The war in Ukraine in international sociological academic periodicals of 2022

Doctor of Sociological Sciences Serhii Makeiev

The war in Ukraine in international sociological academic periodicals of 2022

On 28 December 2022, in response to a query on the platform "research4life.org" on the topic "War in Ukraine" for the period from spring 2014, links were obtained to 5,246 publications, of which 500 appeared in peer-reviewed academic journals. War is by definition a total event that destroys or traumatises social institutions, organisations, the environment and people’s lives. Hence the extremely varied subject matter of the articles: the impact on the health care system and on nature, disease and war, food supply, international relations, the problems of violence, communication, business, the global and regional economy, science, migration. In general, what came to light in the very first months of the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, what has taken clear shape and what naturally represents a small part of the array of probable negative effects that will make themselves felt later. Yet articles of this kind proper are only a few in sociological academic periodicals.

Below is a review of selected publications belonging to the traditional disciplinary subject matter of a theoretical and empirical order. In the first issue of the journal "Violence: An International Journal" for 2022 (vol. 3(1)) two articles are responses to the war in Ukraine. Scott Straus in the piece "Ukraine and the politics of political violence" (Scott Straus, "Ukraine and the politics of political violence") reflects on the change in the language and vocabulary of discussing the problem of violence brought about by the war.

He sees two possible reactions by researchers to a situation in which the language and vocabulary of the corresponding subdiscipline are forcibly militarised in the context of a military conflict. First, to use the notions that exist in international legislation and treaties with the greatest possible care. For they often have no unambiguous interpretation and are ambivalent. An empirically oriented sociologist faces the difficult task of operationalising, without contradiction, such notions as violence, war, genocide, famine, threat. The solution consists in finding a definition that makes measurement possible. For example, violence is the infliction of bodily harm (killing, rape, torture). This, however, does not rule out other substantive definitions relevant to the aims of a particular study.

Second, there remains open the option according to which it makes sense to abandon the use of all the notions listed above altogether. On the simple grounds that they are deliberately politicised, as happened with the notion of "genocide", legally codified and associated with evil (the Holocaust), that they are value-laden and therefore out of place in scholarly research. It would then be necessary to construct a new conceptual umbrella for discussing the problem of violence. What is meant is the creation of a specific vocabulary for recording the various phenomena of violence. The article discusses such notions with the corresponding references to publications.

As a result, Scott Straus sums up, the militarisation of the conceptual instruments of our studies should not compel us to abandon traditional notions or to insist on their unambiguous definition, but it does prompt us not to spare time and effort in clarifying what we mean when we use them".

The second article in the same issue of the journal, "Russia in Ukraine: the social sciences, war, and democracy", was written by the well-known specialist on the problems of post-Soviet development Michel Wieviorka (Michel Wieviorka, "Russia in Ukraine: The social sciences, war, and democracy"). In his view the humanities and the social sciences are productive when they analyse problems over long stretches of time, identifying and describing the factors of economic and political development. But they are poor predictors of how events will develop over short intervals of time; they are strong, then, in retrospect, but not competent in prediction. In connection with the war in Ukraine many people are interested in what will happen in the coming months, whether the threat of the use of nuclear weapons is real, how long Ukraine can hold out, whether a change of government there is possible. However, these questions are not for scholarship: the situation in the public sphere is such that those who do not know are the ones who speak (experts, advisers, politicians, analysts), while those who do know (intelligence agencies, for example) keep silent. As a result no one manages to prepare satisfactorily for the future, and the complaints are often addressed precisely to scholars.

War, Wieviorka believes, is organic to the identity of Russia, bound up with imperialist aspirations that today have taken the form of the "Russian world" and are analogous to the aspirations of tsarist Russia and Soviet communism. Hence the three Russias — Great, White and Little — are supposed to constitute a single political body, and current policy is nothing other than the realisation of this idea by means of the use of military force for the forcible incorporation of Little Russia. Thus in February 2022 there began a war of two identities: the closed Russian one, filled with its own self-sufficiency, and the Ukrainian one, open to pan-European values and freedoms, which are visually embodied in the figures of the two presidents.

