Alexander Etkind: RUSSIA AGAINST MODERNITY

Climate Denialism and Putin’s War in the Ukraine

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.