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Paper short abstract:

This paper describes an encounter with a long-term ethnographic informant and friend in September 2022, shortly after Russia's 'partial mobilization', when he tried to convince me why I should fight in Russia's 'Special Military Operation' i.e. the invasion of Ukraine.

Paper long abstract:

This paper describes an encounter with a long-term ethnographic informant and friend in September 2022, shortly after Russia's 'partial mobilization', when he tried to convince me (of the moral and material reasons) why I should fight in Russia's 'Special Military Operation' i.e. the invasion of Ukraine. At the time the Russian Federation promised foreigners a fast track to citizenship if they signed a contract to participate in the war. As my visa was running out I said that I had no option but to leave Russia; no option but one, I joked: to sign-up for the SVO. Much to my incomprehension, this man proceeded to argue for the advantages of this option. The paper takes this perplexing encounter as an entry point to think about and with a variant of 'otherness' that has been little theorized in anthropology: the otherness produced by war. Can anthropologists take 'seriously' something they find not only ostensibly unfathomable or ontologically alien, but also morally reprehensible and politically unconscionable? Is the alterity one is presented with here moral, political, ontological or all of these? Carl Schmitt argued famously for the absoluteness of the friend-enemy distinction that canceled any and all aspirations to ethical universalism. Yet what happens at the micro-interpersonal level of the anthropological encounter when putative friends get re-cast as representatives of 'unfriendly' states?