Paper short abstract:

This paper catalogues some of the fore-soundings of war designed, built and landscaped into the architecture and public spaces of Moscow and russia during the years leading up to russia's invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022.

Paper long abstract:

This paper catalogues some of the fore-soundings of war designed, built and landscaped into the architecture and public spaces of Moscow and russia during the years leading up to russia's invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. Making use of hindsight as a methodological device, it grapples with the question of whether these portents spoke to war's inevitability; and with issues concerning the anthropologist's ethical and methodological responsibility in the face of war's build-up, outbreak and aftermath. Further, it traces some of the ways in which the logics and practices of violence, war and coloniality traceable in Moscow's built environment are now being "exported" to the regions of Ukraine temporarily-occupied by the russian federation, in the guise of so-called "reconstruction" projects; and it briefly compares these "dark reconstruction" projects with other contexts in which post-Soviet russian state and private actors have sought to settle, reconstruct and disfigure places which its war machine has laid to waste, focusing in particular on Chechnya following the wars of 1994-1996 and 1999-2009; and Syria following the Russian intervention in the civil war (2015-present).

Please note: russia is purposefully written with a small "r" in this abstract to signal an activist stance towards the illegitimacy of the present-day russian federation as a political entity.