Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 promises to be among the critical events moving the end of this epoch in which we live. It has manifestly disrupted, and destroyed, the lives of so many Ukrainians and brought Russians into a criminal assault for which many, including they themselves, must wonder about their culpability. Too many ordinary Germans waited to consider their responsibility until (long) after their Nazi regime fell. Russians should not wait.
This war also follows on the heels of COVID-19 disruptions, and the ever-worsening global climate disaster, all of which, in combination, exacerbate inequalities and magnify risks of multiple waves of catastrophe across the world.
We are all also at risk of thinking about this war through our own preferred lenses, whether shaped by our passports, our familiar solidarities, or our intellectual and political dispositions. But it’s worth considering such globally consequential developments from within the cultural politics of the event itself—a position from which one can better explore its unexpected consequences. Ukrainian voices have been centered, albeit not to the degree one might wish. These frames from within the war might also lead us to rethink our assumptions about the war, what has led to it, and what it means for global social change.
This paper is a knowledge cultural sociology—one that engages expertise about this war to rethink domains not only within it, but also at an apparent distance from its most immediate effects. One must therefore begin by asking whose expertise matters.
Whose War Narrative?
During a September 2022 conference in Kraków, Poland, I looked forward to hearing fellow American Jeffrey D. Sachs Zoom in to talk about the conference themes of COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine. Most there were astonished to hear him declare that Ukrainians, and their American backers, were at fault for failing to compromise with Russians who, he declared, more than once sought to negotiate an end to this war. Without such compromise, Sachs feared a global catastrophe. Not only for the Ukrainians in the room, but also for the majority who were Polish and for the livestream audience, this was so blasphemous that it moved conference organizer Marcin Kędzierski to write a public rebuttal almost immediately.
For Ukrainians, of course, things could get worse, and after six months (login required) of the Russian invasion, the costs were already calamitous. We don’t know how many Ukrainians have been killed, tortured (login required), and raped. As lands are liberated, not only Ukrainian but also global publics shudder at the brutality. Beyond lives, what—should this war end—will be the costs of repairing infrastructures enabling other lives? More, can we even begin to wonder what kinds of biophysical environmental damage have been wrought, even before we worry about whether nuclear reactors could be destroyed?
And what of the costs to health, to families, to social life, of being displaced? With more than seven million Ukrainians displaced from their nation in October 2022, a similar number internally displaced, and more than two million in Russia—many of whom were abducted, some of whom are children (login required) how do we measure the costs of this war? What effect does it have on Ukrainians knowing that one’s invader seeks to eliminate one’s nation, to the extent that global actors debate whether this is genocide?
For those who live at a distance from this catastrophe, the more immediate concern may be about the war’s escalation. What I have called the #EscalationDebate on Twitter has raged across the world. Some argue that, above all, we should be concerned to avoid provoking Putin and his supporters from using weapons of mass destruction. This knowledge culture is also deeply embedded in US security practice and helps to explain US caution in sharing military technologies with Ukraine earlier in this invasion.
Ukrainians, including sociologists, challenge this kind of argument frequently. Mychailo Wynnyckyj, whose work on the transformations of 2013–14 and Russia’s 2014 invasion of Ukraine I have celebrated, wrote on March 18, 2022, that the only peace that might be realized is one realized through Ukrainian victory. His suggested scenario has proved to be more realistic than those offered by the many global authorities with expertise on the politics of escalation.
Proffering likelihoods of nuclear war does rest on expertise, but this contest has so many variables that we can’t know whose estimates are right. We can see, however, that military experts have already been chastened by underestimating Ukraine’s capacity not only to resist, but to liberate occupied lands (login required) in this war.
Particular forms of expertise are, of course, critical in this war. Sharing both weapons and US intelligence (login required) with Ukrainian forces has been vital to counteroffensives that have resulted in the liberation of lands around Kharkiv and Kherson. But underlying this question of knowledgeability is also a question of how to balance solidarity and fear. And whether this is a war worth fighting in. That question relies on a different kind of knowledge cultural authority.
Centering This War
For those with roots or expertise elsewhere, this war’s consequences could appear relatively slight. For those who have focused on those displaced from years, if not decades, of war and violence—from Syria and Afghanistan to Venezuela, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Myanmar, and elsewhere—the displacement of Ukrainians could be considered as one calamity among others. The speed with which it has happened is remarkable, but that it took place within Europe also matters.
Even as support for Ukrainian refugees has been extraordinary in Poland and other recipient communities, colleagues focused elsewhere, or on migrant flows more generally, can offer more critical comparisons. Indeed, we should ask why Ukrainians have received more support than Syrians and Afghans across Europe, and why Poles across the political spectrum welcome them in ways that the United States does not welcome migrants at its southern border. Race certainly figures, but one must also consider that Ukrainians are fighting a war that its proximate nations may also have to fight if Ukrainians lose.
Another one of the reasons Ukrainian refugees are receiving more support may be because Europeans thought they were done with wars fought on its continent. That recurring fantasy is based on biases rooted in both geopolitics and in scholarship. As to the latter, model cases in sociology are shaped by familiarities made by academic traditions and regional hegemonies. In Globalizing Knowledge (Stanford University Press 2014), I explain why Poland is relatively important in the American sociological imagination and Ukraine not; in my book Cultural Formations of Postcommunism: Emancipation, Transition, Nation, and War (University of Minnesota Press 2002), I explain how sociologists focused on transition culture in Poland, Hungary, and Czechia, but decided the Wars of Yugoslav Succession were not relevant to figuring those movements from plan to market and from dictatorship to democracy.
