Issue #134 Speeds and Vectors of Energy Terrorism

Speeds and Vectors of Energy Terrorism

Svitlana Matviyenko

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Still from Chornobyl 22, a documentary film by Oleksiy Radynski, 2023. Camera: Max Savchenko. Courtesy of The Reckoning Project.

Issue #134
March 2023










Notes
1

Jairus Victor Grove, Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World (Duke University Press, 2019), 75.

2

Kevin Liptak, “White House Says It’s No Longer Calling Potential Russian Invasion of Ukraine ‘Imminent,’” CNN, February 22, 2022 .

3

See more in journalist and linguist Volodymyr Ilchenko’s commentary for Ukrinform .

4

“Oil Spill Accident in the Kerch Strait in November 2007,” Commission on the Protection of the Black Sea Against Pollution, 2011 .

5

Anna Engelhardt, “Adversarial Infrastructure: The Crimean Bridge,” Mute Magazine, July 7, 2020 .

6

Grove, Savage Ecology.

7

Grove, Savage Ecology, 67–71.

8

Grove, Savage Ecology, 70.

9

Serhii Plokhii, Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation, From 1470 to the Present (Basic Books, 2017), 13 (Kindle edition).

10

Grove, Savage Ecology, 70.

11

Grove, Savage Ecology, 60.

12

Svitlana Matviyenko, “Nuclear Cyberwar: From Energy Colonialism to Energy Terrorism,” e-flux journal, no. 126 (April 2022) .

13

For “state of exception” see Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922), trans. G. Schwab (University of Chicago Press, 2005), 13.

14

“Special Operations Warfare,” Britannica Online .

15

Svitlana Matviyenko, “Terror Environments,” trans. Pilipp Goll, in Aus dem Nebel des Krieges: Die Gegenwart der Ukraine, ed. Katharina Raabe and Kateryna Mishchenko (Suhrkamp, 2023).

16

Deborah Lubken, “Remembering the Straw Man: The Travels and Adventures of Hypodermic,” in The History of Media and Communication Research: Contested Memories, ed. D. W. Park & J. Pooley (Peter Lang Publishing, 2008); Michael Sproule, “Progressive Propaganda Critics and The Magic Bullet Myth,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 6, no. 3 (1989).

17

Edward L. Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion (Boni and Liveright, 1923).

18

Reuters Staff, “Russia Inaugurates Cathedral Without Mosaics of Putin, Stalin,” Reuters, June 14, 2020 .

19

Selenius is quoted as saying: “It is best not to be born at all; and next to that, it is better to die than to live; and this is confirmed even by divine testimony.” Aristotle, Eudemus (354 BCE), surviving fragment quoted in Plutarch, Moralia, Consolatio ad Apollonium, sec. xxvii, trans. S. H. (1st cen. CE).

20

Sarah T. Roberts, Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media (Yale University Press, 2021).

21

See more in Matviyenko, “Terror Environments.”

22

Daria Getmanova and Svitlana Matviyenko, “Producing the Subject of Deportation: Filtration Processes During the Russia-Ukraine War,” Sociologica 16, no. 2 (2022).

23

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Svitlana Matviyenko, Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 5.

24

Atef Abu Saif, “Sleepless in Gaza: Israeli Drone War on the Gaza Strip,” Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, March 2014 .

25

Jessica Purkiss and Jack Serle, “Obama’s Covert Drone War in Numbers: Ten Times More Strikes Than Bush,” Bureau of Investigative Journalism, January 17, 2017 .

26

Briar Steward, “Kyiv Police Praised for Shooting Down Drone, But Officials Say Leave Air Defence to Military,” CBC, October 18, 2022 .

27

See .

28

Dyer-Witheford and Matviyenko, Cyberwar and Revolution, 5.

29

Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air (2002), trans. Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Semiotext(e), 2009), 18.

30

Sloterdijk, Terror from the Air, 14, 25, 22.

31

Matviyenko, “Nuclear Cyberwar.”

32

Marc Santora and Andrew E. Kramer, “In Ukraine, a Nuclear Plant Held Hostage,” New York Times, August 23, 2022 .

33

See reports by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air conducted as part of its investigative project “Financing Putin’s War: Fossil Fuel Imports from Russia During the Invasion of Ukraine” .

34

Cara Daggett, “Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 47, no. 1 (2018): 27–28.

35

Daggett, “Petro-masculinity,” 30.

36

The alliance between Western democracies and Middle East authoritarianism has been sufficiently problematized. Meanwhile, the West’s alliance with the Russian Federation is ignored by most critics, who, consciously or unconsciously, turn away from the Russian extractivist economic model established in nineteenth-century czarist Russia and kept in consistent operation during the Soviet and post-Soviet eras. As a result, when critics write about fossil-fuel fascism, the most outrageous case of it remains unaccounted for.

37

“The Indigenous World 2021: Russian Federation,” International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs .

38

Robert Mandel, The Meaning of Military Victory (Lynne Rienner, 2006).

39

Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Harvard University Press, 2011); Thom Davies, “Slow Violence and Toxic Geographies: ‘Out of Sight’ to Whom?” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 40, no. 2 (April 2019): 3. Pollution has also been described as a form of colonialism in Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism (Duke University Press, 2021).

40

Svitlana Matviyenko, “Pollution as a Weapon of War,” CLIMATE: The Right to Breathe / Caring for the Commons, ed. H. Chu et al. (L’Internationale Online and K Verlag, 2022).

41

Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019), 92.

42

Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 2.

The essay is based on Svitlana Matviyenko’s Marshall McLuhan Lecture delivered at Transmediale in Berlin on January 31, 2023.