*Originally published in 2023 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

This short article seeks to analyse the Ukraine war as the first war of the Anthropocene. Political discussion and media coverage of military conflict tends to always point beyond literal, strategic, or battlefield questions, to those of existential meaning. Thus, wars are always discursively framed in the context of the fears and concerns of their times. In International Relations, military conflict (the Ukraine as the ‘final twentieth century war’) and imaginaries of the Anthropocene (as a ‘posthuman’ political aesthetic) have been largely treated separately, as if war was somehow ‘modernist’ and the Anthropocene ‘postmodern’. Two topics, two temporalities, two methodological frameworks, two different scholarly communities. However, if the Anthropocene is the contemporary condition we are in, rather than an organisational and policy question of addressing climate change, then we should be able to see how the loss of confidence in liberal modernity and its affirmative imaginaries of progress is played out in this, as in any other, policy sphere.

In fact, the Ukraine war seems to be a perfect case study of the Anthropocene. On the strategic level, little seems to be happening at present with the war stuck territorially, the Ukrainian summer counter offensive having made little headway against Russia’s massed minefield defences. However, on the international level, Ukraine appears to be garnering more and more diplomatic weight along with high-level statements of political support and promises of more military equipment.

Recently, the European Union has risked its own political unity by strengthening support for........

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