide by the vision of the world underpinning the Convention.

Going back into past displacements, something which, as noted by Philip Marfleet (2007), neither historians nor refugee scholars are particularly good at for different reasons, allows us to assert yet more clearly that histories of exiles are always underpinned by states’ demands for hospitality or hostility to different groups. Besides, neither hospitality nor rejection are homogeneous circumstances, and states may often be ready to accommodate refugees without actually welcoming them, for instance by allowing people to integrate within labour markets while at the same encouraging discourses of exclusion or refusing them legal statuses and protections. Discursive constructions of displaced populations intersect both with the valuation regimes and social hierarchies that structure host states’ bio–political architectures, by which I mean regimes of race/gender/class (etc.) as articulated with the geopolitics and interstate relations of the moment.

An important example of this can be found in the stories of Huguenot displacements in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. The flight of 200 000 Huguenots to Geneva, Holland, and England, as they feared persecution from the French absolutist Catholic authorities of the time, is often seen as one of the earliest episodes of contemporary refuge, not because Huguenots were the first group to flee a territory due to violence, but because they were chased away by a state project and received by other states defining themselves against that. It is understood that the word “refugee” entered vernacular language for the first time during this episode. The emerging English and Dutch states promoted openness to those refugees, who came from relatively wealthy commercial backgrounds, including the slave trade, and spectacularized their welcoming attitude as a proof of their attachment to liberalism and religious freedom. This self-presentation was central to their opposition to the French absolutist state. In England, while historical sources show widespread popular hostility towards the Huguenots, the state engaged in a mass sympathy campaign, explaining to people that welcoming Huguenots was a matter of national pride and of, indeed, upholding values of tolerance.

The discourse of brotherhood was also framed in terms of religious proximity. But such categories of belonging are not static. They are insufficient for understanding reception attitudes: we need to recognize racialization, legitimization, and differentiation as dynamic and contingent processes that evolve across time and according to political circumstances. In fact, 50 years later, the Palatines, another group of Protestants fleeing Germany, was seeking refuge in England. Coming from a formally allied and Protestant state, they were received with great hostility. Many were placed in what are believed to be the first refugee camps of contemporary England, along the Thames, before being resettled to Ireland and British America. A highly polarised political debate with similar arguments as those that we now hear regarding the merits of migration and the (im)possibility of integration emerged in England at the time. This underlines that there is nothing new or specific about the unequal treatment of different displaced groups. It also shows that selective empathy tells us very little – perhaps nothing – about groups per se, their circumstances, needs or characteristics: it would be misleading to try to identify reasons for this differentiated treatment in specific qualities of individuals. What is at stake, always, in the relation between state authorities and displaced people is various forms of statecraft and state power.

The famous notion of “border spectacle”, which Nicholas de Genova (2013) has usefully mobilised to examine how exclusion is staged at the border to showcase the state as the protector of a national public that is simultaneously coalesced, has already taught us a lot about how the nation/state/citizen triad is produced in relation to displacement, exile, and borders. Similar observations can be drawn from other episodes where welcoming and hospitality become spectacularized by state authorities. Questions we must ask ourselves to understand selective empathy are never about whether people deserve a better treatment or not, but always about how their inclusion or rejection promote specific state projects at any given moment.

Ukrainian displacement and European belonging

In the case of Ukrainian displacement, discourses about Europe, whiteness, and European belonging have secured people access to reasonable reception conditions. In this context, grassroots reception practices have also been numerous, diverse, and consistent. They have been able to assert themselves publicly in ways that have been altogether forbidden and impossible in other displacement episodes, which were often characterised by the criminalisation of informal aid. This, together with the adoption of legal frameworks allowing Ukrainians fleeing Ukraine (but no other groups!) to cross EU national borders and choose where to settle, can be applauded as not only a uniquely welcoming set of policies but in fact the first properly coherent approach that the EU has ever adopted in relation to displacement. This is a welcome shift from the securitizing response usually reserved to those seeking asylum, which is not just chaotic but also, on many occasions, lethal.

There already are, however, serious issues to consider when we look at the way Ukrainians are being received in Europe. First, the activation of temporary protection schemes, has not meant access to regular (and more protective) asylum regimes. Second, across Europe, the bulk of reception work has been delegated to civilian networks and small-scale organisations. This is the result of decades of neoliberal sub-contracting of public responsibilities to private actors. This continued delegation of responsibility has meant the revival of aid networks formed in 2015: the flexibility and responsiveness of these loser structures, easily reactivated via social networks, was crucial for the execution of reception activities in the first weeks of the conflict. However, as everywhere, the capacity of civil society to fill gaps left by withdrawing states has its obvious limits. We are already seeing how the tide is turning, with volunteers becoming less willing to host the displaced in their homes and tiring from daily assistance activities. In the absence of a coordinated state response this can only deteriorate.

As we have seen in Greece for example, there is no more efficient way to turn popular sympathy into hostility than letting a situation worsen without states providing adequate support to both exiles and host communities. Importantly, while grassroots support activities do not always reproduce government categories developed by states and institutions, they always produce and navigate a sense that practising solidarity is a messy business in contexts of limited resources (Cantat 2018, 2020, 2021). Distributive dilemmas always involve representations, typologies, and moral economies, where (consciously or not) people’s deservingness is assessed by those who have to decide whom and how to help in specific contexts.

In fact, there is nothing inherently progressive to grassroots assistance as compared to state support or the formal aid sector: such initiatives follow their own politics and ethics, build specific socialities and respond to different circumstances. Often, when those circumstances are not clarified, e.g., when people are moved to help by unexamined desires to do good, informal support can fuel extremely unbalanced and unequal power relations. Those may be even more difficult to contest as they take place outside a formalised aid relation where roles are clearly defined and distributed: they might come together with powerful discourses that neutralise criticism, be it religious charity, claims to horizontality, or demands for gratitude. Even when relations are clarified, it is hard to escape combination and hybridization in solidarity practices: doing good and progressive politics usually exist together and this can make people who are the object of help very vulnerable.

This vulnerability is made more problematic because citizens of host countries have been moved into assisting Ukrainians in the name of moral imperatives, rather than because it is considered a public service that states ought to provide to people based on their statuses. If Ukrainians are now being supported in the name of some unstable construction of European belonging, then it begs the question: how long will Ukrainians remain so white? Europeanness is not a homogeneous and stable condition: the EU has produced shades of European belonging where Eastern Europe has always been seen as less belonging, less European, and somehow less legitimate – even for those countries who have become member states. The example of the Brexit campaign is just another reminder of how strong intra-European racism remains.

