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Penned from the crooked timber of humanity

Rubashov, Koestler, and the Theory of Relative Maturity

Rubashov, Koestler, and the Theory of Relative Maturity

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Awaiting the outcome of his secret trial in a cold Soviet prison, the Old Bolshevik Rubashov reflects on a long and bloody career as Party revolutionary. In his meditations, Rubashov attempts to make sense of the arc of history. How could, despite the idealism of Soviet socialism, reality unfurl to produce a merciless authoritarian state? How could the culmination of his and his comrades’ revolutionary efforts result in Stalinism? He makes no attempt to excuse himself of his own involvement in the violent work of achieving the liberation of the proletariat. Though fate has cast him into his cell, he just as easily could have ended up on its opposite side.

The output of his musings is an explanatory framework for human political development, christened the theory of relative maturity.

Rubashov’s theory posits that human societies do not follow a linear trajectory to political and economic emancipation, but rather swing back and forth – much like a pendulum – from dictatorship to democracy, contingent upon a given society’s inexperience and mastery over their technological environment. Dictatorships emerge from the early stages of material development, when societies are ‘immature’ and new technological capabilities are alien to them; democracies are only earned once the masses have conquered these technologies.

With every new technical development, there is a subsequent and protracted period of collective learning. Political maturity can thus never be measured against some objective standard: it can only be assessed relative to the stage of the society’s material development. Once mass-consciousness rises, and political subjects understand their new technologies, as well as the consequences thereof, often taking years, decades, and generations, democracy is ultimately and inevitably attained. This lasts until the arrival of a new technological epoch, whereupon the masses are then cast back into relative immaturity as tyranny resurfaces. 

The Industrial Revolution opened up the possibility of global supply chains and ostensibly limitless economic growth, yet brought with it new forms of war, conquest, and repression. The dawn of the twentieth century was accompanied by the full force of new age weaponry, brought to bear on untold casualties during the First World War. Chemical weapons and heavy artillery the counterweight to penicillin and widespread commercial travel. How many farmhands from across Russia’s great expanse were sent to the Eastern Front to witness this awesome power firsthand – to see their comrades thrown into the meatgrinder and succumb to these Industrial Age horrors? How many then, fewer still, did return to their motherlands to see the grounds they once sowed be torn apart by great metal machines, swapping their ploughs for pickaxes? The speed with which industrialization transformed societies into something totally alien gave scarce time for this transition to be properly comprehended. The resulting vacuum, borne in the tempest of nationalism and ideology that marked the early twentieth century, was easily filled with the order and security of empire.

The flaw in the Soviet system, Rubashov argues, was its presumption that mass-consciousness scaled with technological development, and that all what was required to achieve liberation was the forcing out of the old guard to bring the idyllic society into being: The exorcism of the Rousseauian man’s corrupting socio-material influences. Similarly, the naïve idealism of the liberal West did not escape Rubashov’s analysis – itself equally incapable of making sense of the loom, the steam engine, the radio. “The capitalist system will collapse before the masses have understood it.” 

However totalising and however accurate, the treatise Rubashov sets forth holds considerable value for making sense of our time. The early 1990s saw the end of the Soviet bloc and the advent of the Internet. Once thought to be the tools with which the world chart a path to unambiguous liberalization, the age of the digital has, in almost equal measure, been harnessed for repression, control, and global strategic contest. Social media burgeoned in the 2000s to do untold damage to democracy, to interpersonal relationships, and to the human psyche. No sooner than when we began to collectively understand these effects did the hype of the next thing – the vogue and mystique of artificial intelligence – usurp social media’s place. For decades, we have blanketed the world in hydrocarbons and pesticides while remaining ignorant to the latent health effects of microplastics and forever chemicals: the former having penetrated the blood-brain barrier and the latter rendering the entire planet’s rainwater undrinkable. 

