Everyday War: The Conflict Over Donbas, Ukraine by Greta Lynn Uehling. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2023).

Reviewed by Jessica Storey-Nagy, Indiana University Bloomington

For some children living in Donbas, Ukraine, the sound of flying bullets has become so commonplace it sounds like rainfall. Bullets sound like rain. This striking simile, one of many in Greta Lynn Uehling’s sixth chapter of her new book, Everyday War: The Conflict over Donbas, Ukraine, illustrates just one of the normative and moral realignments that civilians, veterans, and service members alike often make to survive wartime. In her monograph, Uehling turns “everyday peace” on its head, and coins the term “everyday war” as “the conscious and deliberate practices people used to participate in the conflict” in Donbas (p. 14). Uehling’s work provides a service to those who study national belonging, care, conflict, and relationality because in conducting interviews with internally displaced persons (IDPs) and citizens still living with conflict, she finds that peaceful acts of care can and do contribute to acts of war.

Her work begins with a review of the Russo-Ukrainian War as it has developed since 2014. Uehling then addresses how conflict has affected the current and former citizens of Donbas, taking their relationships as her subject of inquiry. She is concerned with how conflict, “undeclared war,” changes them. The bulk of her data is ethnographic, collected from 2015 to 2017 in semi-structured and unstructured interviews, and through participant-observation. Uehling conducted fieldwork all over Ukraine: in western, central, and eastern Ukraine, at Kramotorsk (near the front), and in Donbas itself. The book is comprised of nine short, clearly-written chapters filled with ethnographic vignettes. Chapter themes are, sequentially: regional identity, militarization, lateral peace-building efforts, family structure, tactical kinship, crisis ordinariness, practical orientalism (when the ordinary becomes surreal), the ethics of care, and moral restructuring. Each theme sheds light on the surreal living conditions people must endure in today’s Ukraine. For instance, Uehling explains how a grandmother living in Donbas, where her backyard is regularly shelled, could insist her young granddaughter come to stay with her for the summer, as war reorganizes and reconfigures perceptions of normality, of safety. Uehling writes on how IDPs and those living in conflict zones process extreme violence, sometimes purposefully minimizing its effects and sometimes discursively slandering those who do, as they reconfigure an ethics of care. She brings readers to the home of a woman who cares for her sniper-father by sending him gloves so his aim will be true, then to the conflict zone itself, where volunteers collect fallen soldiers’ bodies. Ethnographies of war like this one are rare and valuable because they are difficult to conduct. Uehling, however, never passes moral judgement on her subjects. She writes relatedly, and is open about the arduous nature of carrying out such a study by consistently positioning herself in the text as an interlocutor and researcher with vulnerability. She provides her reader a kind of methodological transparency, fostering trust.

Uehling’s convincing central argument is that the objective of everyday war, as defined above, is “not to destroy an enemy but rather to preserve human connections and affirm national belonging” (p. 160). Each chapter provides an example of how that preservation and affirmation are enacted in everyday life. In Chapter Two, Uehling challenges existing theories of militarization by describing Lviv’s affective Café Patriot. Militarization’s invisible hand becomes visible and invites open dialogue in the veteran-owned café’s décor which includes camouflage nets, grenades, and crates of bullet castings. In contrast to typical narratives of the nefarious process of militarization, Uehling’s account includes an ethics of care among men. As veterans in the café discuss their experiences in conflict zones, they maintain a type of masculinity “that includes emotional vulnerability” and help to foster an atmosphere that awakens “civilians’ critical awareness” (p. 50). There, civilians and veterans create a new discourse about national belonging and societal change. In chapters Three and Four, Uehling describes how “the intersecting forces of military conflict and national rhetoric” realign and preserve friendships and romantic relationships in varied ways (p. 52). Sometimes residents and IDPs participate in peace-building activities by actively avoiding political discussions – maintaining a physical space where violence born of heated discourse is less likely – while others excuse the words of friends and family members because they understand them to be “zombified” by the media (p. 73). Sometimes, conflict leads individuals to develop a new ethics of care and to recast gender norms, significantly altering their life-paths. Interestingly, ideals of “the nation” make and break all kinds of relationships, where having a friend in the right place at the right time can mean a difference between life and death. Chapter Five illustrates that this realignment of families and friends with or against “the nation” is not rewarded by the state, where great personal sacrifices are rarely acknowledged or even noticed (p.105). The criticality of relationships during wartime is perhaps best illustrated by a discussion on “tactical kinship,” as care for one’s kin can contribute directly to the fighting. In other words, care for some leads to violence for others as “[n]ationality works through, and is configured by relationality” (p. 106).

Uehling makes a substantial contribution to studies of national belonging and political group formation, and to those who are concerned about the material conditions that accompany discursive power flows of disinformation campaigns, especially during wartime. Her voice is reminiscent of Carolyn Nordstrom’s, whose ethnographies of war were pioneering. However, Uehling does not write about violence itself per se, rather about how violence changes relationality, and how relationality is connected to other phenomena, like political discourse and state structure. Further, Uehling blurs the line between studies of nation and state by tracking ideals of sovereignty and national belonging as they grow, change, and are rewritten – by separatists and proud Ukrainians alike. She illuminates how critical a functioning state is to feelings of belonging in a place where at least one IDP left home because “there was no government at all…” (p. 109).

However, this work’s most valuable asset is that it is truly accessible and well-suited for undergraduate courses. Further, it could easily be harnessed as a teaching tool for graduate students and by others interested in the anthropology of care, political anthropology, peace and conflict studies, and by philosophers concerned with moral repositioning. Uehling’s clear, raw ethnography should be shared far and wide, especially among students and scholars as we all work to understand the human costs and trans-national effects of the present Russo-Ukrainian War.