Description
“The personal is theoretical. Theory itself is often assumed to be abstract: something is more theoretical the more abstract it is, the more it is abstracted from everyday life. To abstract is to drag away, detach, pull away, or divert. We might then have to drag theory back, to bring theory back to life.” (Ahmed, 2017:11).
In this piece, I reflect on my own embodied experience, and that of my feminist colleagues, of producing knowledge about the armed invasion of Ukraine, our home country, while also being directly affected by it on many levels. In 2022, many Ukrainian feminists activists, placed at the intersection of academia, activism and our personal positionalities, found ourselves in dialogues with feminist security scholars and activists about the nature of the war in Ukraine, its implications for women’s rights and gender freedoms, and the validity of claims to arm Ukraine’s self-defence efforts. Solidarities spanning across geographies, institutions and positionalities, were both challenged and (re)invented. Voices from the region of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) started claiming the right to their epistemic authority, highlighting hierarchies of knowledge production within and beyond Europe.
Following Ahmed’s proposal to “bring theory back to life”, I argue that in this case, the “international” (matters of global security) have become very personal, or perhaps what became apparent is that they always were. What does seeing the international through the lens of personal do, when it comes to knowledge production, and policy making in the fields of security, peace and the feminist struggle? How does acknowledgement and integration of our positionalities in the process affect our solidarity-building? What can we learn from this about challenges and opportunities for global solidarities in the feminist struggle?