In the current context of the EU’s mobilisation against Russia, Ukrainians’ Europeanness is strongly asserted, but it could just as well be tempered, questioned, or sacrificed when geopolitics evolve. If so, the lack of deployment of proper state support and the overreliance on popular assistance will become highly problematic. We already see processes of differentiated inclusion unfolding with questions around the type of access that Ukrainians get to different social spheres: for instance, in Hungary, work permits are not needed for certain types of jobs where there are shortages – mostly manual, in the agrarian sector and catering, but also in IT. This in fact reiterates previous labour migration patterns whereby racialised Ukrainian labour has been allowed in the country in order to serve specific industries.

The direction in which Ukrainian instrumentality to the EU’s ideological and economic structures will evolve is far from obvious. Above all, the situation demands that we insist on the continuity of solidarity on the ground of a real grassroots internationalism and that we keep demanding public support for all displaced groups.

Céline Cantat is Visiting Lecturer in Migration Studies and Academic Director for the Masters in Environmental Policy and in Energy Transitions at the Paris School of International Affairs, Sciences Po.

This text was developed as part of the EASA fundraising webinar Humanitarian responses to the 2022 Russian war on Ukraine: anthropological perspectives, 07/06/2022, convened by Ela Drazkiewicz and Mariya Ivancheva, and co-sponsored by SIEF and AAA’s SOYUZ, Society for the Anthropology of Europe.

References

Cantat, Céline (2021) “Refugee Solidarity Along the Balkan Route”, Journal of Refugee Studies, 34 (2), 1348–1369.

Cantat, Céline (2020) “The Rise and Fall of Migration Solidarity in Belgrade”, movements. Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies, 5 (1), http://movements-journal.org/issues/08.balkanroute/05.cantat–the-rise-and-fall-of-migration-solidarity-in-belgrade.html.

Cantat, Céline (2015) “Contesting Europeanism: Discourses and Practices of Pro-Migrant Groups in the European Union”. PhD Thesis, roar.uel.ac.uk/4618/

Cantat, Céline (2018) “The politics of refugee solidarity in Greece: Bordered identities and political mobilization”, MigSol Working Paper, 2018/1, https://cps.ceu.edu/sites/cps.ceu.edu/files/attachment/publication/2986/cps-working-paper-migsol-d3.1-2018.pdf

De Genova, Nicholas (2013) “Spectacles of migrant ‘illegality’: the scene of exclusion, the obscene of inclusion”, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36 (7), 1180-1198,

Marfleet, Philip (2007) “Refugees and History: Why We Must Address the Past”, Refugee Survey Quarterly, 26 (3), 136–148.

Cite as: Cantat, Céline. 2022. “The reception spectacle: on Ukrainian displacement and selective empathy at Europe’s borders.” Focaalblog, 28 June. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/06/28/celine-cantat-the-reception-spectacle-on-ukrainian-displacement-and-selective-empathy-at-europes-borders/

Blog, War: New Times

Denys Gorbach: Ukrainian identity map in wartime: Thesis-antithesis-synthesis?

June 13, 2022 Focaal Web Editor

The cultural and linguistic heterogeneity of Ukraine is a well-known fact, used and abused in explanations of the ongoing war. Having taken root in the early modern period in the interstitial area contested by three empires – Polish, Turkish and Russian – the Ukrainian nation was, indeed, formed through demographic processes that have left in their wake a complex multi-ethnic composition with varied legacies.

The South, conquered by the Russians from the Ottomans in the 18^th century, underwent the process of ‘internal colonization’ (Etkind 2011) that consisted of cleansing the newly acquired lands of the Turkic-speaking nomads and replacing them with sedentary agrarian producers. Persecuted minorities from other countries – German Mennonites, Ottoman Serbs etc. – were invited by the imperial government and settled there. Much of the land, however, was distributed among Russian noblemen, who brought with them serfs from the core ethnic regions of Ukraine and Russia. This settler colonization moment, akin to the one that took place in Northern America at the same time, combined fertile soils with forced labor and made the Russian Empire the breadbasket of Europe.

Image 1: ‘Girls in the field’ (1932), by Kazimir Malevich

One century later, during the Long Depression of 1873-1896, this region was colonized again. At the time, French, Belgian, and British capital was looking for profitable investment opportunities. The Scramble for Africa offered one such possibility; another option was to participate in the rapid industrialization of the Ukrainian steppes, benefiting from the generous protectionism of the Russian government. The massive influx of workforce from every corner of the empire only intensified in the Soviet era, when many if not most of industrial megaprojects were concentrated in Southern and Eastern Ukraine. This produced heavy industrial Russophone cities with no strong ethno-cultural attachments.

Territories on the right bank of the river Dnipro that today constitute northern and central Ukraine became part of the Russian Empire after the partitions of Poland in the late 18th century. To combat the influence of Polish nationalism there, Russian ethnographers promoted the idea of a separate Ukrainian ethnicity, Orthodox religion being the chief criterion versus Catholic Poles. This idea later backfired when Ukrainian romantic intellectuals turned it against the Russian imperial center itself. Following the partitions of Poland, the western-most part of Ukraine became part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, later of interwar Poland and Czechoslovakia. Hotspot of a nationalist guerilla war in the 1940s, Galicia – the former Polish-controlled part of Ukraine – became “the Ukrainian Piedmont” during the national revival of 1989-1991. Being the least Russophone region, it projected an aura of Ukrainian ethnic authenticity. Galicia’s Habsburg past allowed Ukrainian nationalists to articulate their ideology with a quest for a lost Europeanness, from which they imagined an ‘Asian’ Russia to be excluded.

I admit that this is an extremely cursory and almost caricatural snapshot of ethnic histories in Ukraine, but it is still more credible than the simplistic tale of ‘two Ukraines’, cooked up by Ukrainian nationalist intelligentsias in the early 1990s (Riabchuk, 1992). The latter was picked up by Samuel Huntington, the prophet of civilisational wars ([1996] 2011), but even, surprisingly, by an anti-nationalist anthropologist such as Chris Hann (2022). In that narrative, the population’s historical heterogeneity easily slides into an unbridgeable chasm between two civilizational different societies: pro-Western ‘Ukrainians proper’ and Russified ‘Creoles’.

How it started

Still, throughout Ukraine’s 30 years of independence there was considerable diversity in the country’s political geography and political identities, but the cardinal differences were changed together with the transformation of political struggles. Contrary to the nationalist narrative that has gradually become dominant, in the 1990s the actual key political cleavage in the Ukrainian public sphere was closer to the classic left-right binary – not least in the terms used by politicians and journalists themselves. The change toward an ethnic vocabulary came with the Orange revolution in 2004, when the center of gravity in the political field moved from the presidency to the parliament. As a result of that shift, the rivalry between oligarchic groupings that stood behind the major party-political formations had become more transparent and involved from now on open electoral struggle. It was at this point that perceived ethno-linguistic differences between East and West turned into a deepening political cleavage and ‘cultural identities’ began absorbing more conventional programmatic distinctions.

