[PeDAGoG] Fwd: WAR BY OTHER NAMES / a-summit-in-acts

[Alessandra Pomarico]

Dear Friends, Comrades,
we would like to invite you this Sunday to join in what we hope will be the
first of several
encounters thinking through this moment, the current invasion of Ukraine
by the Russian military, this war in a sea of wars we have been
assembling and thinking through over these last 22 months.

Our friends Olga Kopenkina and Dmitry Vilensky have been at the heart of
trying to bring together and create this space of assembly.

Anna Engelhardt, Josh Nadeau, Larissa Babij, Elena Ischenko are among
those invited who have said they will be able to join and help us
construct a space of sharing questions, positions.

Below you will find login details and an introduction for Sunday.


_____________________________________
SUNDAY'S SUMMIT

PLEASE NOTE:DIFFERENT START TIME
DIFFERENT LOGIN
February 27th, 202212:00 PM (EST)

WAR BY
OTH ER
NAM ES
https://zoom.us/join

Meeting ID: 934 0924 8883
Passcode: Exter


__________________________________
INTRODUCTION

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.

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.

INVITATION

This Sunday, February 27th, we would like to invite you to the first
encounter and share with you Olga Kopenkina's introduction:

We will begin this act with an analysis of the current moment created by
the Russian invasion and bombing of Ukraine and Belarus being used as a
military platzdarm, focusing on post-cold war colonialist expansion and
the human cost of sustaining national sovereignty and territorial
integrity.

With Ukraine being now invaded and Kyiv apparently turned into a
'theater of war,' how does the international left address concepts such
as 'national sovereignty' and 'territorial integrity' in a situation
when a geopolitical positioning and proximity to the imperial power
create a state of permanent vulnerability?

Left political thinker Tariq Ali has recently suggested that 'national
sovereignty' is a myth created by liberal ideologists to submit smaller
and weaker nations to the international order dominated by unequal power
dynamics. At the same time, it's a nation that is under attack right
now. Meanwhile, in Ukraine’s neighboring nation Belarus, voices worn
down by two-years of political crisis, ongoing suppression of human
rights, including its own military threat from Russia, call for
reconciliation and submission.

Can we mobilize a potential Left movement (that includes "new left":
feminist movements, movements for black life, LGBTQ+, indigenous
nations, struggles, and others) that resists the logic of permanent
vulnerability within the capitalist geopolitical divisions and create
solidarity in support of vulnerable nations and peoples in struggle?

We invite you to think with us along these lines.

__________________________________

Please note, for those who have expressed interest in these weeks to join
our assemblings, we have made a list to send to you each week the details
for joining.

If for any reason you prefer to not receive these updates, we have made it
easier.

You can simply write an email to:
assembling-leave at 16beavergroup.org
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