My recent E-Flux article, “Russia, Decolonization, and the Capitalism-Democracy Muddle,” raised the question of Russia’s potential “decolonization” — what it means (and doesn’t), and how the debate over it, and over decolonization in general, needs some political updating. The article seems no less relevant after the abortive mutiny led last week by the Wagner Group’s Yevgeny Prigozhin (which I wrote a little about here).
That Russia, like all colonial empires, will need to “decompose” itself, is something I take for granted. (My other blog has plenty of resources for you if you’re not convinced that Russia is an “unreconstructed” Euro-colonial empire.) The only question is how: whether by some kind of “guided transition” (which has been tried before, in the 1990s, but on a misguided basis), a replacement or even collapse at the top accompanied by a strengthening at the parliamentary level (leading perhaps to actual, rather than fake, federalism), or through some sort of implosion or fission, accompanied by civil war(s), as seemed quite possible last weekend.
What that article didn’t address is the eco-political and “ecocidal” dimensions of the Russo-Ukrainian war. Those were a subject broached at a conference I spoke at a couple of days ago, held in Tutzing, Germany, and organized by Germany’s Federal Agency for Civic Education. The following is a brief summary of the comments I made there, followed by a few afterthoughts on ecocide in light of the Russian detonation of the Nova Kakhovka dam in southern Ukraine.
The climate crisis, the colonial-capitalocene, and ecocultural trauma
My current work on Ukraine, connected to the Fulbright research I’ve been doing in Berlin this year, begins from a set of premises I take from what I consider to be the “decolonial political-ecology” wing of the environmental humanities and social sciences.
The first premise is that the Anthropocene crisis — that is, global climate change and its associated challenges (of energy transition, migration crises, political destabilization, resource conflicts, and media/informational warfare) — is the culmination of the global spread of colonial and extractive-capitalist regimes over the last five centuries or so. The “resourcification” of the world (of land, of physical and biological systems, of people, of finance, and most recently even of online behavior), within these regimes, has led to a tremendous (over-)production of goods without regard for their capacity to be absorbed by living systems.
The second premise is that the benefits of this spread, for some people, nations, and social classes, have been accompanied by a “shadow side,” or “underside,” borne primarily by others. This underside has been marked by cultural disruption, dispossession and dislocation, enslavement (in some places), outright genocide (in some cases), forced assimilation, proletarianization, and other forms of victimization and “externalization.” (By the latter I mean the kind of euphemistic “externalities” economists refer to, by which they mean the offloading of costs onto others and onto future generations.)
The third premise is that the latter have been undergirded, on some level, by ecocultural trauma — that is, by the loss of existential groundedness in the kinds of kinship networks and territorial filiations that have always constituted an “ecocultural ‘good life’,” a life in which people lived in relative harmony over time with the world around them. While the “good life” has always been somewhat elusive, colonial-capitalist disruption has been so widespread as to constitute a kind of “universal underside” of modernity. Where some people(s) have experienced it over multiple generations, others are only coming to realize it now, either as a potentiality (as in so-called “climate related pre-traumatic stress syndrome“) or as a reality arising from the actual impacts of climate change or climate-related resource conflicts.
Finally, because these “colonial-capitalocene conditions” are global, any major conflict today will likely be marked by the characteristics of this crisis or predicament.
Russia, Ukraine, and the colonial-capitalocene
The war in Ukraine is not unique, but it’s as good an example as any for testing out how these premises are reflected globally. Let’s look at the two sides of the conflict.
Russia today is a petrostate aiming to be a hydrocarbon superpower. Its global status relies on the continued resourcification of its fossil fuels, and on an inherited nuclear arsenal. The former (the value of fossil fuels) is poised to decline as the world transitions to a different energy regime — thus the pressure to do something to consolidate Putinist rule (and wars are always good for that, as George W. Bush knew).
Russia is also an unreconstructed Euro-colonial state — in some ways the last of such states — whose expansion to the east, north, and south involved the genocide of indigenous populations and the spread and consolidation of an autocratic form of extractivist governance across the largest (remaining) state expanse in the world. Russia’s imperialism has been different from that of western maritime powers in being primarily land-based, but it has largely been a form of “adjacent” settler-colonialism. It is also remarkable in that it that hasn’t had to face decolonization movements as most other European colonial powers have.