Ukrainian politics after the Orange Revolution became an arena of confrontation between two competing nationalist projects, which perceived themselves as ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ and ‘East Slavic’ (Shulman, 2005). The former put high value on the Ukrainian language and its associated ethnic identity, was implacably hostile to Russia, which it equated with the Soviet Union, and craved a liberal Euro-Atlantic integration. The latter was centered on the protection of Russian language rights, the Russian Orthodox church, and the historical memory of the Soviet people’s victory in the Second World War (which it saw as a victory of its own), and purportedly leaning towards Russia. This division gave elites an easy tool to mobilize the voter base. But at the same time, it served as a safety stop, preventing an authoritarian consolidation of power: any potential dictator backed by either bloc was easily overturned by rivals mobilizing the other “half” of the country against him. This “pluralism by default” became the hallmark of the Ukrainian political system (Way, 2015). Such pluralism was also an insurance against a neoliberal consolidation in the economic domain: the importance of the “populist” component did not allow governing elites to disembed the economy from local social and political configurations and forced all political forces to maintain the Soviet legacy of redistributive mechanisms.

The making of the supposedly identitarian cleavage thus served as a useful fix for social reproduction during the decade of economic growth between 2000 and 2010. However, as with all politico-economic fixes, this one was only temporary. Several factors contributed to its undoing in the early 2010s. First, with no inbuilt checks, the amplitude of the nationalist see-saw kept widening dangerously until the polarization reached unsustainable levels. In the parliamentary elections of 2012, the far-right (‘ethnic Ukrainian’) Svoboda party gained 10% of votes. Its popularity was propelled by the ‘East Slavic’ President Yanukovych, who was visibly aiming at orchestrating his 2015 reelection the way Jacques Chirac had done it in 2002 vis a vis Le Pen, but he must have underestimated the level of tension already accumulated in the society. Predatory activities of the Yanukovych team in the economic domain irritated both the oligarchs and the much more numerous small entrepreneurs and urban middle classes in Kyiv and the West, pushing up the nationalist vote. This coincided with the end of the commodity super cycle that had been sustaining Ukrainian economic growth between 1997-2012 (Chim, 2021). There was less and less to redistribute – especially given that in 2012 Russia, affected by the same turn of the global cycle, launched a full-scale economic attack against Ukraine, with exorbitant gas prices and countless trade wars affecting Ukrainian exporters. Starting from the second half of 2012, after the end of the stimulus from the infrastructure projects associated with the European football championship, Ukraine entered a steep recession. The Russian economic offensive marked the closure of the geopolitical interstitial space that had been vital for Ukraine: Yanukovych was forced to choose a camp while knowing that any choice would be disastrous.

All these contradictions came together in the political crisis known as the Euromaidan of 2013-2014. With Yanukovych deposed, Crimea annexed by Russia, and the Donbas plunged into war, the internal balance of Ukrainian politics became skewed beyond repair. Millions of ‘East Slavic’ voters found themselves now outside the playing field, and the ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ party became mathematically dominant (D’Anieri, 2018). This antagonism, however recent and constructed, now all but drove national politics. At the same time, however, both the ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ and the ‘Eastern Slavic’ identities that were being offered in the political arena were only weakly anchored in the worldview of the common people. Wherever one lived and whichever language one spoke most smoothly, the dominant popular attitude was an anti-political rejection of party-political games as such, rather than a firm endorsement of one side against the other. As a result of this disconnection between political society and the wider society, and pushed by the logic of the public sphere, Petro Poroshenko spent his presidential term drifting towards an ever more radical form of ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ nationalism. In the end he suffered a humiliating defeat at the 2019 elections: 73% of voters supported Volodymyr Zelenskyi, who was the veritable embodiment of the popular anti-political and anti-elitist attitude.

Once elected, however, Zelenskyi, too, began obeying the structural logic of the political field. By the autumn of 2020, it became clear to the Russian government that Zelenskyi would not accept their version of the Minsk accords, and the Kremlin began military preparations. In the lower echelons of Ukrainian society, meanwhile, the same old detachment from identarian politics persisted. For instance, one of the leaders of the 2020 miners’ strike in Kryvyi Rih, Zelenskyi’s native city, was hailed as a hero of the two hardest battles of the Donbas war. However, this did not mean much to him subjectively: in a polemic around the strike, he said he had never even considered himself a patriot (Gorbach, 2022).

How it’s going

What happened when Russia finished its war preparations and moved its troops into Ukraine? Kryvyi Rih, a stronghold of the supposedly ‘East Slavic’ elite, provides a telling example. The city’s mayor Yuriy Vilkul was elected in 2010, after Yanukovych’s presidential victory. The mayor’s son Oleksandr was a CEO of two large industrial enterprises of the city during the crucial moment of their contested transfer to Rinat Akhmetov, the richest man in Ukraine and the traditional sponsor of ‘East Slavic’ political projects. The anchoring of this family’s political power in the city was accompanied by their sponsoring of the construction of numerous Russian Orthodox churches and other religious objects, as well as monuments reinforcing the Soviet-centred version of WW2 historical memory. Local Ukrainian nationalist and liberal activists were convinced that the ruling elite would switch sides at the first sight of Russian troops.

Instead, Oleksandr Vilkul became the head of the local military administration. Shortly after the invasion, he wrote: “Dear friends, every generation has its own Brest fortress, and its own Stalingrad. We will not give up even a meter of our native land to the occupiers. Kryvbas is behind our backs, we have nowhere to retreat. Behind our backs are our families and our families’ graves… The enemy will be beaten.” These four sentences contain no less than five allusions to Stalin’s wartime speeches. The ‘East Slavic’ identity, long perceived as ‘pro-Russian’, became a mobilizing tool against the Russian invasion. The local ‘ethnic Ukrainian’ civil society has been annoyed and disoriented by this turn of events, but whatever they might think of it, the fact remains: resistance to the Russian invasion is being efficiently organized under the slogans of Soviet antifascism and Orthodox faith. The political leader who spent years opposing Ukrainian ethnonationalism and fighting the post-Euromaidan “decommunization” of urban space, has now received friendly visits from the figureheads of Ukrainian nationalism and initiated renaming all toponyms that have anything to do with Russia (which implies even greater changes then the removal of communist names).

What about the workers? None of my previously ‘apolitical’ or ‘East Slavic’ informers in Kryvyi Rih seem in doubt about the invasion. The specter of reactions ranges from patriotic emotional outbursts in group chats to joining the war effort personally. A trade union leader has demanded weapons from foreign comrades who wanted to send humanitarian aid; a displaced miner from Donetsk has left aside his skepticism about politics and enthusiastically participated in the city’s defense. Further examples abound.

The end of ambiguity?