We’re looking ahead, we don’t have time to look back. Move fast and break things until nothing but a trail of destruction is wrought in our wake. Quantum, gene-editing, the outer limits of space – let’s break those next.

What is perhaps distinct about our time to that of Rubashov’s is the uniquely countervailing effect our modern technologies have towards mass enlightenment. The diminution of attention spans, social fracturing, and simulacra of modern social media, the sustained cognitive impairment from environmental pollutants, the asymmetric warfare capabilities offered by the surveillance state and lethal autonomous weapons systems: all work against our global political development and force the pendulum backwards, closer to tyranny.

As these cascading challenges scale, and our collective ability to understand and intervene diminish, the call for authoritarian leadership may resound ever more clearly. Our modern global economic system is a vestige of the Bretton-Woods Post-War lull. Its short-term prosperity is unravelling, and the world’s governments can only kick a can so far. The reverberating whiplash unto the next generations that will soon be felt is nothing short of unbridled intergenerational warfare. In times of uncertainty, fear, mistrust, and hostility rouse the authoritarian resident within each of us – a call which is beckoned by those willing to push demagoguery and domination. 

It is unclear if Arthur Koestler, the author of the 1941 novel Darkness at Noon in which Rubashov and the theory of relative maturity are located, is arguing vicariously through the Old Bolshevik, or merely confining the theory inside his character as a form of cathartic release for his own participation in bloody revolution. Rubashov, a political prisoner, is of course doomed: the outcome of his trial known before it has begun. Rubashov dies, and so too, the theory of relative maturity with him, never reaching its complete expression. Koestler, however, survived through Stalinism to see the other side of the Iron Curtain. A journalist-cum-intelligence operative fighting against European fascism in the 1930s, Koestler became disillusioned with communism’s ideals after his imprisonment in Spain, where he bore witness to almost daily executions of his fellow revolutionaries. The Party’s continuous devaluing of human life and ugly commitment to ends-justifying-means saw him abandon his support shortly before the Second World War. Koestler then joined the British government’s anti-communist foreign propaganda wing, funding much of his work and casting a long shade of doubt as to the integrity with which he advanced Rubashov’s thesis.

As a totalising framework for history and human political development, the theory of relative maturity is not recognised among the ranks of Hegel’s Spirit, Fukuyama’s end of history, or Diamond’s guns, germs, and steel. Yet, its depiction of humanity as in perpetual tension with its technological environment – and thus itself – reveals valuable insight into our current moment. At this eleventh hour, will we overcome our collective inability to properly understand our techno-historical standing? Or will the pendulum thrust us backwards into a dark age of despotism?

The Russo–Ukrainian Civil War

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The following article was written by Alexey Ilin & Roman Kusaiko

The war between Russia and Ukraine is not an ordinary conflict between two states. The men (and women) across the trenches speak the same language, share the same traditions, and their faces also look very similar. Modern Ukraine and Russia are only one generation old, and the age of both an average Ukrainian and an average Russian is a little over 40, meaning the majority of people from the belligerent states were actually born in the same country – the Soviet Union. Thus, a conflict between people from the same cultural and historical background has many characteristics of a civil war, and defining the Russo–Ukrainian conflict as such may actually help to better understand the actions of authorities, seemingly illogical decisions, and the protracted yet brutal character of the ongoing crisis.

One People?

Even one year since the war broke out, many Western people do not understand why Russia invaded Ukraine, or why the so-called ‘special military operation’ could be the only way to overcome the boiling crisis between the two neighbours. Consequently, there was no surprise Western media portrayed Russia, and Putin as its leader, as an aggressor. The situation is trickier with the Ukrainians. Some of them, especially those sympathetic to Russia in Donbass, have no doubts. Others still refuse to understand why Russians would need to fight them. In a video from the warzone published by the Telegram channel ‘Karymat’, a Ukrainian soldier decries a paramilitary fighter from the Wagner Group: ‘Am I not a Russian to you? Is a Ukrainian not a Russian? Our grandfathers were fighting together, were they not Russians? Why did you come to kill my children?’ 

