On war, hegemony and (political) masculinities

Abstract

Ukrainians awoke on the 24th of February 2022 to find themselves in a conflict over which many had been dreading but which almost as many had also thought impossible. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has also meant that we, non-Ukrainian Europeans, find ourselves in a time in which the term ‘crisis’ has taken on a much more direct presence. After over 20 years in which the so-called ‘War on Terror’ wrought death and destruction ‘elsewhere’, the actual conflict between sovereign nation-states, with the prospect of spilling over into yet another European war involving multiple nation-states is now a reality. The horrors of war are happening closer to our own countries than many of us have experienced in our lifetimes. The gender dynamics of the invasion of Ukraine are impossible to ignore. War reinstalls gendered demarcation lines that many of us, naively, thought was a relic from the past. Masculinity is mobilized as a rhetorical figure and symbolic resource in the brutal reality for all these young men and women that have to go into a war declared by older men. In the character of the fascist strongman who has become a cult figure in the global far-right, we can see someone who has been valued at home and abroad precisely for his compensatory masculinism (Löffler, Luyt, & Starck, 2020) as well as ridiculed in Western media (Wiedlack, 2020). Then there is the resilient, David-esque figure who has been championed for his intransigence and refusal to give up in the face of insurmountable odds. Caught in-between these political leaders are the military conscripts of all genders who are putting their lives at risk, as well as women and children who are being forced to flee as a result of imperialist aggression. On social media, people are celebrating the loss of human life and glorifying militarist responses from political leaders whilst those of us in Finland and Sweden find ourselves closer to NATO membership than at any point during our intertwined histories. It is a new formative moment that most of us wish could have been avoided.