For decades, the relation of the Ukrainian working class to politics was distant, if not actively antagonistic. Politics of all sorts and colors was perceived as the domain of corruption and lies. What has changed? Probably not much. The univocal reaction to the Russian invasion is so loud precisely because of its ‘non-political’ character: the experience of the war and the response to it are visceral, unmediated by ‘corrupting’ ideologies and politicking. Contrary to previous political events, this one feel ‘real’. It touches upon the very fabric of everyday life and does not rely on abstract reflections mediated by an intellectual class. Hence the surprising level of personal involvement.

Volodymyr Artiukh makes a similar point while comparing the Russian and Ukrainian official narratives that accompanied WW2 commemorations this year: “whereas the Ukrainian side fights iconic signs and appeals to visceral bodily experience through indexes, the Russian side relies almost exclusively on symbols devoid of any relation to lived experience” (Artiukh, 2022). Both discursive strategies exclude the possibility of building a sustainable political movement from below, but whereas the Russian symbolism is demobilizing, the Ukrainian appeal to lived reality mobilizes by generating a powerful emotional loyalty to the event. Oleg Zhuravlev and Volodymyr Ishchenko studied a similar ‘immediate politics’ in the case of Euromaidan – an enormous mobilization that had no verbalized agenda, relying instead on emotional ties between movement’s participants, and between them and their political object (Zhuravlev & Ishchenko, 2020).

Will this bond stabilize enough to create a shared common sense, thus finally constructing a ‘proper’, undivided, Ukrainian nation as a response to the war? It is tempting to anticipate a Hegelian emergence of synthesis out of two antithetic ideologies, the coexistence of which made Ukraine somewhat deficient in many narratives. However, even if such a project does become reality, what might it look like? It may either slide back into narrow ethnonationalism or develop into an inclusive national project, based on the shared war experience, EU aspirations, and a redistributive agenda. It can remain pre-rational (after all, what is nationalism if not a romantic negation of the rationality of Enlightenment?) or morph into a more legible political program.

Little is certain about it at a moment when everything – including the future geographical shape of Ukraine – depends on the war’s outcome. However, it is important to acknowledge that the war is not an independent variable, either; its course is structured by the contradictory political agency of people inhabiting the country.

Denys Gorbach is a postdoctoral fellow at Max Planck Sciences Po Centre for Studying Instability in Market Societies (MaxPo, Paris) and an adjunct lecturer at Sciences Po Toulouse. His recently defended PhD thesis is an ethnographic study of the moral economy and everyday politics of the Ukrainian working class.

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, Volodymyr. 2022. Destruction of Signs, Signs of Destruction. Emptiness,May 9. https://emptiness.eu/field-reports/destruction-of-signs-signs-of-destruction

Chim, Sandy. 2021. The Dawn of an Iron Ore Super Cycle. Resource World Magazine. https://resourceworld.com/the-dawn-of-an-iron-ore-super-cycle/

D’Anieri, Paul. 2018. Gerrymandering Ukraine? Electoral Consequences of Occupation. East European Politics and Societies: And Cultures 33(1), 89-108.

Etkind, Alexander. 2011. Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Gorbach, Denys. 2022. The (Un)Making of the Ukrainian Working Class: Everyday Politics and Moral Economy in a Post-Socialist City. I.E.P. de Paris.

Hann, Chris. 2022. ‘The Agony of Ukraine’. FocaalBlog, 3 June, https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/03/11/chris-hann-the-agony-of-ukraine/

Huntington, Samuel P. [1996] 2011. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Riabchuk, Mykola. 1992. Two Ukraines? East European Reporter 5(4).

Shulman, Stephen. 2005. National Identity and Public Support for Political and Economic Reform in Ukraine. Slavic Review 64(1):59–87.

Way, Lucan A. 2015. Pluralism by Default: Weak Autocrats and the Rise of Competitive Politics. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Zhuravlev, Oleg, & Volodymyr Ishchenko. 2020. ‘Exclusiveness of Civic Nationalism: Euromaidan Eventful Nationalism in Ukraine’. Post-Soviet Affairs 36(3), 226-245.

Cite as: Gorbach, Denys. 2022. “Ukrainian identity map in wartime: Thesis-antithesis-synthesis?” Focaalblog, 13 June.
https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/06/13/denys-gorbach-ukrainian-identity-map-in-wartime-thesis-antithesis-synthesis/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Volodymyr Artiukh: The political logic of Russia’s imperialism

June 9, 2022 Focaal Web Editor

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 19^th 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 21^st 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, Features, War: New Times

Don Kalb: War: New Times

April 21, 2022 Focaal Web Editor

It is now becoming overly clear that this cruel and unjustifiable war in and on Ukraine is not going to last ten days – as the strategists in Moscow, Brussels, and Washington D.C originally expected – or ten weeks, as the pessimists thought. It may well extend to ten months and possibly morph into another ‘forever war’ (both hot and cold).

We are therefore turning our original FocaalBlog discussion, launched in the very first days of the war, into a rolling Feature that is open for any genre of submission: ethnographical, historical, theoretical, global.

So, this is an open call: we invite further contributions.

However, given the sprawling passions around this topic and the massive ideology production and propaganda on all sides, we emphasize that at FocaalBlog we continue to honor the elementary distinctions between description, explanation, historical contextualization, and moral justification. We are not in the business of the latter, and none of our authors engages in it.

A white man wearing a gray beanie and black tracksuit, with a cigarette in his mouth, carries a small dog and a grocery sack down a pathway surrounded by trash and rubble. A larger dog walks behind him and others follow in the distance. — **Image 1:** Bucha after Russian invasion, photo by Oleksandr Ratushniak

We remain deeply and intimately interested not only in what is going on in Ukraine and Russia, and with Ukrainian and Russian citizens of all sorts – including the young and better educated current refugees into the EU as well as the older vulnerable people who remain behind in the war torn villages and suburbs without food or water – but also in the critique of war, militarism, imperialism, violence, primitive accumulation, ideology, nationalism, fascism, racism, and the shifting power fields of the ever less liberal global order in which this war is embedded, into which it feeds, and which it may accelerate.

This involves any type of critique of all the main actors in this cruel and utterly dangerous drama started by Putin. There is no doubt, this is Putin’s war. While this is so in a juridical sense, we should carefully consider that the very possibility of this war, with the exact same stated reasons and objectives from the side of Russia (minus the ethno-essentialism), was already discussed between US Secretary of State James Baker and (former) President Gorbachev in 1992, long before Putin came on stage (Sarotte 2021). Thus, the critique also continues to include prominently the US, the EU, and NATO.

