Synopsis

Everyday War provides an accessible lens through which to understand what noncombatant civilians go through in a country at war. What goes through the mind of a mother who must send her child to school across a minefield or the men who belong to groups of volunteer body collectors? In Ukraine, such questions have been part of the daily calculus of life. Greta Uehling engages with the lives of ordinary people living in and around the armed conflict over Donbas that began in 2014 and shows how conventional understandings of war are incomplete.

In Ukraine, landscapes filled with death and destruction prompted attentiveness to human vulnerabilities and the cultivation of everyday, interpersonal peace. Uehling explores a constellation of social practices where ethics of care were in operation. People were also drawn into the conflict in an everyday form of war that included provisioning fighters with military equipment they purchased themselves, smuggling insulin, and cutting ties to former friends. Each chapter considers a different site where care can produce interpersonal peace or its antipode, everyday war.

Bridging the fields of political geography, international relations, peace and conflict studies, and anthropology, Everyday War considers where peace can be cultivated at an everyday level.

Amazon * Cornell University Press

Excerpt

Introduction

“Do you want to go to the green, yellow, or red zone?” Kyrylo bellowed enthusiastically. He was gripping the wheel of his probably mufflerless SUV and we were barreling down a superhighway outside of Kyiv, Ukraine. It was 2015, and Kyrylo lived on the other side of the country in the nongovernment-controlled part of Donetsk, but traveled to the capital city regularly to gather supplies and meet with colleagues about his humanitarian work. His color-coded levels of risk, brilliantly calibrated to the universal language of the stop light, were intended to help manage the perils of working in close proximity to military violence. For the red zone where sniper fire was common, I would need a helmet, Kevlar, and exhaustive knowledge of where to take cover at any moment. In the yellow zone where there could be heavy artillery fire, I would need to be connected to the flow of information at a granular level: knowing the forecast in the military microclimate was essential to survival. In the green zone, I might see plumes of smoke or be awakened by the grumbling of artillery fire, but there would not be life-threatening dangers, he told me. Kyrylo’s stoplight metaphor challenged my previous way of thinking about war as chaos. He showed me the side of military conflict that entails planned destruction. But the simplicity of this mental mapping stands out against another reality, which was the complexity of who was fighting whom, and why. And while it might seem surprising, people, including families with small children, lived in the red zone, vividly demonstrating that contemporary conflicts threaten life’s very ongoingness: one could be shot and killed while stepping out to buy bread.

Between 2014 and 2017 alone, the conflict over the Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk extinguished well over 13,000 lives (many of which were civilian) and injured at least 24,000 people (OHCHR 2017, 1). Tens of thousands were missing and presumed dead. Over two million people had been forcibly displaced (OHCHR 2017, 1; Mukomel 2017, 105), and the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) estimated the population of humanitarian concern to be five million (OCHA 2020, 1). The scars of the conflict marked the earth itself: by 2017 Ukrainian soil had one of the highest concentrations of landmines in the world (OCHA 2020). Unless removed, these mines will shift over time and take lives and limbs for decades to come. Eight years on at this writing, and despite multiple efforts to end the conflict, peace remains elusive.

This book is less concerned with the statistics, however, than the subjective experience of military conflict. The chapters seek to expand the boundaries of what we take to be war. Contemporary military conflicts are increasingly being fought in residential areas, and the protagonists have changed. We, therefore, need to stop thinking about military conflict as something that is primarily waged between the trained soldiers of states. Theories of “new wars” and “hybrid wars” (Kaldor 2013; 2006; Hoffman 200) postulate that cyber-technologies, Jihadists, mercenaries, disinformation, election interference, and forcible population dis- placement characterize contemporary military conflicts. But these concepts still implicitly treat states as the most important actors. If today’s wars are increasingly fought in civilian areas, it is all the more imperative to study (as this book aims to do) what happens among the noncombatants who live in areas where conflict and combat occur.

The Conflict over Donbas and this Book

The military conflict began in the wake of the 2013–2014 revolution, also known as the Revolution of Dignity or the Maidan movement. The revolution initially sought to bring about greater integration with the European Union, an objective that aroused sharp controversy in the eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, Ukraine. Protestors took to the streets and while some supported the political transition going on in Kyiv, others were against it. In March 2014, insurgents in the city of Sloviansk seized administrative buildings as well as the police station, and the first shots were fired. It was the beginning of a bloody armed conflict, sometimes called a hybrid war because of Russia’s covert intervention using multiple modalities on behalf of the insurgents. The conflict therefore had both domestic and international dimensions that are elaborated on in the next chapter.

For now, suffice it to say that Ukraine’s aspirations to be more integrated with the West, aspirations that the United States and the European Union encouraged, hardly played well in Moscow, and helped inspire the occupation of Crimea. The “success” of the Crimean operation is believed to have helped embolden President Vladimir Putin to support the anti-Maidan insurgency in eastern Ukraine. In the beginning, mercenaries paid by the Russian Federation were important ac- tors in the conflict. At the battle of Ilovaisk, that began in August 2014, Russian military forces became more identifiably involved. Owing to how weak the Ukrai- nian military was at this time, it was up to battalions of volunteer fighters, coming from all walks of life, to limit this advance. The United States also provided sup- port, including technical advice, training, and eventually the transfer of advanced military equipment like surface-to-air missile launchers. This was on top of the United States Department of State having advised the Ukrainian government to have its troops stand down when Crimea was occupied. A great deal of debate has centered on who is to blame: kto vinovat? Ukraine’s territorial integrity and the social identities, political rights, and economic livelihoods of people across this region, not to mention respect for state sovereignty more generally, are at stake.

The first half of the book takes place in government-controlled parts of Ukraine. These chapters are organized around friend, family, and romantic partner relationships to illuminate the specific ways in which war can reconfigure intimacy while intimate relationships are the site of a different, everyday kind of war. The second half of the book is focused on life in and around the Donetsk

About the Author

Greta Uehling’s scholarship is broadly concerned with international migration and forced displacement. Major projects have examined the experiences of refugees, asylum seekers, and the internally displaced. Her current project explores the subjective experience of military conflict and forced displacement in Ukraine. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, she documents how the military conflict reconfigured social worlds that became the site of a different, everyday kind of war.

Prior to teaching in the Program on International and Comparatives Studies, Uehling consulted with a number of international organizations including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and the Watson Institute at Brown University.

Uehling holds a PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan. In 2004, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship with the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book is Beyond Memory: The Deportation and Repatriation of the Crimean Tatars. Her newest book is Everyday War: The Conflict over Donbas, Ukraine. She is also the author of numerous scholarly articles and the editor of two edited volumes.