In his upcoming book Russia against Modernity the historian Alexander Etkind traces the historical entanglements of climate change, energy transition and military aggression. He suggests that the war against the Ukraine should be seen as part of a wider attack on modernity. Refusing to accept the imperatives of climate change, the dying Energy Empire undermines the global effort of preventing ecological collapse.
The inescapable demand to move away from fossil fuels has long constituted an existential threat to Russia, as one of the world’s largest oil and gas exporters. Its wealth and military might depend on the ruthless extraction of energy and raw materials which it has exploited for decades at the expense of the health and livelihood of the population at large. Against this backdrop, the current attack on Ukraine appears as the latest stage in a long ongoing war against nature, environment, people and bodies.
Alexander M. Etkind is Professor at the Department of International Relations at the Central European University. He has authored, among others, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Polity Press 2011) and Nature’s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (Polity Press 2021). His new book, Russia against Modernity, will be released by Polity in April 2023.
Monika Halkort is a social scientist and journalist in Vienna. She currently also teaches at the University of Applied Arts as part of the master program ‚Applied Human Rights and the Arts`, under the direction of Manfred Novak. Next to her academic work, she regularly produces contributions for the Ö1 programs Radiokolleg, Hörbilder and Diagonal. From 2011 to 2020, she taught and conducted research at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, Lebanon. The thematic focus of her scholarly and publishing work is the historical interconnections of colonialism, technology and knowledge production and how they continue to shape ideas of sustainability, planetary thinking and environmental justice today.