There are loud and self-advertised NATO anthropologists around these days who imagine that NATO can save us from the abys and must have been the solution all along. They should never forget this: while NATO was steadily expanding in Eastward direction towards Russian borders (CEE, Georgia, Ukraine), it was simultaneously waging war for one and a half decade in the Middle East, invading, occupying, and destroying countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, at the cost of close to a million official deaths (on Yemen, a proxy war, we keep counting). The US and the UK had acted on transparent lies and treacherous accusations, had blatantly ignored the United Nations, and pushed aside the principled objections against their aggression within NATO/the West. The unprecedented and globe spanning anti-war demonstrations of early 2003 made no impression whatsoever. Russia, not averse to superpower aspirations of its own, duly took note (as did China): this is apparently allowed. We as anthropologists and citizens (mostly) of the Western world do not have the moral luxury to forget this. This is ‘hard’ knowledge, and it is an anthropological sine qua non for understanding the contemporary world order.

We are writing almost two months into the violence (19 April 2022). The UN has openly acknowledged that a majority of the more than 5 million Ukrainian refugees will probably never actually ‘go home’ again. In the centers of war planning, it is also now gradually accepted that the expected but failed Russian blitz into Ukraine, which in Russia itself was not allowed to be called a war, is sliding unstoppably into a ‘proxy war’ between Russia and NATO, with heavy and advanced weapons deployed on both sides and both military colossuses determined not to lose. Ukrainians continue to heroically play their part and to actively imagine, and being made to imagine, that it is a war for their ‘sovereignty and freedom’. At some point, the distance between these abstract and lofty desires and the raw reality of death, destruction, and mass out-migration will for some begin to feel alienating. After the sinking of the Moskva missile cruiser on 16 April even TV commentators in Moscow, in emotional outbursts, are now allowed to call this a war. Patriarch Kiril of the Russian Orthodox church continues to defend the holy war of Mother Russia against the sinful West of the LGBT’s and the gay parades. Meanwhile, in a militarily surrounded and levelled Mariupol, the hard Right Azov Brigade, or what is left of it, refuses to give up its arms and has retreated into the underground tunnel complexes of the giant Azov Steel complex. They are betting that the massive soviet heritage of industrial labor they had so ardently wished to erase ideologically during the ‘de-communization’ campaigns and memory wars after the 2014 Maidan revolution, might in the end offer them some paradoxical protection. President Zelensky, chosen in 2019 on a platform that resolutely rejected the polarizing identarian logic of the nationalist-civilizational cleavages of Ukraine’s antagonistic governmental elites (‘European Ukraine’ versus ‘Russian’), saw his program quickly collapse in the face of determined right wing nationalist opposition, such as from the members and supporters of the Azov Brigade. The Minsk 2 peace process then all but stalled. Zelensky has now announced that if these circa 2000 national heroes of Ukraine get killed in the Azov Steel tunnels, there cannot be any peace negotiations and Ukraine must fight for final victory. All the actors are overwhelmed by the logic of war.

Outside of the immediate theatre, much of the Global South and all the BRICS have refused to support the Western condemnation and isolation of Russia, which they find sanctimonious. The spiking inflation in the prices of energy and food probably mean that, after the massive build-up of pandemic related debt, many of these postcolonial nations are going to face simultaneous famine and debt-defaults by the end of the year, with likely resounding political consequences. The West, meanwhile, bootstrapping itself out of the embarrassing Afghanistan debacle of just half a year ago, and finding itself viscerally surprised about its own sudden unity, has accepted President Zelensky as the brave contemporary embodiment of its own historical ideals of liberty and freedom, so under siege lately by domestic ‘populism’. It has launched unprecedented financial punishment on Russia – deploying its continued exclusive control over financial circuits and values – and is seeking to isolate and cut down Russia for the long term by banning its oil and gas while claiming to speed up its own green transition. China, clearly, is far from ready to impose a Bismarckian moment (the Berlin conference of 1885 that carved up the world for colonialism) and seems willing to remain modestly supportive of the Russian side – indeed, Putin started his war directly after meeting privately with Xi. There is no doubt that the US is waging its proxy war also with an eye on teaching China what can happen if it does not abide by Western rules. Western Central Banks, meanwhile, faced with the highest inflation in four decades, revert to an earlier monetary normal, and are beginning to push up the interest rates, loosely talking about ‘a repeat of stagflation’ (a misplaced comparison with the 1970s), a possible ‘Volcker moment’, and a ‘necessary economic recession’. Global South and other big debtors are forewarned. Donald Trump is waiting rather quietly in the wings, as is Marine Le Pen, both (former?) admirers and clients of Vladimir Putin.

The palimpsest is utterly scary, full of actual and potential future violence, extremely volatile and dynamic, and full of powerful contradictions. We need to think, discover, describe, and analyze. On the ground and off the ground. New Times.

Don Kalb is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bergen, Editor at Large of Focaal Journal and FocaalBlog.

References

Sarotte, M.E. 2021. Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate. New Haven: Yale U.P

Cite as: Kalb, Don. 2022. ‟War: New Times.‟ FocaalBlog, 21 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/21/don-kalb-war-new-times/

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Antonio De Lauri: The idea of a clean and efficient war is a dangerous lie

April 18, 2022 Focaal Web Editor

The war in Ukraine resuscitated a certain dangerous fascination for war. Notions such as patriotism, democratic values, the right side of history, or a new fight for freedom are mobilized as imperatives for everyone to take a side in this war. It is not surprising then that a large number of so-called foreign fighters are willing to go to Ukraine to join one side or the other.

I met a few of them recently at the Poland-Ukraine border, where I was conducting interviews with a Norwegian film crew with soldiers and foreign fighters who were either entering or exiting the war zone. Some of them actually never got to fight or be “recruited” as they lack military experience or proper motivation. It’s a mixed group of people, some of whom have spent years in the military, while others only did military service. Some have family at home waiting for them; others, no home to go back to. Some have strong ideological motivations; others are just willing to shoot at something or someone. There is also a big group of former soldiers who transitioned towards humanitarian work.

As we were crossing the border to get into Ukraine, a former US soldier told me: “The reason why many retired or former soldiers moved to humanitarian work might easily be the need for excitement.” Once you leave the military, the closest activity that can take you to the “fun zone,” as another one said, referring to the war zone in Ukraine, is humanitarian work – or, in fact, a series of other businesses mushrooming in the proximity of war, including contractors and criminal activities.

A white person stands in front of a destroyed house, wearing a camo balaclava, green jacket, and ammo and gear vest with a gun strapped across one shoulder. A Ukrainian flag is displayed on the chest of the gear vest. — **Image 1:** Fighter of the Ukrainian 43rd Territorial Defense Battalion “Patriot”, photo by Алесь Усцінаў

“We are adrenaline junkies,” the former US soldier said, although he now only wants to help civilians, something he sees as “a part of my process of healing.” What many of the foreign fighters have in common is the need to find a purpose in life. But what does this say of our societies if, to search for a meaningful life, thousands are willing to go to war?

