Description
Theorists and practitioners of international politics increasingly tout time as a key vector of security in the twenty-first century. While temporal dynamics and concerns have always inflected politics, from Ecclesiastes’ ‘a time for war and a time for peace’, to Hitler’s rage that ‘time is always against’ the Third Reich, the war in Ukraine pushed time and timing to the forefront of contemporary concerns about war and the future of international order. This paper begins to catalogue and unpack salient temporal tropes in the discourse of the war, as well as the diverse and interweaving timing processes and dynamics influencing its possible resolutions. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine augurs the return of territorial conquest, achieved by conventional war but seasoned with nuclear blackmail’s threat of apocalypse. The war threatens not only Ukraine’s sovereign integrity but the ‘future of democracy’ and the existence of ‘Europe’ as a political project. Russian aggression builds on denials of Ukraine’s historical and cultural facticity or ‘right to exist’, imbuing questions of victory and defeat with do-or-die meaning. Ukraine’s self-defence depends upon complex timing issues like military aid manufacture, delivery, and usage restrictions; how long international sanctions will take to stay Putin’s hand; when to call for negotiations; and the impacts of seasonal climates on offensives and counteroffensives. Alongside these complex processes, we have seen increasingly hardened and mutually exclusive visions of victory forwarded by both belligerents, while their allies ponder more ambivalent settlements. As previous work on victory culture suggests, the more dichotomous such victory discourse becomes, the longer and more brutal the war is likely to be. Put briefly, nearly every element of Russia’s war in Ukraine invokes existential stakes, staunch visions of victory, and complex timing dynamics, all with stark implications for the future of Ukraine and the international European order.
