1869, Ep. 136 with Greta Uehling, author of Everyday War

12:10AM Jul 14, 2023

Speakers:

Jonathan Hall

Dr. Greta Uehling

Keywords:

war

book

ukraine

people

talk

stories

ivan

counter offensive

greta

ukrainian

live

donetsk

svetlana

speak

everyday

airport

image

coped

view

military

Welcome to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode, we speak with Dr. Greta Uehling, author of the new book, Everyday War: The Conflict over Donbas, Ukraine. Dr. Greta Uehling, is a lecturer at the University of Michigan, and is the author of a previous book Beyond Memory. Her new book seeks to tell the story of internal displacement in Ukraine in a way that is multifocal. And she uses the language of lived experience to take readers on a journey through Ukraine that deepens understanding and solidarity. We spoke to Greta about why our conventional understanding of war is incomplete, the importance of examining wars through the lenses of interpersonal relationships, and the concept of what she calls everyday war, the conscious and deliberate practice, people adopt to participate in the conflict. Hello, Greta, welcome to the podcast.

Hi, thanks for having me.

Well, I'm excited to talk to you about your timely book, Everyday War: The Conflict over Donbas, Ukraine, we see a lot of Ukraine in the news, we see a lot of the war through video and through print in the news media every day. But we are clearly not being shown a lot of what's actually going on, not just on a military level, but also on an emotional level. You argue that our conventional understandings of war are incomplete. Please tell us more about this. What are we missing?

You know, Jonathan, that's such a great question. And there's a lot of ways that I could answer it. But I think where I'd like to start is with the current counter offensive that is being launched in Ukraine as we speak. It's been going on for a few weeks now. And recently in the news, what what the sort of the prevailing story has to do with the lack of fast progress with the counter offensive that things simply aren't proceeding as rapidly as anticipated? And President Zelensky quipped that, you know, it isn't a Hollywood movie. It's a counter offensive, and it moves forward in a grindingly slow pace. And this is something that actually ties into the book very closely, because one of my very first discoveries was had to do with war not being the kind of unpredictable chaos that we might imagine from Hollywood films. And I think that the humanitarian I spoke with, named Carrillo is really a perfect example. Because when I met him, and we decided to work together, he said, Well, do you want to go to the, the red, yellow or green zone, and he had carefully calibrated these zones to manage the risk of, you know, both working and doing research in a war zone. And what that challenged was my previous conception, that war was chaotic, unpredictable, you know, via proceeding quite rapidly, when in fact, especially with ground wars, they proceed, it's much more like planned willed, and predictable destruction. Now, of course, there are airstrikes that are not predicted, there are many unpredictable elements. But when it comes to the counter offensive, it's really has to move forward, meter by meter yard by yard. And that's the really the only way to do it. And I think, really, there's a really important second dimension of what we're missing, which is kind of a methodological point that I'd like to make, you know, the, the images that are flowing across our computer screens and our television screens are by now painfully familiar, and many of the images show residences that have had their walls or their ceilings blasted off and the you know, the view from the viewer gets this image from the outside looking in to a residence. And by contrast, I think it's, it's important to think about like the cover of this book, and I'm holding it up now. What we see on the cover of the book everyday war is the view from the inside out, or sitting the picture is inside of looks like a living room. There's some plush toys in the corner, and then to one side, there is an open window, it appears that the glass has been busted out. And we can gaze out at a Ukrainian landscape. And I think that this image is a good metaphor for what I'm trying to do with the book, which is to compliment the view that we get through the news, which is primarily from the outside in, with a view from the inside out, right. And so that these views are very complementary. And what the view from within reveals is that war affects personal lives and personal relationships. And so, you know, we know the, the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a military, humanitarian and geopolitical crisis. But that's being accompanied by what I talked about in the book as a relational crisis in which families and friendships have been destabilized. And in these conditions, relationships may become microcosms of war, there are, you know, millions of families that have been torn apart, and millions of friendships that have been put on hold because of the war. And this has consequences both for the outcome of the war, and the well being of the people who are trying to live through it.

