{"id":7859,"date":"2022-05-25T09:30:20","date_gmt":"2022-05-25T07:30:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/?p=7859"},"modified":"2025-03-09T18:46:42","modified_gmt":"2025-03-09T17:46:42","slug":"occupied-ukraine-between-colonialities-of-war-and-the-migranticisation-of-dispossession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/occupied-ukraine-between-colonialities-of-war-and-the-migranticisation-of-dispossession\/","title":{"rendered":"Occupied Ukraine Between Colonialities of War and the Migranticization of Dispossession"},"content":{"rendered":"

According to UNHCR, more than 6.3 million people have left Ukraine since 24 February 2022<\/strong>. Most of them have arrived in the EU (3.4 million in Poland alone), but also over 850\u2019434 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 \u2018migrants\u2019 and, thus, reproduces the conventional figure of the \u2018migrant stranger.\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yet, instead of drawing on such concepts as \u2018refugees,\u2019 \u2018forced migrants\u2019 or \u2018internally displaced persons,\u2019 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\u2019s \u2018subaltern empire.\u2019 In doing so, it seems appropriate to combine a colonially-sensitive perspective on Putin\u2019s violent war, the Marxist notion of dispossession and a reflexive lens on the practices of the general public\u2019s labeling of mobile individuals.<\/p>\n

Colonialities of War by a \u2018Subaltern Empire\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

Russia\u2019s ongoing occupation of Ukraine should not be misinterpreted as one individual dictator\u2019s decision, instead, it should be contextualized as a neo-colonial violent war. As a \u201csubaltern empire,\u201d Russia \u2018occupies a middle ground between the \u201ccivilized\u201d center and [the] \u201corientalized\u201d periphery, which makes it both [the] object of [epistemic] colonization and a colonizing subject\u201d\u2019 (Morozov 2013: 25). This view of Russia\u2019s subaltern position in a \u2018Eurocentric world,\u2019 as the political scientist Viatcheslav Morozov puts it, implies that Russia, \u2018as an empire,\u2019 plays \u2018an oppressive role in relation to its subjects\u2019 (Ibid.).<\/p>\n

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\u2019 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\u2019s official allusions to the Soviet Union\u2019s 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 \u2018Anti-Russia\u2019 (Leszczenko & Tarnavska 2021: 24).<\/p>\n

Dispossession of Land Instead of \u2018Migration\u2019 and \u2018Flight\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

Based on this colonially-sensitive lense, the forced spatial relocation of Ukrainian citizens can be framed in the spirit of Rosa Luxemburg \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

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 (\u00c7a\u011flar & Glick Schiller 2018).<\/p>\n

Related processes of political dispossession of Ukrainian citizens are evident in the Russian government\u2019s rhetoric of dehumanization, which identifies parts of the Ukrainian military force as \u2018fascist battalions\u2019 and considers the calls for Ukrainian sovereignty to be evidence of \u2018fascism.\u2019 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).<\/p>\n

Making \u2018Migration\u2019 by Naming Practices<\/strong><\/p>\n

By building on the above considerations, scientists studying reflexive migration can show how \u2018migration\u2019 and \u2018flight\u2019 are \u2018done\u2019 and \u2018made\u2019 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 \u2018migrants\u2019 and \u2018refugees\u2019 in the transit and receiving contexts (Dahinden 2016).<\/p>\n

In doing so, scholars can pay explicit attention to how these processes of naming may vary depending on the specific institutional contexts of movers\u2019 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., \u2018forced migration\u2019, \u2018flight\u2019, \u2018internally displaced persons\u2019) and categories of analysis (e.g., dispossession, occupation, coloniality\/ies) (Amelina 2021, 2022).<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>European Borderlands Recreated<\/strong><\/p>\n

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 \u2018borderlands,\u2019 as \u00c9tienne Balibar notes, \u2018is the name of the place where the opposites flow into one another\u2019 (2009: 210), then the current task of sociology is to focus on the \u2018intrinsic antinomies\u2019 of these borderlands, in which some movers are labeled as \u2018migrants\u2019 and \u2018refugees\u2019 and others as \u2018European citizens.\u2019 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\u2019s current geopolitical transformations.<\/p>\n

Anna Amelina<\/a><\/em> is a professor of intercultural studies at the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sources<\/p>\n

\u2013 Amelina, Anna (2021). After the reflexive turn in migration studies: Towards the doing migration approach. Population, Space and Place<\/em> 27(1): e2368.
\n\u2013 Amelina, A. (2022). Knowledge production for whom? Doing migrations, colonialities and standpoints in non-hegemonic migration research. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 1-23.
\n\u2013 Balibar, \u00c9tienne (2009). Europe as borderland. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space<\/em> 27: 190\u2013215
\n\u2013 \u00c7a\u011flar, Ay\u015fe, and Nina Glick Schiller (2018). Migrants and City-Making: Dispossession, Displacement, and Urban Regeneration<\/em>. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
\n\u2013 Dahinden, Janine (2016). A plea for the \u2018de-migranticization\u2019 of research on migration and integration. Ethnic and Racial Studies<\/em> 39(13): 2207\u20132225.
\n\u2013 Leszczenko, L., and Tarnavska, O. (2021). Russia\u2019s 2021 national security strategy in the context of the state\u2019s strategic culture. \u0410ctual Problems of International Relations<\/em> 1(147): 18\u201326.
\n\u2013 Morozov, Viatcheslav (2013). Subaltern empire? Toward a postcolonial approach to Russian foreign policy. Problems of Post-Communism<\/em> 60(6): 16\u201328.
\n\u2013 Quijano, An\u00edbal (2007). Coloniality and modernity\/rationality. Cultural Studies <\/em>21(2\/3): 168\u2013178.
\n\u2013 Tlostanova, Madina, and Walter Mignolo (2009). Global coloniality and the decolonial option. Kult<\/em> 6: 130\u2013147.
\n\u2013 UNHCR (2022). https:\/\/data2.unhcr.org\/en\/situations\/ukraine<\/a> (Numbers for 16 May 2022).<\/p>\n

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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\u2019434 in Russia. The tragedy of the Ukrainian citizens forced to move and those forced to continue living in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":252,"featured_media":7603,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[982],"tags":[209,211,219,661],"coauthors":[1011],"class_list":["post-7859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe-on-the-brink","tag-borders","tag-citizenship","tag-european-union","tag-immigrants"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7859","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/252"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7859"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7859\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7866,"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7859\/revisions\/7866"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7603"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7859"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7859"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7859"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nccr-onthemove.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=7859"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}