Ukraine is here, the maps stay the same. On the ethics of framing an analysis.

With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the world in which New Area Studies (NAS) were born has shifted, and this leaves us with a number of questions on how to move on. In this post-2/24 world, we are back to the past of raw military power, colonial conquest and destabilized international borders. And because the invasion is, itself, explicitly dealing with Ukraine and its borderlands as constructs of history and of politics – as illegitimate constructs, in the Putinian telling – it presents an ethical challenge for constructivist, NAS scholars. I am proposing a two-part ethical and political reflection on how to think about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – and, more to the point, how to think about areas and borders in view of the war. In different circumstances, highlighting the historical constructedness of Ukraine’s (and therefore Russia’s) borders would make sense, while always carrying risks of “recuperation” by Russian revanchists. Now, this risk is heightened sharply and the question of how to be a scholar in a time of war is urgent. Analysis of the situation needs to be anchored first and last in a recognition of the profound wrong that is being perpetrated by Russia against Ukraine, and in an affirmation of the Ukrainian people’s existence and right to exist. The first part of the ethical reflection, then, calls for resisting the use of history as justification for political projects. The second part of the ethical reflection resists a different dimension of the urge to step back and contextualize, especially in left-leaning academia: the critique of American imperialism and of NATO’s very existence as its instrument. But putting one’s critical and political energies, now, in fighting NATO’s expansion and support of Ukraine cannot but bolster Russia. Whatever NATO’s misdeeds were toward Russia in the past thirty years, there can be no equivalence with the death and destruction that Russia is raining on Ukraine since 2/24 – and recognition of this fundamental imbalance must inform our practices, as citizens and as scholars.