There is dominant propaganda that seems to suggest war can be conducted according to a set of acceptable, standardized and abstract rules. It puts forth an idea of a well-behaved war where only military targets are destroyed, force is not used in excess, and right and wrong are clearly defined. This rhetoric is used by governments and mass media propaganda (with the military industry celebrating) to make war more acceptable, even attractive, for the masses.

Whatever deviates from this idea of a proper and noble war is considered an exception. US soldiers torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib: an exception. German soldiers playing with a human skull in Afghanistan: an exception. The US soldier who went on a house-to-house rampage in an Afghan village, killing 16 civilians including several children with no reason: an exception. War crimes committed by Australian troops in Afghanistan: an exception. Iraqi prisoners tortured by British troops: an exception.

Similar stories are emerging in the current war in Ukraine too, even though mostly still “unconfirmed”. With the information war obfuscating the distinction between reality and fantasy, we don’t know if and when we will be able to verify videos such as one showing a Ukrainian soldier talking on the phone with the mom of a killed Russian soldier and making fun of her, or Ukrainian soldiers shooting prisoners to make them permanently injured, or news about Russian soldiers sexually assaulting women.

All exceptions? No. This is exactly what war is. Governments make big efforts to explain that these kinds of episodes don’t belong in war. They even pretend to be surprised when civilians are killed, even though systematically targeting civilians is a feature of all contemporary wars; for example, over 387,000 civilians were killed in the US post-9/11 wars alone, with more likely to die from those wars’ reverberating impacts.

The idea of a clean and efficient war is a lie. War is a chaotic universe of military strategies intertwined with inhumanity, violations, uncertainty, doubts, and deceit. In all combat zones emotions such as fear, shame, joy, excitement, surprise, anger, cruelty, and compassion co-exist.

We also know that whatever the real reasons for war, identifying the enemy is a crucial element of every call for conflict. In order to be able to kill – systematically – it is not enough to make fighters disregard the enemy, to despise him or her; it is also necessary to make them see in the foe an obstacle to a better future. For this reason, war consistently requires the transformation of a person’s identity from the status of an individual to a member of a defined, and hated enemy group.

If the only objective of war is the mere physical elimination of the enemy, then how do we explain why the torture and destruction of bodies both dead and alive is practiced with such ferocity on so many battlefields? Although in abstract terms such violence appears unimaginable, it becomes possible to visualize when the murdered or tortured are aligned with dehumanizing representations portraying them as usurpers, cowards, filthy, paltry, unfaithful, vile, disobedient – representations that travel fast in mainstream and social media. War violence is a dramatic attempt to transform, redefine and establish social boundaries; to affirm one’s own existence and deny that of the other. Therefore, the violence produced by war is not mere empirical fact, but also a form of social communication.

It follows that war cannot be simply described as the by-product of political decisions from above; it is also determined by participation and initiatives from below. This can take the form of extreme brutal violence or torture, but also as resistance to the logic of war. It is the case of the military personnel who object to being part of a specific war or mission: examples range from conscientious objection during wartime, to explicit positioning such as the case of the Fort Hood Three who refused to go to Vietnam considering that war “illegal, immoral, and unjust,” and the refusal of the Russian National Guard to go to Ukraine.

“War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves,” wrote Leo Tolstoy. But it’s like holding your breath underwater – you can’t do it for long, even if you are trained.

This text was originally published in Common Dreams.

Antonio De Lauri is a Research Professor at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, the Director of the Norwegian Centre for Humanitarian Studies, and a contributor to the Costs of War Project of the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. He received an ERC grant for a project on soldiering and warfare.

Cite as: De Lauri, Antonio. 2022. “The idea of a clean and efficient war is a dangerous lie.” FocaalBlog, 18 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/18/antonio-de-lauri-the-idea-of-a-clean-and-efficient-war-is-a-dangerous-lie

Blog, Features, War: New Times

Martin Fotta: Towards Anti-War Anthropology: On EASA, CEE and NATO

April 14, 2022 Focaal Web Editor

One of the casualties of Putin’s war on Ukraine will be European critical social science. While the war has instigated important discussions about ‘US-plaining’, ‘Westplaining’ and about Russian imperialism, we also see—so far in a clash of keyboards—a growing weaponization of scholarship. There are signs of growing censorship of those ideas that would not align neatly into friend-enemy dyads. In the fight against ‘misinformation’, diverging opinions are framed, often preventively, as problematic and even pejoratively as “pro-Kremlin.”

It is with this in mind that I revisit herein the campaign to amend the “EASA Statement on the Russian war against Ukraine”, published initially on 26 February 2022 and amended on 15 March 2022. The case reveals how not only mainstream media and big tech are changing what is permissible, but how militarism, securitisation, and warmongering is creeping into anthropologists’ language and analyses, at times insidiously as they usurp anti-hegemonic and decolonial positions to enhance their credibility. Where it will take us is hard to predict, but it might be worth looking into the amendments of the EASA statement to cast light on possible futures in social anthropology’s debates and in order to make a case for anthropology as an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, cosmopolitan and anti-war discipline.

EASA’s statement on the Russian war and the protest campaign to rewrite it

On the 26^th of February 2022, two days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EASA executive committee (EASA EC) published a statement ‘EASA Statement on the Russian war against Ukraine’. While in the context of atrocities its value is symbolic rather than practical, the EASA EC must be commended on the swiftness of their response and the clarity of their stance against the war and imperialism. The first two paragraphs of the statement are particularly strong:

The Executive Committee of the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) condemns the Russian government’s illegal and unprovokedmilitary invasion of Ukraine: an imperialist war that is leading to immeasurable suffering and losses for the Ukrainian people, whose dignity, well-being, and independence we wholeheartedly support.

As scholars we reject President Vladimir Putin’s distorted interpretations of Russian and Ukrainian history and the assault against and brutal denial of Ukraine’s sovereignty that they seek to justify. We see him as the main aggressor in the current situation that – as many anthropologists working in the post-socialist world have shown through their work – has its roots in both the Russian imperial ambitions and the NATO expansion into the Eastern European territory.

The last sentence has since been removed. The preamble to the new statement explains:

As the Ukraine war has worsened in all sorts of shocking ways, the Executive feels that our statement needs to be unequivocal in order to avoid ambiguity of any kind. A group of EASA members contacted us to say that there were some ambiguities in our initial statement and therefore we have amended it.

How did this change come about? On Friday, 11 March, almost two weeks after the statement had been published, a group of anthropologists from East Central Europe wrote an email to EASA EC demanding that what they saw as ‘controversial ideas’ in the statement be revoked. In the meantime, they also uploaded a petition to GoogleDocs and started gathering signatures. They explained in earlier versions of the petition that if EASA did not retract the wording by noon on Monday, 14^th March, they would feel ‘morally obliged’ to go public with the petition. As EASA EC changed the wording, the petition was never widely circulated.