That's beautiful. You're describing the cover and the approach of looking from the inside out, and we need more books like yours, because the news media and just the culture at large is looking at it from the outside in. And I think if there were more books like yours and more reporters that were taking your approach, we probably would have less wars, because the stories that you present are so humanizing, whereas war generally takes sides and one side is horrible, and the others are heroes. And it's very easy to fall into camps. Whereas the stories that you present in the book, we can all relate to, we could all say, Oh, if I was in that situation, oh my gosh, those would be really difficult decisions to make. And you point that out, you highlight the importance of understanding war through interpersonal relationships of non combatants, civilians. I love the stories you have in your book in their stories of Larissa, Svetlana, Ivan, many others. Tell us some of the most evocative stories in the book that really speak to you.

Of course, so Svetlana is a very interesting one, because I met her in the western part of the country where she had fled, but she was from the Donetsk Republic. And when we sat down over lunch one day, she said, Greta, people have it all wrong about Donetsk. They think of it as you know, in terms of like the cliche, that war is how, and But what people don't fully realize is that it is help. That's true. But life also goes on, people go to work. They have babies, they get married, they have wedding. Life goes on, because because it has to. And to illustrate that point more clearly, she told me that she had lived through the siege of Donetsk, which was the the siege of the Donetsk airport, which is very, very intense fighting in which Russian forces were attempting to take over this airport. And it was, it was protracted, the Ukrainian fighters that defended that airport came to be known as cyborgs for surviving these intense battles. And throughout the siege of the airport, Svetlana had friends. And these friends were enlisted in opposite militaries. However, they she didn't know the cyborgs. But these were people who basically, you know, some of them got their salary from in from enlisting on the Ukrainian side. Other people were getting their salary from enlisting on the Russian side. So they weren't in a position to kill each other during the day at that precise moment, but they were enlisted in opposite militaries. But the part about the story that's really interesting is that Svetlana had made it her interpersonal politics to set aside geopolitics within her house. And so the rule was that we do not talk about politics. We do not talk about the war. You're welcome to come here. We will drink tea. We will eat cake we will relax. We will talk about Everything about war, we will talk about the weather. We will talk about what we had for lunch today, we'll talk about our health. We'll talk about everything but war. And this is a really important politics. Because, you know, I wrote the book in dialogue with this school of thought about everyday peace that seeks to elevate the importance of civilians and non elites, and to say that, you know, these individuals are important to politics as well. Now, I think that that's important because it shows what's possible. And at the same time, those interpersonal politics that Svetlana adopted early in the war, would no longer be possible after the full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Yeah, for the listeners, I think it is interesting to note that it was considered a conflict up until the invasion and that it was the labor of war. And you, you had mentioned everyday peace, that that's a that's a term that you, you have, mainly beside, as you say, in your book, the opposite of that is everyday war, you describe it as quote, it describes the conscious and deliberate practice people adopt to participate in a conflict. And you also state everyday war is distinguished from war itself, by its objective, which is not to destroy an enemy, but rather to preserve human connections and affirm national belonging. Tell us more about this,

Hmmm That's so important to the book, because I found that this everyday form of war in which non combatant civilians are deeply engaged in the war effort produced these ethics of caring. And what I mean by that is just that I discerned a pattern in which many decisions were based on safeguarding others or tending to their well being. And that pattern supports what feminist ethicists of care have been arguing for some time, which is that, you know, the kind of morality that we typically think about that's based on the autonomous and rational individual is really only one kind. There are also ethics, that pertain to how we relate to each other. So Paul Ricoeur, said it very beautifully when he said that ethics has to do with how we live well with and for others with and for others. And I think that that's so important, because pretty much everywhere I looked, I saw that people were thinking morally about human vulnerabilities in a warzone. And every day making difficult choices about where and how to care. So a really mundane example that one woman offered me was, should I should I cook in the shelter for the internally displaced tonight down the street, or should I cook for my family and my home. And that's just one small example. But they have much larger repercussions if we think about, for example, the the volunteer body collectors that I talked about, at the end of the book, you know, in the some phases of the war, actually, they're still active today. But they, they, they were able to go behind enemy lines to retrieve fallen soldiers. And so, and they did this without pay, without equipment using tools they brought from home, driving on mind roads, literally risking their lives and their limbs to retrieve these human remains, because they cared so much about the emotional well being of the family members, and they wanted those family members to have a least a little bit of a peace of mind if they couldn't have peace itself. And so in the towards the end of the book, I talk about terrorists and his you know, his moral thinking about why he left his his retirement to do this work and it had everything to do with caring about fellow Ukrainians.