One might imagine that an event such as Russia’s 2022 invasion is so momentous that it can’t be easily overlooked. We however know that ignorance can be manufactured even when injustice seems grossly evident. We also know that attention must be produced to garner broader sociological awareness as well as global public engagement. One can certainly appreciate that production happening now around this war on Ukraine.
Consider three reasons why people are paying particular attention to the war in Ukraine beyond the immediate catastrophes as such. First, this is not only a kinetic war but also an information war. Ukrainians and their allies—most notably in Washington, D.C.—declare this a struggle to defend both a rules-based international order and an alliance of democracies against an authoritarian axis. Scholars can and should debate this simple association. Regardless of that debate, the fate of Ukraine will shape the cultural political contest over democracy’s meaning, and not just for how geopolitical intellectuals mobilize the concept.
Consider, for example, how meticulously Ukrainians are documenting war crimes in order to press charges against Russian assailants. Evidence and reason vs. fantasies and disinformation are thus also at war in this contest. Russia justifying its invasion of Ukraine with claims to de-Nazify its leadership is rooted in gross deception; even the Azov Regiment—that military force in Mariupol surviving a nearly three-month-long siege at the Azov steel plant—is not the far-right political force some Westerners too often assume. Both sociologists and activists interested in democracy and truthfulness should center Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in both their theory and practice.
Second, the war has the potential to alter global transformations with different frames of reference For those concerned with moving away from carbon economies, the forced transition (login required) away from Russian energy dependence in Europe could hasten a greener economy, even if in the shorter run Russia’s energy war moves coal back into the European bin of energy sources. And while the global famine has its principal causes in droughts and wars elsewhere, the Russian invasion’s destruction of Ukrainian food production and transport has motivated real concern. African leaders, long caught between the West and its Russian and Chinese rivals, are diplomatically noting that this war is harming Africans too.
Finally, as decolonizing sociology and other knowledge cultures take stronger root, Russia’s invasion has become increasingly marked as a colonial enterprise. While scholars of the region, and Ukrainians themselves, have long identified Russian imperialism as the impetus of its Ukrainian engagements, a broader postcolonial recognition might make room for recognizing interimperial relations, in both their transoceanic and contiguous expressions. To recognize the US empire, for example, does not mean one must ignore Russian imperialism, common as that is.
Rearticulations in Transformational Solidarity
Stuart Hall has moved many, me included, to think about social change in terms of articulations. I also favor thinking about rearticulations, in particular those practices intentionally refiguring cultures of critical discourse around social transformations so as to produce more inclusive, and consequential, cultural foundations for transformational solidarity. This Russian invasion of Ukraine not only invites, but mandates, just that. The easiest path of solidarity is to follow those already laid down in previous ideological constellations and abiding geopolitical alliances. But that is not enough.
It is difficult, for example, for those long accustomed to marking US militarism’s disastrous effects on the world to find value in providing ever more war technologies to Ukraine. On the other hand, while he has begun to question notions of “just war,” Pope Francis has also called the delivery of weapons to Ukraine part of a just defense against Russia’s assault. I struggle too, but it is an issue with which it is worth engaging, not only for matters of solidarity with Ukraine, but also for how weapons manufacturers are gaining influence over defining global futures.
It is also difficult to rethink what Global South means when Russia is counted in that category. It is a member of a group called BRICS, at one time considered at least counterhegemonic if not also emancipatory. However, when Russia invades its neighbor, and another member of BRICS—namely China—inspired by the Russian example, threatens to invade a democratic, and self-governing, territory—namely Taiwan—we can hardly see the counterhegemonic as emancipatory too. Some have argued that the contest over Ukraine provides an opportunity to strengthen the Global South’s distinction from the G-7, but others find the actual and threatened aggression against sovereign and democratic countries an opportunity for solidarity and reconstructing sociology’s sense of the world. Regardless of one’s political position, this is a good opportunity to refigure the qualities of empire and violence when its previous expressions hardly seem adequate for interpreting the trajectories of Taiwan and Ukraine together.
Of course, there are many more ways to imagine how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ought to move us to rethink alternative futures and global solidarities. But, in order for us to do that work, we also have to rethink what that invasion means, and rearticulate its implication in our public and scholarly imaginaries. One of the most productive comes from Ukraine itself.
Ukrainians have been refiguring their sense of Russianness—both within Ukraine and beyond its borders—especially since Russia’s 2014 invasion. But the conventional schema organizing the world’s critical and public sociologies are too polysemous to convey the particular sense of deceit, injustice, and criminality Russia’s invasion bears. There is an alternative to imposing our own language on the emancipatory cultures defined from within struggles.
The multilingual portmanteau рашизм, or “rashism,” is a combination of “Russia” and “fascism” that in the form “rashist” also evokes in English the term “racist.” Originating in 1995 during the First Chechen War, the term has since become especially powerful within the cultural politics accounting for Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. In the English-speaking world, Timothy Snyder (login required) has done much to increase public recognition of the word.
While the term has been in circulation for nearly three decades, it’s about time it also figures as part of our discipline’s lexicon, so that we might better recognize and explain the axes of injustice defining this twenty-first century.
Russia’s рашизм and its invasion of Ukraine not only contribute to a sense of epoch end, but critical engagement with this concept also might help us to refashion a global sociology seeking justice.
The author would like to thank Juho Korhonen, Ming-Cheng Lo, and Karis Ma Jia Ning for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.
Any opinions expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the author and not the American Sociological Association.