Image 1: Screenshot from “EASA Statement on the Russian war against Ukraine” (April 11, 2022; source: https://www.easaonline.org/publications/support/ukraine0222)

The style of the protest itself is quite stunning as it features moralistic-conservative language (‘controversial ideas’), forces the executive committee to decide over a weekend, and in many ways resembles wartime Realpolitik (the initiators speak of ‘kind appeals’ but set conditionalities and prepare to escalate further, justifying such their steps with reference to morality). But it is the content of the protest that interests me here. As the authors of the petition explain:

While we fully agree that the war against Ukraine has roots in Russian imperial ambitions, we reject the suggestion that Russia’s armed aggression is caused by NATO expansion into the Eastern European territory. Such a statement would imply that sovereign countries of Eastern Europe do not have the right to join international alliances unless Russia approves, justifying Russia’s colonialist and imperialist claims over countries in Eastern Europe. As anthropologists, we understand Ukraine’s defensive actions as resistance against the reactionary empire and recognize the right of people of sovereign states to decide on membership in international alliances. The sentence [this refers to the final sentence in the EASA EC statement quoted above; M.F.] also contains a deeply troubling ambiguity—referring to Putin as “main aggressor” implies that there are more aggressors in this war than Putin and Russia, assigning the blame for the war against Ukraine (even asymmetrically) to another party.

Don’t mention the North-Atlantic Treaty Organisation

The “ambiguity” raised by the last point can be debated. On the other hand, most EASA members are not native speakers of English and thus there may always be ambiguity in written English statements from the organization. But I believe, it is clear from the statement condemning “Russian government’s illegal and unprovoked military invasion” in the opening sentence who is the aggressor.

It is, however, the arguments made in the first three sentences which are particularly striking. I ask the readers to take a look at the first two paragraphs of the original EASA statement quoted above again. How could a mention NATO’s role in the longer history preceding the invasion imply that sovereign countries do not have the right to join international alliances unless Russia approves? What logical somersault was performed here? Does the protesters’ problem with EASA EC’s statement lie in the word “roots”? Do the protesters read this as equivalent to “the cause”?

It is certainly not a marginal position to argue that Putin’s actions are framed in geopolitical terms (where the key agents are the US and China) and that the West has not really tried to “inscribe Russia in a more comprehensive security agreement and all of the bilateral and multilateral agreements”. It is also not a marginal position to point out that NATO policies have made Russia’s invasion more likely. Moreover, pronouncements about Ukrainian membership in NATO (or in the European Union) had been merely symbolic. Even countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) had never truly supported Ukraine’s membership until now (geopolitics, in other words), leaving it in a particularly vulnerable position. In no way, however, does acknowledging “the geopolitical confrontation between the US-led liberal “empire”, and the Russian imperialist project in East Europe” mean that Ukrainians are mere puppets without desires, hopes and agency, who should not freely express their will on which international alliances their country should enter, without a fear of becoming targets of military invasion.

Of course, most Ukrainians have no time and patience for such debates now—their country has been brutally attacked and the fight against the Russian invaders is all that matters to them. In this sense, it is good that the EASA EC removed the final sentence of the statement to avoid a social media storm that would have followed with the publication of the petition and which would have detracted from the statement’s overall message.

But let’s be clear here: there was no ambiguity in the original statement. The ambiguity was created by the initiators of the protest. Unless, of course, for anthropologists it is inconceivable that one can support the independence and sovereignty of Ukrainian people while seeing Russian tsarism and NATO enlargement as shaping the context of the invasion. But there is a danger that knee-jerk ascriptions of culpability and contests over the moral high ground will weaken our capability to take a critical view of ourselves, and to understand how our activities contribute to fascism and militarism.

NATO in CEE

The choice presented by the protest initiators is straightforward: if the EASA EC statement mentioned NATO as an actor shaping geopolitical contexts, it would go against Ukraine’s right of self-determination. This, to me, is a whitewashing of NATO. It is striking that it comes from anthropologists who must know that the pro-NATO position was never unequivocally embraced by Ukrainians. This is why, Volodymyr Arthiuk explains, “a silent majority” elected Zelensky who “promised to end the war, to not press issues of identity and language.” And while for reasons of bare survival under occupation, support for NATO membership, or at least for a closer cooperation, increased among Ukrainians in comparison with the pre-war period, these views will continue to be in flux and are regionally specific. As regards Ukrainians’ political opinions, one must also wonder what it will be in the future, given how NATO has failed to come to their defence.

Equating NATO membership unproblematically with popular sovereignty, with “the right of people of sovereign states to decide on membership in international alliances”, is even more disingenuous coming from CEE scholars, as in most CEE countries there were no referendums about NATO membership—there was no popular decision. And while in Poland or the Baltic countries, the majorities would have probably been in favour, even Václav Havel was against the referendum in Czechia, since the opinion polls were far from conclusive. In Slovakia, another country that I know well, barely 50% supported membership in 2003 when the country joined the alliance. Continued ambivalence of these two countries to NATO can be seen, for instance, in demonstrations against the installation of tracking radar and kinetic missiles in Czechia. Although politicians argued these would protect from attacks by rogue states, such as Iran, the public overwhelmingly (68%) rejected them. In Slovakia, just prior to the invasion, more people blamed NATO than Russia for the escalation of the tensions along Ukraine’s borders.

The petition was initiated by eight anthropologists – seven Polish and one Slovak (see ‘Protest initiators’). The petition now claims to speak for an “international anthropological community”, whereas the EASA website speaks of an initiative by “EASA members” that stimulated the change. Since the petition with signatures was never publicised, I must suppose that the executive committee decided to change the wording of the statement following the email from the protest initiators. A predominantly CEE character of the initiative is further reflected in the online social life of the petition: most of the signatures come from Poland, Slovakia and Czechia. And while a public campaign was stopped short by the EASA EC changing its statement, any momentum for obtaining a critical mass for the protest would have emerged from within this region.

In this way, the narrative of the protest echoes important discussions about the position of Central and East European anthropologists within the discipline, in which many signatories of the protest letter have been taking part actively. However, consider the irony it leads to: a group of CEE anthropologists led by former members of EASA EC end up defending NATO against EASA, which they imply is a Western hegemonic institution misunderstanding the region (even if it is currently presided over by a Bulgarian). Such positioning undoubtedly added to the pressure on the EASA EC, since it suggested that EASA’s statement was denying sovereignty to Ukrainians and to peoples of other “sovereign countries of Eastern Europe”, legitimising Russia’s imperialist claims.

We must be wary of such east-Europeanising re-alignments in the context of the prevalent view of Ukraine in many CEE countries as a failed state between Central Europe and Russia; the racialisation of Ukrainians as cheap and thus exploitable, also sexual, labour, but ‘white’ (good migrants and even refugees!). Likewise, it is important to critically reflect on the grading of Europeanness in the CEE public sphere, where NATO and EU membership have been constructed as its unambivalent symbols.

