Anthropological Perspectives on the War in Ukraine
On February 24th Russia shocked the world by launching a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. As bombs fell on Ukrainian towns and sleeping districts, and Russian troops moved in, leaving in their wake a towering wave of refugees, many external observers have tried to make sense of the war’s causes, implications, and possible outcomes. A popular explanation points to competing imperialisms, which though important, threatens to recenter the West, while downplaying complex regional histories and erasing local agency. Meanwhile, members of various global publics began asking why this war deserves so much attention, when earlier invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and ongoing wars in Syria, Yemen and Libya either never figured as news stories or slowly faded from view. Similar contrasts have been drawn regarding the outpouring of humanitarian support for Ukrainian refugees compared to the violent and racialized policing of Fortress Europe during the prior and ongoing global refugee crisis.
This panel brings together a group of leading and emerging anthropologists who work in Ukraine and Russia to problematize and push past external frames for thinking about this war and explore the deeper historical and political context within which these events are unfolding. As anthropologists, we come together to demonstrate the crucial importance of grounded, ethnographic understanding of the cultural terrain that gives this particular conflict shape, without losing sight of the banality of wartime violence that grips many other parts of the globe.
As a collective, relying on our knowledge and expertise, we will attempt to answer the question of what is happening, and why it matters, even as some of us are rendered speechless and others are in a war zone.