Martial necropolitics: The position of the combatant in the Russo-Ukrainian war

Abstract

The Russo-Ukrainian War has produced a myriad of necropolitical discourses regarding the justification of death and the subjugation of lives to potential death. Contemporary necropolitical scholarship has primarily focused on the civilian, subaltern dimension of this paradigm in a wider context, yet in this war, combatants from the opposing armed forces are the individuals most consistently embedded in these conditions of potential death. How, then, is the potential death of the combatant justified and legitimized? Through a critical engagement with the concept of the border as the front, this article will explore how the subjugation of Ukrainian and Russian combatants to the conditions of potential death is discursively justified through a framework of the necropolitical logics of survival and martyrdom. Through these logics, two competing necropolitical regimes of truth have arisen, nevertheless leading to the same conclusion – the mobilized bodies of the combatants at the front – yet promising different versions of a life beyond death itself.