Back in 2014, Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who was still a comedian at that time, remarked, ‘I want all of us to speak one language and understand each other … We cannot stand against the Russian people because it’s the same people’. In the 2021 Direct Line annual broadcast, Russia’s president Vladimir Putin also called Russians and Ukrainians ‘one people’. However, this time Zelenskyy (by now Ukraine’s president) rebuffed Putin, stating, ‘We are definitely not one people. Yes, we share common history, remembrance, neighbourhood, relatives, our victory over fascism [Nazi Germany] … But we, I repeat once again, are not one people … Each of us has his own way.’ Nevertheless, even after invading Ukraine, Putin continued to call Russians and Ukrainians ‘one people.’ He also expressed partial agreement that the conflict could be called a civil war albeit between people living in two different states.

The ‘civil’ aspect of the Russo–Ukrainian conflict can also be attributed to the idea that both nations belong to the same civilisation. Russian history starts from the Kievan Rus’, which was located primarily on the territories of modern Russia and Ukraine, while also encompassing minor parts of modern Poland and the Baltic states. The feudal fragmentation and upcoming Mongol invasion destroyed the Kievan Rus’ as a state and social system. Some of its regions fell under Polish control, while others became Mongol vassal states. Only after centuries of struggle and the rise of the Tsardom of Russia did broad territories of Kievan Rus’ fall under Russian control. Shared history, ethnicity, religion, and linguistic similarities are among the reasons why Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians are considered ‘one people.’ For instance, according to the maps in Samuel Huntington’s 1993 essay ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ and his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Ukraine belongs to the Orthodox civilisation, which is centred around Russia and the Russian people.

In Russia itself, a similar civilisational concept was embodied by the ideology of the so-called ‘Russian World’ (Rus. Русский мир). Vladislav Surkov, a well-known ex-aide of Putin, also made multiple attempts to describe the concept, finally extending it from the strictly territorial or linguistic criteria to almost any Russian sympathisers who share Russian values and ideas. Unlike Huntington, Surkov was not a scientist but rather a bureaucrat, politician and writer who described the concept in strictly utilitarian means, resulting in a long, vague and ambiguous definition. Unsurprisingly, his political strategy failed.

Russian territorial expansion went in several directions. Eastern and Southern expansions took place relatively late in comparison to expansions in the European direction. This lack of clarity today allows Russia to justify its advancements in the East and South. On the other hand, the criteria of respect regarding Russian power and military overextends the concept without sufficient compensation, which allows Russian opposition and pro-Western Ukrainians to criticise the motives of current ruling elite and Russo–Ukrainian unity in general.

Nevertheless, as part of the Russian Empire, within the Soviet Union and even as a sovereign state, Ukraine has had some of the strongest ties with Russia in the entire post-Soviet era, with the exception of Belarus, which formed a ‘Union State’ supranational structure with Russia. As of 2021, 65% of Ukrainians use Russian language in daily communication. After the conflict in Eastern Ukraine broke out in 2014, up to five million Ukrainians moved to Russia for permanent residence. Leaked videos and interviews by Western media confirm that the Ukrainian military still uses Russian language on a regular basis. As for employment – Russian recruiters do not see any difference between Russian and Ukrainian job candidates, as the latter do not need a visa or a work permit. Nevertheless, due to the gradually escalating conflict and terrorist attacks in Russian cities, a thorough background check may be conducted. Finally, Russians are the second-largest ethnic group in Ukraine, while almost three million Russian citizens identify as Ukrainian. Regardless of the polls and recent geopolitical developments, the idea that Russia and Ukraine belong to one civilisation is still credible based on historical and factual data. However, such an idea has its limitations – the political and ideological dynamics of the last decade indicate its continuous erosion.

What Makes the Civil War ‘Civil’?

