Working through warfare in Ukraine: rethinking militarization in a Ukrainian theme café

ABSTRACT

The conflict between Ukraine and Russia in the Donbas region has led both countries to strengthen their respective militaries. The literature on militarization emphasizes the subtle and largely unconscious ways in which militarization spreads through society. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2017, I argue that attention to the intersubjective aspects of the process exposes the self-conscious working-through of military realities. I make this argument using the case study of a restaurant run by demobilized fighters, Café Patriot. Specifically, I show how the café's proprietors aimed to provide an anti-depressive atmosphere for fighters, and to provoke critical thinking among non-combatant patrons. The café challenged theorizing on militarization by effacing the separation between military and civilian as predicted, but doing so in the interest of reminding people of militarization rather than blinding them to it. These findings highlight veterans’ constructive efforts to re-inhabit a fractured world, and contrast with portrayals in critical studies of militarized masculinity. In sum, the café represented an effort to intervene in the process of militarization using, strangely enough, the trappings of militarization. At stake is the definition of militarization as an insidious process.

KEYWORDS:

• Militarization
• masculinity
• gender
• emotion
• veterans
• feminism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Greta Uehling teaches in the Program on Comparative and International Studies at the University of Michigan, where she is also a faculty associate at the Center for Russian and East European Studies. She holds a doctorate PhD in cultural anthropology from the University of Michigan, and in 2004 she completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania with the Solomon Asch Center for the Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict. In 2015 she was awarded a Fulbright Scholar Grant to continue her research in Ukraine, and in 2018 she was a Summer Fellow with the University of Michigan's Institute for the Humanities. She is the author of Beyond Memory: The Deportation and Return of the Crimean Tatars. She is also the author of scholarly articles and book chapters, and has published two edited volumes.

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was supported by the Fulbright Scholar Program (Grant Number 48141684).