Ukraine’s role within Russian colonial-imperialism has been ambiguous — in Soviet times it was more core than periphery. But the long history of subalternization is undeniable: from Russian historians’ relegation of Ukraine to Russians’ own past (which every Russian studies “expert” mimics to this day), to imperial Russia’s banning of the Ukrainian language and of Ukrainian cultural organizations in the late 1800s, the Stalinist decimation of the intelligentsia and of peasant resistance in the 1930s (a kind of bi-level genocide), continuing Russification through the late Soviet period, and the massive resourcification of its rural land base — including collectivization and agro-industrialization, intensive development of mining in the Donbas and Kryvbas regions, the damming of rivers (including the Dnipro and the flooding of massive steppe wetlands in the building of dams like Nova Kakhovka), and much more. The ecocultural trauma experienced through all of that, topped off by the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986, is undeniable.
If decolonization consists of national self-determination on a political level accompanied by some measure of revitalization (of language and culture) on a cultural level, then the last four decades have been a tug of war between decolonization and recolonization/neo-colonization processes.
Decolonial politics contributed deeply to the Ukrainian independence movement of the late 1980s (with its eco-nationalist flavor), and to language policies and the turn to the West more recently. Ukraine’s oligarchic-capitalist quasi-democracy has, meanwhile, served as a form of neo-colonialism, both Russian and western in its origins and influences. Russia’s effort to recolonize “on the ground” began in earnest with the takeover of Crimea in 2014.
But while the war has been awful, Ukrainians’ war effort — especially the solidarity and grassroots agency involved in self-organizing resistance to the invasion — has been thoroughly decolonial. Ukrainians have now experienced an expanded sense of decolonial agency in at least three partial or complete “revolutions” — the 1991 Granite Revolution, the 2004 Orange Revolution, and the 2013-14 Maidan Revolution or “Revolution of Dignity” — and now all the more in the experience of wartime resistance.
Postwar reconstruction will of course risk (re-) neocolonizing Ukraine, so it will need to be guided by Ukrainian priorities and not those of its would-be “reconstructors.” (Russia’s lesson from the 1990s should serve as a template for how not to do that.)
Meanwhile, the ecocultural trauma experienced daily by millions of Ukrainians — up to a third of the country’s citizens now — forced to abandon their homes and relocate, and exposed to shelling, bombing, genocidal and ecocidal attacks — is as harsh as any experienced by colonial-capitalist regimes anywhere. And as with recent Russian attempts to take over nuclear power plants (Chernobyl and Zaporizhzhia) and the sometimes bizarre efforts to steal or destroy cultural objects, the intentional explosion of the Nova Kakhovka dam could, in this light, be seen as another act of colonial vengeance on the lines of “We will take away what we gave you” — even if the historical reality (Soviet Ukrainian engineering built the dam) is entirely different from the Russian colonial mythology surrounding it (“we Russians gave Ukrainians all of it”). (And it’s not the first time the dam has been exploded.)
The “ecocide” question
The environmental consequences of Russia’s war on Ukraine have been massive. Calling the war an “ecocide,” as has been done since the explosion of the Nova Kakhovka Dam, should hardly be controversial, even if agreement on the term’s meaning is still internationally elusive. At the same time, it raises the question of how ecocide may relate to genocide.
If my arguments have been correct that culture and ecology have always been intertwined until they became separated, then ecocide and genocide have long gone hand-in-hand. To dispossess a people of its culture is the same sort of thing as, and often accompanies, the conquest and transformation of their territory. Relations, filiations, and kinship networks are uprooted, as new relations are imposed.
In that sense, the Soviet-era damming of the Velykyi Luh (“Great Meadow”) wetlands for the building of the Dniprohes hydroelectric dam, like the damming of the Colorado River or of China’s Three Gorges, was also a kind of ecocide. Each of these massive transformations of the earth destroyed organisms, ecosystems, and cultural-ecological heritage, even as they created new, more economically “productive” relations. That’s how capitalism works: it destroys in order to create. The question is always: who pays? What are the full, long-term costs and consequences for people, species, ecosystems, lifeways, and the earth as a whole?
Responsible living on this planet requires taking full accountability for one’s actions in the face of everyone affected by them. In that sense, one could say that anything that offloads ecological, as well as ecocultural, costs onto others without compensation is a form of ecocide. When it is ecocultural, it is also genocide, or what Ukrainian cultural theorist Olexii Kuchanskyi has called “geosomatocide.”
War as fought today is by definition ecocidal. And as long as war and militarism are part of a system of competitive relations between neocolonial-capitalist regimes (that always, it seems, happen to be led by old men), ecocide and geosomatocide will remain with us.
Dismantling that system should be a priority. How to do it, in ways that expand people’s capacity for decolonial-democratic action (as I described here for Ukraine, and here more generally), will be our challenge ahead.
Top image: flooding in Kherson after the Nova Kakhovka Dam explosion.