Most dictionaries define civil war as a ‘war fought between groups of people living in the same country’ (e.g. Cambridge Dictionary). Some definitions call it a conflict between a state and non-state actors in the state’s territory. These wars can be classified into two types of conflict: when the insurgents are trying to secede from the state, and when they are trying to overthrow the central government. Secession may also pursue one of two goals: either to establish a new independent state (as South Sudan did in 2011) or to join a neighbouring state (as Texas joined the United States in 1845 after seceding from Mexico in 1836).

The term ‘civil war’ is frequently used to describe a conflict that is not fought on an international level. In other words, a civil war is a ‘’domestic or ‘national’ war – fought between members of the same nation. The terms ‘country’ and ‘nation’ are usually treated as identical, even though they may represent different entities. According to National Geographic, ‘the word ‘nation’ can also refer to a group of people who share a history, traditions, culture and, often, language – even if the group does not have a country of its own.’ We have a broad array of evidence that Russians and Ukrainians are still very close to each other in terms of their history, culture and heritage, as well as the fact that they often speak the same language. Today, these peoples belong to two different countries, but we understand that several million Ukrainians live in Russia, several million Russians live in Ukraine, and each of them calls their country of residence ‘home.’ Moreover, both peoples used to share the same mother country – the Soviet Union. Even though this country ceased to exist more than 30 years ago, the ties between members of the Russo–Ukrainian nation were not severed, and the people’s commonality has largely survived the political decoupling. The ‘Russian World’ lived on as a ghost of a greater nation that used to exist within a larger country. Therefore, we may presume that the international war between the Russian and Ukrainian states also has a ‘civil war’ dimension – a conflict within the one Russo–Ukrainian nation.

Historical Repetitions

The current conflict seems shocking because it happened after many decades of peace in Europe and after signing the Helsinki Final Act of 1975. The Cold War after was a time of political and military competition but also a time of relative peace. The inception of dramatic changes was triggered by the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, Eastern European socialist regimes and the USSR itself. During the last years of the Soviet Union, internal conflicts and cross-border issues started escalating. There were multiple clashes within and between former ‘brotherly people’ in Moldova, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan, Russia, and Georgia. Ukraine seemed an exception, but its ascension into the whirlpool of turmoil was imminent for the following reasons. 

Like others in the USSR, Ukrainian border policy originated after the October 1917 coup and the results of the Russian Civil War that followed. The period from 1917 until 1924 was the most turbulent, which unleashed the potential of nationalism in the former imperial outskirts. After the genie of nation-building escaped the bottle, the USSR had few options to choose from. The Bolsheviks granted national minorities special autonomy and representation in the federal government. At the same time, deliberate border arrangements, the primate of party structures in the Soviet Republics and on the federal level, and a complicated procedure of cadre advancements all guaranteed the stability of the new state. These foundations were eroded during perestroika, when the Communist Party, especially on the federal level, was deprived of real authority after a series of legal changes. Consequently, the USSR quickly collapsed. The legal procedures of independence proclamations by the former socialist republics are still under question, as well as the justification of border changes during their existence within the union. In the case of Ukraine, historians and lawyers usually refer to the Crimean issue and the early declaration of independence, which automatically question Ukraine’s borders regardless of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994. 

Secondly, throughout history, Ukraine was always at the epicentre of Russian politics, and initially served as a buffer between Russia and the West. Even the term ‘Ukraine’ did not have a unified meaning – it was continuously changing and primarily reflected the border region between Moscow Tsardom and its neighbours. Ukrainian territory was always disputed between the Russians, Polish and Ottomans. Moscow always needed access to either the Baltic or the Black Sea as well as needing a buffer against its two primary enemies, who were preventing Russia’s expansion. The conflict with Poland was a conflict between two Slavic nations divided on the premise of religion and regional domination. However, the threat of Muslim expansion sometimes brought two rivals together. The complexity of Russo–Polish relations and the imminent threat of the Ottoman conquests of Europe reflect the complexity of the situation of modern Ukrainian lands as disputed between three regional powers. 

