This short article attempts to analyze the war in Ukraine as the first war of the Anthropocene. Political discussions and media coverage of military conflicts tend to always go beyond literal, strategic or battlefield questions, to issues of existential significance. Wars are thus always discursively framed in the context of the fears and concerns of their time. In International Relations, military conflict (Ukraine as the ‘last war of the twentieth century’) and imaginations of the Anthropocene (as a ‘post-human’ political aesthetic) have been largely treated separately, as if war were somehow ‘modernist’ and the Anthropocene ‘postmodern’. Two subjects, two temporalities, two methodological frameworks, two different scientific communities. However, if the Anthropocene is the contemporary condition we find ourselves in, and not an organizational and policy issue of addressing climate change, then we should be able to see how the loss of faith in liberal modernity and its affirmative ideas about progress is taking place in the fight against climate change. this, just like in any other policy area.
In fact, the war in Ukraine seems like a perfect case study of the Anthropocene. At the strategic level, little seems to be happening at the moment, with the war territorially deadlocked and the Ukrainian summer counter-offensive having made little progress against Russian minefield defenses. At the international level, however, Ukraine appears to be gaining more and more diplomatic weight, along with high-level declarations of political support and promises of more military equipment.
Recently, the European Union has risked its own political unity by increasing aid to Ukraine, forcing Poland, Hungary and Slovakia to accept Ukrainian grain exports, which threaten their own domestic economies. US President Joe Biden pledged to supply Ukraine with long-range tactical missile systems (ATACMS), expanding the possible range of missiles that can be used on Russian territory. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told Canada’s parliament that Canada will provide an additional $650 million ($482 million) in military aid to Ukraine over the next three years. There appears to be a disconnect between the international expressions of support for Ukraine, echoing from virtually every presidential and prime ministerial office in the West, and the meaningful progress on the battlefield.
What is to be gained from approaching the war in Ukraine from an Anthropocene approach? Perhaps the first benefit is to move beyond the bond between realism and liberalism that holds back much contemporary thinking in this field. Where the critics of support for Ukraine are the Realpolitik In their argument, proponents of support for Ukraine, seeing the West as a ‘proxy war’ against Russia, argue that it is a war for liberal-democratic values and universal freedom. This dominant framing divides our understanding through the binary structure of realist ‘interests’ and liberal ‘values’. An Anthropocene approach does not pit interests against values in this way, because both values already exist and the issue is a matter of choice between them. Instead, it could take the crisis of modernist frameworks as its starting point; how fragile conceptions of ‘interests’ and ‘values’ are themselves reconstructed and contested by the conflict.
Perhaps the war in Ukraine could be analyzed in much the same way as the more obvious “Anthropocene” discourses, such as James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar where destructive conflicts play out between colonial humans on an exhausted Earth and the Na’vi, blue-skinned humanoids who live in harmony with nature on the planet Pandora. The film is about Jake’s human journey from a destructive colonial form of extractivism to a renewed appreciation for the importance of living together with other beings who share our environment. It is through engagement with the indigenous Na’vi that people (and the film’s audience) can potentially be transformed for the better. In Avatar, engagement with the indigenous, non-Western Other allows ‘values’ to overcome ‘interests’, but the key point is that these are values that have already been lost under the acquisitive, extractive forms of Western being. In the Anthropocene, the Na’vi are needed both to realize the magnitude of this loss and to overcome it, indeed, to reclaim the “reality” of what it means to be human.
You could argue that Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky plays exactly the same role for the West. His apparently naive desire for democracy, freedom and the market and to be included in all available Western institutions reminds Western leaders of what they have lost. Zelensky is seen to express ‘real’ European or Western values and desires, as opposed to the real values and desires, which have been discredited by neoliberalism, deep-seated inequalities and racial exclusions. As one commentator puts it: ‘Quoting principle after moral principle, Zelensky has appealed to parliaments, leaders and peoples across the West to help his country by giving them the hard power tools they need to fight – and win . He encouraged people and politicians to relive the heroic moments of their history and confronted them with examples of when they failed to live up to their ideals.”
Like the indigenous Na’vi, Zelenskiy and the Ukrainian struggle itself are cinematically seen as an affirmative vision of the future at a time when Western and European political institutions appear to have been largely discredited. By intervening to save Ukraine, we are not saving ourselves, in a realistic or interest-based understanding, but something quite different: we are saving our future selves by becoming better, more realistic, or more true to our ‘values’ and our ‘interests ‘. If the Anthropocene is about canceling the future, then the war in Ukraine is discursively framed in contrast; the war can, in the words of Ukraine lawyer Ben Tallis, be seen as “undoing the future.”
I would like to conclude with a reflection on what is at stake if we consider the war in Ukraine as the first war of the Anthropocene—the first war discursively framed with the aim of “unmaking the future.” Another way to say this is to ask, “What would you sacrifice to undo the future?” or, to steal Claire Colebrook’s expression: ‘Who would you kill to save the world?’. The problem with saving our future selves by saving Ukraine is that it is a discourse of rejection. A denial of a Western or European factual past and actual present. The rescue of liberal, Western, modernist and European ‘values’ can only come at the cost of understanding the real reality of the colonial, extractivist and racial reasoning that underlies them.
When thinking about “undoing the future,” learning lessons from the past, or becoming truer to our “real selves,” as Elizabeth Povinelli notes, it is critical to “understand the function of the horizon and to remember the limit in liberalism as a mechanism of denial’. The war over Ukraine is one of denial, a war through which it is hoped that the ‘idea’ of modernity, the idea of ’Europe’ and the idea of ’values’ can hide their rather poor reality.
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