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.