Coloniality is so baked into Western state powers and institutions that attempts to take ‘short cuts’ through making ‘decolonial’ claims and statements can easily feed into existing hierarchies.
The Ukraine war is one of disavowal through which it is hoped the ‘idea’ of modernity, the idea of ‘Europe’, and the idea of ‘values’ can conceal their shabbier reality.
It would be nice to pretend that we still lived in a modernist world of meaningful choices, where taking sides was part of a broader grand narrative of struggle and progress.
The internationalisation of the conflict can be destabilising because there is less pressure to find the compromises necessary for peace agreement.
Totalizing moral binaries are particularly dangerous in the sphere of international relations, where international law lacks universal mechanisms of enforcement.
To refuse the discourses of war and racialization it is necessary to do more than place them in critical relation to those of anti-war and anti-racialization. Instead, we should refuse to distinguish the two.
Coronavirus shows the limits of resilience. If we are the security threat as well as the subjects to be secured, then we cannot be trusted to secure ourselves.
The Anthropocene is a deeply intense, material experience: a wild romp of the grotesque and the transgressive, emphasising our shared character of Earthly being.
Without Western responsibility for the outcome of the intervention in Libya and without any transformative promise, Western powers were strengthened morally and politically through their actions, whereas in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, they were humbled and often humiliated.
Many international relations commentators are heralding the Western bombing of Libya as marking a return to the 1990s era of humanitarian intervention. The debate is largely over whether this return is to be welcomed or regretted. But a return of the moral or ethical understandings of the humanitarian interventionist 1990s is not a possibility.
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