Description
This paper explores the Geos – an ontological category at the centre of contemporary military violence (Griffiths and Redwood 2024) – in relation to Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine by focusing attention on the global networks and assemblages of power and material practices, and their historical precedents, that both sustain and resist contemporary warfare. We interrogate the empirical entanglements of war with the geos through a close reading of three sites in Ukraine. 1. Crops. These are a target of violence, source of life and resistance practice (particularly the phenomenon of small-scale agriculture and home gardening), as well as hugely consequential for global food markets. 2. Rare earth minerals. These are a principal focus of certain global powers as they define their ‘interests’ in the war, as well as having significant consequences for both local and planetary ecological health. 3. Land mines. Ukraine is the most mined country on earth. These devices present not only an immediate threat to populations, but their seeping toxicity stretches the temporality of war and its violence, as well as pushes us further underground to understand the ontology of contemporary war. Turning to these sites helps both reinterrogate what ‘war is’ today as well open up sites and practices of resistance.