Interesting, interesting. Yeah, I mean, there's there's so many gut wrenching stories but also heartwarming stars within the book. It I'm not sure where the research came from. But I do recall hearing a while ago that people's mental health, it was a counterintuitive finding that people's mental health actually improved during war time. Which is, which is odd. I mean, there's obviously so much grief and sorrow and sadness and, and, you know, very negative emotions. But at the same time, for those who survived, their mental health was better, because there weren't... the choices were very clear. It wasn't like, what am I going to do today, I could do all these different things, it was clear what you had to do. And so during wartime, people had a clarity that they didn't get after afterwards. Not that we want to wish that upon anyone, but it just the whole idea of you bringing in the interpersonal, and the clear, maybe, and maybe not so clear choices that people have to make, are there any stories where you felt that you could, you could really relate to them the choice that they had to make?

There was many, many stories like that. But you know, I want to just respond to what you were saying about mental health in in wartime. And that brings us to Ivan, we meet Ivan in this chapter where I'm talking about, like the range of emotional responses to war. And I'm trying to kind of map this very emotional geography of how people coped. And one of the insights of the psychologists and social workers that I interviewed was that there was kind of like a, there were sort of two complementary and yet divergent tendencies. One was to minimize the war, and the violence. And the other was to interrogate that very minimization. So the way that the social workers in the psychologists put it was emotional mitosis, right, the splitting of the population into people that basically got so used to war that it became normal for them. And this other group of people that said, hey, this shouldn't be treated as normal. Right? We have to maintain our level of risk in order to remain psychologically healthy, we have to read we have to engage in self preservation. And I think that Ivan, Ivan story brilliantly encapsulates this dichotomy because he fled the east with his wife and two children and actually set up a, a shelter for other internally displaced people eventually. And yet his parents stayed behind because they had a, a dacha, and a garden, and it was, you know, they were elderly, it was they were they were used to living, they didn't feel like they would do well in displacement. And so, one day Ivan's mother called him up. And, you know, the first thing she does is she complains about a mortar strike because this mortar strike has ripped apart their apple tree, which is very upsetting to his his mother. And then the conversation goes on. And the next thing that the grandmother wants to talk about is, can't Ivan send her grandchild to visit? And what Ivan Ivan has this bifocal view of the situation, right, he realizes that his mother is not putting two and two together, she is inviting her grandchild to play in a garden, where there are likely to be mortar strikes. And in fact, there was a mortar strike last night. And so he encapsulates this in a way that really shows us that people did develop skills for minimizing and coping with the violence. But that isn't to say that it was that isn't to say that it's not a terrible reality and actually a very dangerous reality.

Yeah, it's it sounds a little bit like our country's experience with COVID. Nothing to see here. But now, interestingly enough, there's also a section of the book, chapter seven, where you, you take the everyday war concept and bring it to the next level. And you say everyday sci fi where where the experience of war is, so crazy that it's almost like you're in a movie. Tell us about this.

Hmm. So in the everyday sci fi chapter, I talk about how in In the beginning of the war, we had these, we have these discourses. In Russia, there was an anti Ukrainian discourse in Ukraine, there's an anti-Russian discourse. But over time, these discourses become embodied and they become part of a social reality. And when that social reality is accompanied by military violence and war, people found that their once very familiar surroundings started to seem very strange. And they had to find a different way of inhabiting these spaces. It was so strange that it felt like they were living in some sort of a science fiction film. And so to make that more concrete for me, one woman said, you know, we had a month where the dogs didn't bark, it was complete silence, they had gone mute. And I and I use that example to not only talk about how the familiar becomes strange, but to think very carefully about how people had to find these somatic ways of dealing with their surroundings.

Interesting, interesting. Wow. Well, there's, there's so much in your book that I think needs to and that's why we're publishing it that needs to be heard. And I'm just grateful for the stories that you've brought into this book, to really humanize the experience. And you use the term emotional geography. I think that's a really interesting term that your your book tackles the emotional geography of Ukraine, and I encourage anyone listening to this to really take a look at credit as new book Everyday War: The Conflict over Donbas, Ukraine. Thank you so much, Dr. Uehling.

Thanks for having me.

That was Greta YuLing, author of the new book, Everyday War: The Conflict over Donbas, Ukraine. You can purchase this new book as an affordable paperback at our website, cornell press.cornell.edu and use the promo code 09POD to save 30% off. If you live in the UK, use the discount code CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combinedacademic.co.uk Thank you for listening to 1869, The Cornell University Press Podcast.