2023/07/21 by Ian Klinke · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #African studies and sociopolitical issues
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/tran.12628
openalex publication_date 2023/07/21 · openalex created_date 2023/07/23 · openalex updated_date 2025/12/21
A few months have passed since I wrote my initial commentary. The Russian spring offensive has failed and the papers are now reporting that a Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun, this time using donated NATO tanks. Social media is awash with footage of destroyed military equipment and flag planting, but the movement of the frontline is often measured in metres rather than kilometres. A decisive victory for either side does not seem imminent. It is against this backdrop of prolonged crisis that I take the opportunity to thank my three interlocutors, all of whom have helped me expand my understanding of the war and clarify my position. Let me begin by responding to Luiza Bialasiewicz (Bialasiewicz, 2023), who rightly highlights the explosion of crude geopolitical reasoning in and around the European Union's institutions since late February 2022. A geopolitical EU had of course been in the making. But current events do signal both an escalation of that trend and a return to the political landscape of the early 2000s. For however much Kyiv's European and North American supporters, be they political leaders or intellectuals, try to convince us otherwise, they have travelled at least some of the way on that perilous road built by neoconservatism a good 20 years ago and which was itself always a continuation of the Cold War by other means. Bialasiewicz is right to note that a Republican victory in the 2024 US presidential elections and swing to a paleoconservative foreign policy might intervene decisively into the war. But whether the European anti-Putin coalition is as fragile as she claims is yet to be seen. A look at the European far right, which one might expect to harness the forces of discontent, reveals the following: Poland's Law and Justice party (PiS) and Spain's Vox have both held assertive positions towards Putin's Russia, as has Italy's governing post-fascist Fratelli d'Italia. The British Tory Party, which has moved so far to the right that it has effectively annihilated the electoral chances of other hyper-nationalist parties, stands firmly behind the Ukrainian war effort. As the war has slowly but surely retreated from the headlines, any mobilisation of war wariness would depend on the electorate continuing to see the cost-of-living crisis as a consequence of NATO's war effort. But there seems to be no evidence, for instance, that Poland's drastic increase of defence spending to five per cent(!) of GDP has dampened the country's resolve vis-à-vis Russia (Karnitschnig & Kość, 2022). A split is now perhaps more likely to arise from an unsuccessful Ukrainian counter-offensive, which brings home the message that even NATO's advanced military technology does not allow for a decisive breakthrough. For the time being however, Putin's war seems to have reforged ‘the West’ both as an agent in world politics and as a category of civilisational identification. Vera Smirnova (Smirnova, 2023) offers much to complicate how we might think about Russian territorial politics by highlighting the most important tensions that run through territorial discourses and practices. The fact that Eurasianism itself has a decolonial history was new to me and introduces another fascinating twist in the story, even if Smirnova rightly diverts our attention away from this Western ‘darling’. But I remain as yet unconvinced that the ‘decolonisation of Russia’ can be modelled on the decolonisation of academic knowledges elsewhere. I am not arguing that Russians should not engage in the kind of debates that some settler colonial societies have begun to have. My point is rather that decolonisation in the West is largely a counter-hegemonic project. While some African dictatorships have promoted symbolic decolonisation as part of their ruling ideology (Masakure & Nkomo, 2023), the governments of former European empires continue to suppress their colonial histories. When the call to decolonise Russia is uttered in the West, where the crimes of Russian and Soviet imperialism are well understood and where the call is effectively backed up by HIMARS and Leopards, it has a rather more hegemonic ring to it. In short, I suspect that we are, as I think Smirnova accepts, dealing with a number of quite different political projects here. Finally then, a few words on Nick Megoran's (Megoran, 2023) contribution. I agree with him on the perils of ontologising Russian imperialism and believe he is right to query the chronology of events. But the question is not whether the world looks different from the vantage point of a consumer of Russian state TV (we already know it does). It is rather to what degree the Kremlin's storyline on NATO expansion is correct and to what extent the fact that some of it might be correct matters. I do not doubt that the Russian political elite have believed NATO (and EU) enlargement to constitute some kind of threat, though that in itself does not say all that much about what threat it really posed. One also has to read this question alongside that of whether Russia's elite were ever fully prepared to respect Ukrainian sovereignty, even before the rise of Putin (Nilsson, 2010). We might debate, moreover, how much importance we should attach to Russia's ‘pro-Western’ moment in the early 2000s and how much room to manoeuvre Ukraine really had left in the run-up to the 2022 invasion. Clearly, Washington and Kyiv could and should have renounced any ambition for a Ukrainian NATO membership – but it is unclear whether that would have prevented the invasion. It should be remembered that the Kremlin has provided a number of further reasons for its ‘special military operation’, including ‘denazification’ and the reclaiming of historic lands. So even by Russia's own standards, NATO enlargement is hardly the whole story. I also note that Megoran explicitly reproduces slogans from Stop the War Coalition, the UK's erstwhile leading anti-war campaigner. But much like Stop the War, Megoran seems keen to ignore what has happened since February 2022. The point of starting my commentary with fascism, genocide and urbicide (I do not cite Snyder ‘approvingly’ by the way) was to lay out the terrain on which a pacifist case, Christian or otherwise, must now be made, regardless of whether one agrees with each of these charges. Megoran sounds like he is on the defensive when he tells us that he abhors the invasion, but he does not really update his position. Yes, grassroots pacifism had an important role to play in the Cold War and again as a critique of various US-led invasions. Pacifists still make critical contributions to the debate on nuclear armament. But Stop the War had lost its way long before Russian tanks crossed the border in 2022. Having acquired a reputation for being soft on dictators, including Syria's Bashar al-Assad, its rallies now attract a fraction of the crowds they drew 20 years ago. Its position amounts to what some Russian socialists have referred to as ‘false pacifism’ (Russian Socialist Movement, 2023), a grasp for yesterday's moral certainties and an often-reflexive embrace of the West's enemies which confuses the desired outcome (peace) with the next move to achieve that outcome. I do hope that geographers can avoid such pre-formulated positions without succumbing to a mindless liberal militarism. They certainly do not need to be afraid of ambivalence. The authors have nothing to report. I have no conflict of interest. There is no data set associated with this article.