Veterans Contest Militarization In a Ukrainian Theme Café
By: Greta Uehling
Ukraine has attracted unprecedented attention recently as the center of the impeachment inquiry into United States President Donald Trump. Considerable evidence is emerging that Trump delayed crucial military aid to Ukraine in order to pressure the Ukrainian President, Volodomyr Zelensky, into investigating the family of his political rival. For his part, President Zelensky is less interested in the impeachment proceedings than ending the territorial dispute the United States military aid was intended to support: the bloody territorial dispute with Russia and pro-Russian separatists over Ukraine’s eastern provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk, collectively known as Donbas.
My research is concerned with the ways in which this territorial conflict has affected ordinary people in Ukraine. To understand the scope of the conflict, it is helpful to know the Federal Migration Service of Russian Federation states that there are 2.6 million refugees from Ukraine in Russia. With anywhere between 1.5 million 2 million internally displaced and the official death toll at 13,000, the war has significant implications for the future of Ukraine. The territorial dispute began after the 2013 Revolution of Dignity put the country on a path toward a stronger relationship with the European Union.
While some of the people in Luhansk and Donetsk provinces approved of the European trajectory, others held demonstrations demanding greater independence from Kyiv, and advocating for enhanced ties with Russian Federation. The first shots were fired in March 2014 when saboteurs entered the city of Slovyansk and took control of strategic sites. Within months, separatists in the region declared the Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), and Luhansk People’s Republic (LNR) respectively. The Ukrainian military has been seeking to regain control of the territory since.
I use a café owned and operated by veterans of the war, Café Patriot, as a window on the conflict itself. These are not ordinary veterans, however, but veterans of the volunteer battalions that rushed to defend their country in the initial stages of the conflict when the Ukrainian military was rusty from decades of inactivity and relatively weak.
As part of my research, I visited the café to speak with its owners. Even before entering, I was invited to pocket a handful of bullet casings from in a large crate by the door as a “souvenir.” With no end to the conflict in sight, the owners couldn’t see their supply of casings running out soon. Imagine a cross between stepping inside a Hard Rock Café and an historical museum’s diorama of the World War II partisan underground. The café was designed to be interactive. Not only did real Bazookas used at the front hang from the ceiling; but one of the owner’s retired Kalashnikov and bullet proof vest were available for patrons to try out. Until March 2018 when the café closed, it offered an opportunity to interact with military paraphernalia and veterans themselves while relaxing over coffee or savoring a pizza. To some ways of thinking, that made Café Patriot an example of militarization.
Bar area at Cafe Patriot
In militarization, people and institutions far from the fighting come to rely on the military for their wellbeing. It is useful to distinguish here between militarism - the conviction that a country must maintain a strong military capacity - and militarization, which refers more broadly to the spread of social and psychological preparedness for organized violence. Militarization is believed make wars easier to start and more difficult to finish by dulling critical thinking. It’s true that the Café Patriot provided an opportunity to interact with military paraphernalia: the real Kalashnikov held out a fantasied power to destroy; the name of the café connected national identity to nourishment; and to grab a napkin, one must pick up a deactivated land mine. But I argue that Café Patriot, with its macabre mix of death and entertainment, invites us to think again.
While it is true that the style of the venue might blur the separation between military and civilian, it does so in the interest of reminding people of war rather than blinding them to it. And while militarization is widely believed to be an insidious process, I show how the café’s proprietors acted in highly conscious and strategic ways to contest militarization, using, strangely enough, the trappings of militarization.
The café’s owners used the objects brought back from the conflict zone for two very different objectives: soothing demobilized soldiers on the one hand, and establishing channels of communication with citizens on the other. Understandably, the owners wanted to help other former fighters make a transition to civilian life rather going back to war as part of the contract army. They also wanted to improve their relationship with civilians. After all, like veterans returning from the Vietnam War to the United States, the veterans of the volunteer battalions did not find gratitude for their service or wide acceptance. Both efforts underscore veterans’ creative – and highly constructive - efforts to re-inhabit a fractured world.
The veterans also challenged the stereotype of militarized masculinity that is believed to help perpetuate war. Militarized forms of masculinity privilege using violence to resolve disputes, and reward the suppression of emotion. These veterans challenged militarized masculinity in some ways – especially in encouraging veterans to express their emotions - but not others.
These findings are significant, I suggest, because they challenge the definition of militarization as an unconscious and insidious process. Militarization is better thought of as a complex and ambivalent coming to terms with the reality of military conflict in non-military spaces. There is far more room for contestation in the process than has previously been explored in the literature on militarization.
Read the full article here: “Working through warfare in Ukraine: rethinking militarization in a Ukrainian theme café“
Greta Uehling teaches in the Program on Comparative and International Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Each blog post gives the views of the individual author(s) based on their published IFJP article. All posts published on ifjpglobal.org remain the intellectual property and copyright of the author or authors.