David Chandler, Professor of International Relations, has written an article for E-International Relations in which he analyses the war in Ukraine as the first war of the Anthropocene, a term that references the geological epoch in which human activity has been a dominant influence on climate and the environment.
In his article titled the First War of the Anthropocene: Ukraine and the Struggle to ‘Un-Cancel the Future’, Professor Chandler argued that wars are framed in the context of the fears and concerns of their time.
He emphasized that the concept of the Anthropocene is not simply related to questions of climate change and policy but is a methodological framework for our contemporary condition. A primary concern in this geological epoch is the “loss of confidence in liberal modernity and its affirmative imaginaries of progress.”
Professor Chandler wrote: “What’s to be gained by taking an ‘Anthropocene’ approach to the Ukraine war? Perhaps the first benefit might be moving beyond the realism/liberalism bind that holds back much contemporary thinking in the discipline...This dominant framing bifurcates our understanding via the binary of realist ‘interest’ and liberal ‘values’.
"An Anthropocene approach does not pit interests against values in this way, seeing both as already pre-existing and the question being a matter of choice between them. Instead, it might take as a starting point the crisis of modernist framings; how fragile conceptions of ‘interests’ and ‘values’ are themselves reconstructed and contested through the conflict.”
Professor Chandler concluded: “By intervening to save the Ukraine we do not save ourselves, in some realist or interest-based understanding, but something else entirely: we save our future selves by becoming better, realer, or truer to our ‘values’ and our ‘interests’. If the Anthropocene is about cancelling the future, then the Ukraine war is discursively framed in opposition to this, the war, in the words of Ukraine advocate Ben Tallis, can be seen as ‘un-cancelling the future’.”
Read the article The First War of the Anthropocene: Ukraine and the Struggle to ‘Un-Cancel the Future’ on the E-International Relations’ website.
Related articles