The anti-Ukrainian, aggressively nationalist historical narrative that constitutes the core of the ideological justification of the armed invasion, both in the speeches of the president of the aggressor country and in the entire propaganda industry of the Russian Federation, is to a large extent addressed to two main internal strata of society. First of all to those who formed the market segment of the economy (oligarchs, medium and small proprietors) but did not acquire autonomy and instead found themselves dependent on the authorities and on the state’s controlling functions in conducting business and ensuring its profitability. And, further, to wage earners who miss state greatness and have not parted with the memory of victory in the last world war of the middle of the last century. The special military operation, as it is called in the Russian Federation, turns out to be a guarantee of ensuring the stability of prosperity for the former and of warding off threats to the sovereignty of the state from the hostile West for the latter. Such a promise is accompanied by violence against "internal enemies", elements of civil society disloyal to the authorities.

In sociology it is not customary to present social problems as a consequence of mental disorders. But autocratic, over-centralised political regimes do give some grounds for this. Years spent by a leader in conditions of confidentiality, when a multitude of important secret decisions are taken within a narrow circle of accomplices, lead to the formation of a specific, singular personality. And then the particularities of that personality’s perception and explanation of the surrounding world become the decisive factor in the actions undertaken, including destructive ones. Therefore the personal history of the president of the Russian Federation cannot be excluded from an interpretation of current events that claims to be both intelligible and convincing.

The armed confrontation between autocracy and democracy, which is in essence what the Russian Federation’s war against Ukraine is, is at a political impasse. There is no sign that one of the sides will win, or that there are any possibilities of stopping the violence and returning from war to a politics of peaceful means. Such a situation represents a challenge to democracy as a regime of the rule of law and of individual rights on a global scale. War always suspends the dominance of democratic procedures for organising social life, and today it is also a challenge to the unity of such political associations as the European Union. If only because it demands a new reconciliation of the national democratic dimension with the geopolitical, global one.

Boris Kagarlitsky, the well-known Russian opponent of globalist attitudes and views in the spirit of "critical sociology", gave an interview to two German colleagues, "The whole world is becoming more like Russia. A conversation on deglobalization in the wake of the war in Ukraine", published in the journal Berliner Journal für Sozioljgie (Kagarlitsky B., Puder J., Schmalz S. The whole world is becoming more like Russia. A conversation on deglobalization in the wake of the war in Ukraine, 2022, 32: 489-502).

The war, in Kagarlitsky’s view, became a consequence of two Russian crises that reinforce one another: an economic one, connected with the growing economic dependence on the oil and gas sector and with the technological backwardness of industry; and also a crisis of governance, caused by progressive authoritarianism and the centralisation of power, when decision-making was concentrated in the hands and within the competence of an ever narrower circle of persons. Centralisation was in fact a response to the low culture and quality of managing political and socio-economic processes, to the declining trust of the highest authorities in the middle and local administrative apparatus; an ever larger array of problems demanded one-man decisions without discussion and without proper informational support. In such a situation the probability of developing any strategy of development, of planning what is possible and feasible, is completely nullified. And the worse the situation becomes, the more money is directed to the propaganda sector and to the security structures responsible for preserving the ideological, political and social status quo. Or, in other words, large strata of individuals take shape who claim to be or to look like the ruling elite and derive benefits from the situations that arise. Such strata constitute the stabilising core of the basis of a power that cannot be changed by an electoral procedure.

The war in Ukraine has a global dimension; it reinforces those tendencies in the restructuring of the world economy and of global trade that had emerged earlier. The European Union, for instance, has already begun implementing an ambitious plan to reduce its dependence on gas and oil, and the war will only accelerate this and similar processes related to environmental protection. For the Russian Federation gas is both a source of profit and an instrument of pressure. But Western countries use shares and technologies for the same purpose, so in this sense the world is becoming more like the Russian Federation.

The history of capitalism represents an alternation of cycles of globalisation and deglobalisation. At present a tendency towards deglobalisation is palpable, accompanied by a growth in the significance of nation states. In Kagarlitsky’s view, the European Union in its present form has no future. The mere prospect of Ukraine joining it demands a different format, some new constituent congress, a new treaty for Europe, which will have to include the Russian Federation as well. Such an option is not a prediction, but something it makes sense to strive for and to fight for.