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

ACT III

Third Encounter
with
Alisa Lozhkina, Avery Gordon, Ovidiu Tichindeleanu and friends

Sunday March 13th, 2022
11 AM (EST)


Dear Friends, Comrades,

This Sunday we hope to have you join us once again as we convene the third act in our summit War By Other Names.

Each week so far, we have tried to create an open space wherein friends and comrades from Ukraine as well as Belarus, Russia, and other places, contexts, struggles can converge and think through these most difficult of times, where death, destruction, displacement for Ukrainians become more generalized.

How to respond and translate to acts of solidarity and our own struggles wherever we may be?

We have also tried to construct a space where we can try to understand together, through questions shared, what forms of solidarity and struggle we can embody that do not forget, eliminate, or further bury all the other wars and forms of war that are or have been in our midst.

As we meet on the week of March 8th and March 11th, we can invoke two fronts of that wider war, which reverberate or echo the violence also being perpetrated against the people of Ukraine, the violence against women, encapsulated by the phenomenon of Femicides and the total war against all earthly life, in the name of science and energy, and its fallouts, its accidents, its Fukushimas.

Each week, we have tried to invite some friends as guests to help us begin the conversation. To invite them to share their questions, to try with us to situate this moment and their own sense of what is at stake. And to do so in a way which could maybe help us find our own ways.

This week among the confirmed friends who will help us do that, will be Alisa Lozhkina, Avery Gordon and Ovidiu Tichindeleanu.

Below we share once again our initial statement as well as how to join.

Please note that this Sunday we will begin at 11AM (EST).



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Some Resources shared

Collecting money for paramedics:
https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=3152910124993874&id=1554490484835854

Link to a volunteer organization connected to our friend Alessandra:
https://vostok-sos.org/en/i-wanna-help/rekvizyty-dlia-hroshovoho-perekazu/

List of volunteer organizations:
https://supportukrainenow.org/donate/humanitarian-supplies-1#7f0b346f75c24b67b7657d7c02a1de1c


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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.