During its wars with Western neighbours, primarily the Livonian Order and Poland, Russia suffered several sensitive defeats across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries before making sufficient gains following the Russo–Polish War of 1654–1667. In 1686, even Kyiv was purchased from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth when the Treaty of Perpetual Peace was signed. The expansion in the Baltics coincided with the turmoil in Ukraine and betrayal of Ivan Mazepa, hetman of the Zaporozhian Host and the Left-Bank Ukraine. Some historians claim it was the moment when the ancestor of the current Ukrainian flag (blue and yellow) was born. The emergence of Ukrainian nationalism as an act of betrayal of Russia is used to claim its inferior nature and even to raise biblical connotations of Ukraine as a prodigal son, adding to the argument of ‘internal’ rather than international conflict.

Finally, Russian acquisitions in the south of Ukraine were the result of long-term conflicts with the Crimean Khanate and the Ottomans. The territory of Ukraine was divided into three major parts: Sloboda Ukraine, Malorossiya and Novorossiya. All three somehow related to the creation of the border or buffer territory between the Moscow Tsardom and her primary rivals (Poland and the Crimean Khanate / Ottomans). These territories were gradually incorporated into the Russian Empire. Moreover, if Malorossiya was incorporated sooner after the conquests in the West, Novorossiya (literally New Russia), including Crimea, was created later, with strong sentiments relating to the imperial iconography and its prominent leadership. The complicated structure of Ukrainian lands became even more complex after the partition of Poland and in the Soviet period, when Romanian and Hungarian lands became minor parts of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

After 1917 and during the Russian Civil War, the territory of modern Ukraine was one of the primary battlefields controlled by the Central Powers (Germany and Austria-Hungary), Whites (Russian conservatives and monarchists), Reds (Bolshevik communists), Anarchists from Huliaipole, Polish, and Reds again. That historical period, as previously in the seventeenth century, showed signs of betrayal and complexity of allegiance of the local population. It also had modern connotations: the Ukrainian leader, Pavlo Skoropadsky, was under heavy influence of the European powers, signing deals over the country’s agriculture; also, the local population did not solidly support any side, changing allegiance from Reds to nationalists, Whites and back to Reds depending on the political and economic situation. For a brief historical period, there were even two Ukraines: West Ukrainian People’s Republic and Ukrainian People’s Republic, with complicated mutual relations. The first one ended up as part of Poland while the second became one of the pillars of the USSR.

There is no surprise that such a historical complexity put its heavy mark on these lands, further aggravated during the Soviet era through controversial policies of forging cadre and national development by Petro Shelest and later Vladimir Sherbitsky, as well as the subsequent rehabilitation and incorporation of former Ukrainian nationalists into the state authorities.

Religious Turmoil

Civil wars are often caused or complicated by a religious rift. Russian historians usually claim that Mazepa’s scheming is inseparable from understanding the religious betrayal that happened in 1595, when religious hierarchs in Kyiv pleaded their allegiance to the Roman Catholic Church. Moscow Tsardom was an Orthodox Christian state. German barons with the support of the Catholic Church started their expansion into the East through Poland and the lands of the current Baltic States. The eastward expansion aimed to take over not only the lands but also the minds of people, establishing a foothold for further operations into the Orthodox lands. However, the religious conflicts were put on hold when their mutual enemy, the Ottomans, arose as the most threatening enemy of the European continent. 

The influence of Catholicism did not end with the 1595 union. There have been three different churches operating in modern Ukraine: Catholic, Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchy). During the presidency of Petro Poroshenko, the autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine became a prominent player on the religious scene as an attempt to supplant the Moscow Patriarchy. In essence, the goal from the sixteenth century remains unchanged – only Moscow can be a fair competitor to the West. The smaller churches, regardless of their title, will inevitably fall under either a Western political agenda or the influence of the Roman Catholic Church. 