It would also be misleading to say that all CEE anthropologists found EASA’s original statement to be “the dangerous distortion” that the protesters saw it to be. Many disagreed, or would have disagreed, if they had been aware of the protest, and if not with the content of the protest, then with its tone. Indeed, there was a lively discussion on the mailing list of the Czech Association for Social Anthropology (CASA), with voices pro and contra. In the end, only a few members signed the petition. Of course, some were probably waiting for EASA EC’s response, while others might have thought this whole thing ridiculous, since, as one member put it, and I paraphrase, “Ukrainians need guns, not statements.” In any case, it shows that the options presented by the protest initiators as clearcut were not wholeheartedly embraced by all.

The need for anti-militarism

Let’s be honest here. Rather than an argument about popular sovereignty, the initiators’ position is a pro-NATO one. It presents a false dichotomy: if one is against Putin, one cannot be against NATO. To be sure, I understand where this position comes from. The feeling among many people in CEE, including my parents, confirmed by the invasion, can be summarised in the following way: only NATO membership protects our countries from becoming prey to Russia’s tsarist ambitions; it is therefore only NATO that enables people in member states to be safe and, by extension, CEE anthropologists to pursue our careers.

Certainly, such an argument is counterfactual, as the world where CEE countries would not be NATO members would be a different world. Precisely because any line of argument about the absence of NATO membership must remain counterfactual it invokes both fears and desires, and in its operation must reproduce legitimising narratives. These are things anthropologists should be mindful of. The argument is also problematic as it separates NATO’s past interventions and invasions from its role as a defensive alliance through which smaller states can protect themselves against an imperialist next door. Violence elsewhere (e.g., Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Libya, and with Turkey as a NATO members conducting a war against the Kurdish population within its borders and in Syria) and often against a threat of “tribal” or racialised “savagery” (Pierre 2013: 548) are treated in isolation from peace and European values at home. This compartmentalization is understandable in the context of Russian imperialist warfare, but it leads to simplistic listing of pros (NATO as a national-level ally against Russian colonialism) and cons (continued militarisation internationally; ‘humanitarian interventions’), which is a sophisticated approach to neither the history of imperialism nor to a critical anthropology of military alliances. As anthropologists, we must resist such a compartmentalization. Our discipline must be anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, cosmopolitan and anti-war, even though it is always practised from a specific locale, such as CEE. We must reject simplistic Manichaeism, labour against provincialism, and reject seeing anthropologists as Putin’s apologists, just because they are critical of NATO and of their own countries’ role in it.

Furthermore, the above line of argument promises only war; it extends Russia as a threat into the past with only war and crisis on the horizon. One must wonder how such “truths” (constructed through the piling up of historical analogies, which are now in vogue) skew anthropological sensibility, especially in and about Central and Eastern Europe. Gregory Bateson (2000: 265), among others, showed how our truths, premises and habits of thought recursively reinforce our understanding of the world and of ourselves, which leads further to the petrification of these truths.Against the real threat of securitisation in European anthropology, I suggest we promote an anti-war anthropology, a part of a broader anti-war movement. To break the militarist habit of thought we should become apprehensive of how militarism and militarisation shape research topics and field sites (Gusterson 2007).

We should also proceed as if we knew that the forever war (as a problematic, not static ontology) was the ground on which we stand and from which we speak as anthropologists. This task is more urgent now when countries are increasing their military spending or when some argue for the need to destroy Russia in a long-term war, with the suffering borne by Ukrainians. We might find inspiration in abolitionist anthropology and rethink European anthropology as a speculative analysis that not only critiques the existing order, but in a move of counter-war imagination, reimagines and—through collective practical effort—reinvents the possible, “past the ruins of the world (and the discipline) as we know it” (Shange 2019: 10).

Two final comments

The fact that Putin clearly broke international law and the Russian army has been committing war crimes should not make us blind to the fact that the war has been going on in Ukraine for eight years preceding the invasion. As anthropologists we must recognise the complexity of that situation. This does not make us Putin’s apologists. In fact, the real problem from the point of view of the discipline is the way European anthropology chooses which ‘events’ it notices: while we have had discussions on Brexit and COVID (e.g., dossiers in Social Anthropology and two series of articles on FocaalBlog), the war in eastern Ukraine—with 14,000 casualties between 2014 and 2021—was never the focus of critical discussion (e.g., no dossier or EASA-sponsored roundtable, not even by the protest initiators).

Turning to the internal politics of EASA, it is important to note that many members would want the association to function as a learned society that abstains from activism and politics. For them, EASA’s past activities related to HAU, precarity, and possibly also the open letters published by the current EASA EC signify an unwelcome ideological move to the left. It is ultimately EASA members who will decide on this in the future elections. I, personally, am proud to be a part of an association that published such a strong anti-war statement on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Organising biannual conferences, publishing a journal or facilitating various topical networks is not enough.

Martin Fotta is a researcher at the Institute of Ethnology, Czech Academy of Sciences. His current research focuses on the Romani diaspora across the Lusophone South Atlantic region.

References

Bateson, Gregory. 2000. Steps to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution, and epistemology. University of Chicago Press.

Gusterson, Hugh. 2007. “Anthropology and militarism.” Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 36: 155-175.

Pierre, Jemima. 2013. “Race in Africa today: a commentary.” Cultural Anthropology 28.3: 547-551.

Shange, Savannah. 2019. Progressive Dystopia. Duke University Press.

Cite as: Fotta, Martin. 2022. “Towards Anti-War Anthropology: On EASA, CEE and NATO.” FocaalBlog, 14 April. https://www.focaalblog.com/2022/04/14/martin-fotta-towards-anti-war-anthropology-on-easa-cee-and-nato/

Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology

Tag Archives: Ukraine

Anna Balazs: War, displacement, and cultural heritage: reflections on a workshop

Chris Hann: Humiliation, Hubris and Hamartia: the emotional history of the Ukraine war

Mihai Varga: Crisis-tested, yet forgotten: Family farms in wartime Ukraine

Focaalblog: New Times? Confronting the Escalating Crises of Global Capitalism

Céline Cantat: The reception spectacle: on Ukrainian displacement and selective empathy at Europe’s borders

Denys Gorbach: Ukrainian identity map in wartime: Thesis-antithesis-synthesis?

Volodymyr Artiukh: The political logic of Russia’s imperialism

Don Kalb: War: New Times

Antonio De Lauri: The idea of a clean and efficient war is a dangerous lie

Martin Fotta: Towards Anti-War Anthropology: On EASA, CEE and NATO

EASA’s statement on the Russian war and the protest campaign to rewrite it

Don’t mention the North-Atlantic Treaty Organisation

NATO in CEE

The need for anti-militarism

Two final comments

Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology