Occupied Ukraine Between Colonialities of War and the Migranticization of Dispossession

According to UNHCR, more than 6.3 million people have left Ukraine since 24 February 2022. Most of them have arrived in the EU (3.4 million in Poland alone), but also over 850’434 in Russia. The tragedy of the Ukrainian citizens forced to move and those forced to continue living in Ukraine is unprecedented. Public reflections on these movements, however, remain caught in naturalizing vocabulary that discursively transforms movers from Ukraine into ‘migrants’ and, thus, reproduces the conventional figure of the ‘migrant stranger.’

Yet, instead of drawing on such concepts as ‘refugees,’ ‘forced migrants’ or ‘internally displaced persons,’ there is an urgent sociological need to reiterate the merits of reflexive migration studies (Dahinden 2016) that calls us to re-examine the conceptual vocabulary of migration research. Therefore, this blog contribution invites us to approach current Ukrainian movers as citizens, who are neocolonially dispossessed by the armed military forces of Putin’s ‘subaltern empire.’ In doing so, it seems appropriate to combine a colonially-sensitive perspective on Putin’s violent war, the Marxist notion of dispossession and a reflexive lens on the practices of the general public’s labeling of mobile individuals.

Colonialities of War by a ‘Subaltern Empire’

Russia’s ongoing occupation of Ukraine should not be misinterpreted as one individual dictator’s decision, instead, it should be contextualized as a neo-colonial violent war. As a “subaltern empire,” Russia ‘occupies a middle ground between the “civilized” center and [the] “orientalized” periphery, which makes it both [the] object of [epistemic] colonization and a colonizing subject”’ (Morozov 2013: 25). This view of Russia’s subaltern position in a ‘Eurocentric world,’ as the political scientist Viatcheslav Morozov puts it, implies that Russia, ‘as an empire,’ plays ‘an oppressive role in relation to its subjects’ (Ibid.).

By building on these considerations and using colonially-sensitive vocabulary (Quijano 2007; Tlostanova & Mignolo 2009), the current occupation of Ukraine may be framed as exhibiting hybrid patterns of coloniality/ies, articulated in the discursive rationalization of war by representatives of the Russian government. Legacies of the tsarist Russian Empire are visible in the official authorities’ references to pre-Revolution imperial maps as current proof that Ukraine has no right to exist. The ideological canon of the Soviet empire manifests itself in Russia’s official allusions to the Soviet Union’s early history, thus highlighting the publicly accepted argument that Lenin was the founder of Ukraine within its current geographic borders. Most importantly, the discursive references to these legacies are intended to justify the ongoing neo-colonial occupation of Ukraine by characterizing it as a war against an ‘Anti-Russia’ (Leszczenko & Tarnavska 2021: 24).

Dispossession of Land Instead of ‘Migration’ and ‘Flight’

Based on this colonially-sensitive lense, the forced spatial relocation of Ukrainian citizens can be framed in the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg – that is, as processes of a colonially driven dispossession of land. The dispossession of Ukrainian citizens by Russian troops has both an economic and a political dimension.

The economic dispossession can be seen as an essential driver of a (neo-)colonial process of commodification (i.e. wheat production in the occupied region Kherson) and the commodification of migranticized bodies in particular, such as in the contexts of smuggling, irregularly organized labor exploitation and gendered (including sexual) labor, which take place at border controls and affect many of the current movers (Çağlar & Glick Schiller 2018).

Related processes of political dispossession of Ukrainian citizens are evident in the Russian government’s rhetoric of dehumanization, which identifies parts of the Ukrainian military force as ‘fascist battalions’ and considers the calls for Ukrainian sovereignty to be evidence of ‘fascism.’ By relying on the post-Soviet glorification of its victory in the Second World War, such discursive analogies make political autonomy for (dehumanized) Ukrainian citizens in the occupied parts of their country difficult. Most importantly, the notion of dispossession also allows us to consider the aforementioned reflexive lens in migration studies (Dahinden 2016).

Making ‘Migration’ by Naming Practices

By building on the above considerations, scientists studying reflexive migration can show how ‘migration’ and ‘flight’ are ‘done’ and ‘made’ by migration and asylum regimes in the geopolitical contexts of the European Union as well as the Russian Federation (Balibar 2009). The reflexive lens allows us to ask questions about the principles according to which some categories of movers are approached as ‘migrants’ and ‘refugees’ in the transit and receiving contexts (Dahinden 2016).

In doing so, scholars can pay explicit attention to how these processes of naming may vary depending on the specific institutional contexts of movers’ reception (e.g., registration offices, welfare administration) as well as their everyday social contexts (e.g., central train stations, provisional private accommodations). This reflexive perspective provides us with conceptual tools to differentiate categories of social and political practice (e.g., ‘forced migration’, ‘flight’, ‘internally displaced persons’) and categories of analysis (e.g., dispossession, occupation, coloniality/ies) (Amelina 2021, 2022).

Moreover, in studying linkages between naming practices and publicly articulated notions of humanitarian deservingness in relation to dispossessed Ukrainian citizens, we will benefit from the comparison of public articulations of solidarity with Ukrainian movers both in the European Union and the Russian Federation. Thus, the challenging task will be to compare similarities (e.g., racialization) and differences (e.g., forms of subalternity) in respective expressions of solidarity in the framework of Europeanized cosmopolitan citizenship and empire-oriented citizenship pattern of the Russian Federation.

 European Borderlands Recreated

To summarize, war and related processes of dispossession signal a contestation of the European geopolitical borders. These processes are also visible in the reorganization of the European borderlands that results from the new transnational networks of Ukrainian movers between the sending and receiving settings. If ‘borderlands,’ as Étienne Balibar notes, ‘is the name of the place where the opposites flow into one another’ (2009: 210), then the current task of sociology is to focus on the ‘intrinsic antinomies’ of these borderlands, in which some movers are labeled as ‘migrants’ and ‘refugees’ and others as ‘European citizens.’ Such an outlook would inspire us to deconstruct the realities of the migranticization that Ukrainian citizens experience and would allow us to study the potential simultaneity of the (colonially constructed) superiority and inferiority positionings of some mobile individuals that seem apparent only if analyzed within a wider cross-border realm of Europe’s current geopolitical transformations.

Anna Amelina is a professor of intercultural studies at the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg.

Sources

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– UNHCR (2022). https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine (Numbers for 16 May 2022).