Recently, news revealed more religious clashes between the Orthodox congregation loyal to the Moscow Patriarchy and raiders acting in favour of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine. The religious component makes the conflict even more complex because it involves not only ethnic Russians or people from the same historical background but also adherents of the same branch of Christianity.

One Truth

The religious turmoil in Ukraine is a vivid demonstration of the fact that the divide between the warring parties lies not only on the battlefield, but also in the hearts and minds of the people. In civil wars a brother often turns against brother and father against son, just like the New Testament foretold it almost two thousand years ago (e.g. see Matt. 10:21). The history of the twentieth century proved that people can fight for a political cause with a religious-like zeal, especially when they are indoctrinated to believe that their cause is ‘[the] one and only truth.’ Again, it brings us to the example of the Russian Civil War (1918–1921), being the most prominent of its kind. It was very common for the members of the same family to fight for different sides – either for the White Army or for the Red Army. All movements had its distinctive ideology and utilised various tools of propaganda. Each side claimed that their goal was to save Russia from destruction and to protect its people. Both sides blamed each other for betraying Russia’s national interests and serving as puppets of the foreign powers. Both the Whites and the Reds pledged to fight to the end, until their adversary was wiped from the face of Russia. Soviet poet Robert Rozhdestvensky wrote a poem about the war that contains the following lines: ‘There are many paths in the field, but there is only one truth’ (Rus. Много в поле тропинок, только правда одна). These words express the religious-like mindset of a civil war. One nation – one truth.

Just like a hundred years ago, the new civil war has broken many families and friendships. In a typical example, a Russian person calls his family member or friend in Ukraine and discovers that his companion supports the Ukrainian cause and denounces the Russian invasion. This perplexes the caller, who sincerely struggles to believe that a person he used to know so well has ended up on the opposite side. ‘You are one of us! How can you be with them?’ he wonders. The Ukrainians use similar arguments in their conversations with Russians. One such talk occurred between the soldiers in the video mentioned in the beginning of this article. ‘You have nothing to fight for here. Surrender and come over to our side. Or just leave and go home,’ the Ukrainian soldier told the Wagner Group fighter.

Both sides acknowledge their kinship and admit that they could actually live in peace. Yet the fighting continues, and its brutality and intensity only escalate. The Ukrainians blame their Russian adversaries for being brainwashed by Putin’s propaganda, so they often call them ‘orcs’ or ‘zombies’ – because of the letter Z that the Russian soldiers wear on their uniforms. The Russians in turn call the Ukrainians ‘puppets of America/the West/NATO’ and claim that the war would have never taken place if America had not meddled in the affairs of the Slavic people. Thus, each side imagines the ultimate end of this conflict from quite a similar perspective: defeating the military of their opponent, toppling its government, either directly or through a revolution, dismantling the propaganda machine that brainwashes its citizens, and opening their eyes to let them ‘see the truth.’ As for now, each enemy soldier is not only a unit on the battlefield, but also a host of a hostile ideology, whether the Russian World or Ukraine’s Western choice. In order to win this ideological war, each host must either be converted to the ‘true side’ or annihilated. This partly explains why both sides fight each other brutally to the point of committing war crimes. 

Solutions?

