WAR BY
OTH ER
NAM ES
a-summit-in-acts

ACT II

Second Encounter
with
Irina Zherebkina, Yevgenia Belorusets, Mikola Rydny and friends

Sunday March 6th, 2022
12 PM (EST)

Dear Friends, Comrades,

We started this process of assembling together virtually nearly 2 years ago. We never could have imagined then, that this process could become such a rich communal infrastructure for sharing our urgent questions and tending to them together. Thanks to each of you for nourishing and creating this space of trust and generosity.

It is in this spirit that we would like to invite you this Sunday March 6, 12pm for the second act of War By Other Names.

Together with Olga Kopenkina and Dmitry Vilensky, we have imagined this summit-in-acts as an attempt to create a space to think together and consider potential actions responding to the Russian military invasion of Ukraine.

This week is Dmitry's turn to introduce the day. Rather than write a text, he thought to share a question and potential heading to begin our conversation:

Learning to Resist in Times of Wars

Irina Zherebkina from Kharkiv, Yevgenia Belorusets and Mikola Rydny from Kyiv are among those invited who have said they would like to join.

Below you will find login details and the short introduction for Sunday and the summit.


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INVITATION

This Sunday, March 6th, we would like to invite you to the second encounter and share with you Dmitry Vilensky's question:

Learning to resist in times of wars


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INTRODUCTION TO WAR BY OTHER NAMES

Since 2020, we have been testing assembling drawing on friendships old and new from all the various parts of our shared planet, considering the current conjuncture. We felt then, in the urgencies of 'lockdown' and imposed 'social distancing' to find new ways of recomposing the cartographies of struggle in the face of what could only be another crisis through which states and capital would opportunistically manipulate toward their advantage.

Our thesis has been confirmed time and again as states, especially those bearing the imprint of supremacist mandates, imperial or colonial histories, have used in the most wretched manner the pandemic and its conditions of distraction to further their capacities to exert and extend their will to govern and control.

A global war has been pronounced against a virus. And in the middle of that war many other wars have and are taking place. Wars against indigenous communities, migrant peoples, displaced, houseless peoples, wars of dispossession, wars of occupation, of omission, sometimes as if by accident, organized neglect, in the name of safety, security, law, of restoring territorial integrity or restoring old empires.

But these wars are like palimpsests, taking the same writ, the same sheets of proclamation and rewriting over them new conditions, new rules, new impositions, and new justifications. Amidst the seas of war are floating peoples, communities, multitudes who struggle to find a side, a way, a path toward autonomy, subsistence, if not bare survival.

The current invasion by Russia of Ukraine is a moment of intensification in an ongoing war, which inherits the legacies of a cold war and the hot wars which preceded it, always risking to spill into surrounding territories and justifying new forms of weaponry for forced forms of pacification. These wars certainly have their locality and specificity but they cannot be read outside also the larger forces at play.

But understanding these forces also does not necessarily arrive to understanding how they implicate each of us wherever we are. As we have asked implicity or explicity in our many assemblies, the Conference of Butterflies, a Conference in Shards, as well as our vigil, Fukushima at 10, how to reimagine solidarity today?

Over the course of these following weeks, we will try to enter collectively a process of thinking together the various forces at play, the questions this invasion by Russia raises, the various modes of discourse and practice it may call into being in order to struggle against the supremacist, imperial, colonial, fascist, racist, patriarchal, capitalist forces which continue to invent and direct new causes of war and war by other names.

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NOTE ON ORGANIZATION

As a form of organizing this summit, we will try to share responsibility with friends. We began this process leading to this first encounter with a letter from Dmitry Vilensky of Chto Delat on February 6th asking how we may organize something together in response to a potentially devastating war.

Given Belarus's implication in this, we asked our friend Olga Kopenkina to join us in situating occasions and inviting friends from Ukraine, Belarus, and beyond to think and share questions.

Whatever we have planned or written has seemed to be inadequate by the day as the situation has deteriorated from a potential war or attack to a full scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.

At the level of organization, we would like each encounter to have its own approach to thinking and finding a way to discuss what is taking place in a manner that can go beyond news and toward nourishing our ways to conjoin struggles wherever we are situated.