At the beginning of the ‘Special Military Operation’ (SMO), Vladimir Putin and the Russian government initially declared that the objective was to defend the people of Donbas from the Ukrainian aggression. It is hard to dispute that at the beginning of the conflict, the Russian military could have used surprise attacks to bomb barracks and government offices, and attempted to paralyse the government, electric plants, gas pipelines, and communication with the West, in order to inflict maximum damage and force Ukraine to accept all terms and prevent NATO from interfering. Yet none of this was done. Many analysts worldwide argue whether it was right or wrong, whether Putin committed a strategic mistake or whether his later change of plans was adequate. Seldom do the commentators appear to bear in mind that such a great surprise offensive, distantly resembling the U.S. invasion of Iraq or the NATO operation in Yugoslavia, was simply impossible. And the main reason is this – that the Kremlin regards Ukrainians as ‘one people.’ That is the principal reason why the gas pipeline still works, Ukraine earns money for gas transit, its people do not warm themselves with campfires, and electric infrastructure is attacked only when necessary to paralyse or disrupt the military operations. This also explains why, at the beginning of the SMO, Putin asked the Ukrainian military command to attempt a coup against the current regime. 

It is obvious that the ultimate goals of the SMO gradually changed from mild to the most serious scenarios, including toppling the Ukrainian government and dismantling a sovereign Ukrainian state. In accordance with this escalation, many Russian media, blogs and Telegram channels started further promoting the idea that Ukraine was an artificial country and a failed state, Ukrainian culture was absurd, Ukrainian people were largely Russian people brainwashed by Western propaganda (except for a small minority in the West who used to belong to Poland or Austria over a hundred years ago), and that in conclusion Ukraine had no right to exist and therefore most of its territory had to be integrated into Russia. Ukraine itself is often called ‘State-404,’ nowadays, and one of the objectives of the SMO is explicitly to put an end to ‘Ukrainism’ (Rus. украинство), which can be defined as an ideology of an independent Ukraine with its own language and culture.

In a similar fashion, many Ukrainian nationalists believe that Ukraine can only find safety and freedom when the imperialist Russia no longer exists. In their view, Russia needs to be partitioned into several independent states, losing the status and might of a great power and thus the ability to subjugate its neighbours. This line of thinking can be traced back to the books and articles of Stepan Bandera – the chief ideologist of Ukrainian nationalism. In his work Perspectives for a Ukrainian Revolution, he envisioned a national liberation movement for various ethnic minorities within Russian territory. In Bandera’s view, a series of such revolutions would chip away various territories from Russia and thus put an end to Moscow’s imperialism. This also explains why many Ukrainians support the idea of an independent Chechnya-Ichkeria.

Russians and Ukrainians each calling for their adversary’s destruction is another sign that this war is a civil war. A broad array of data from previous civil wars fought around the globe in the twentieth century shows that negotiated settlements are not effective in ending civil wars, as these conflicts tend to recur. A decisive military victory when one side vanquishes the other is the most effective way to end a war. This idea is present in Monica Duffy Toft’s book Securing the Peace: The Durable Settlement of Civil Wars. Indeed, all the attempts at a diplomatic settlement of the Ukrainian conflict, whether mediated by the East (China) or West (the European Union), have failed. Both sides continue to fight fiercely. The Russian media assure their citizens that the Ukrainian armed forces are crumbling and that victory is close. Kyiv places its bets on the new Western armaments and on a new counteroffensive to retake Donbas and Crimea. Each side’s propaganda keeps repeating the same statement: ‘We cannot lose this war’. This is a typical civil war dynamic. No negotiating with the enemy – fight to the end – the winner will write the history and decide the fate of our people.

A Way Out?

There is no easy way out of this Russo–Ukrainian civil war. Any negotiated settlement is liable to achieve nothing more than a short-lived armistice until one of the sides violates the ceasefire. Zelenskyy’s government has repeatedly stated that they will not surrender any Ukrainian territory to Russia, while the Russian leaders insist that Crimea’s status is non-negotiable. Moreover, Putin will never accept Ukraine joining NATO and the EU, even in a ‘sawn-off’ format without Crimea and Donbas. Both Russia and Ukraine have gone all in; both leaders have rolled the dice. A Russian victory will bring Ukraine into the ‘Russian World’, and establish a durable and lasting peace until the next political crisis hits Russia or a new nationalist awakening happens in Ukraine. A Ukrainian victory will derail Putin’s entire political strategy and possibly his government as well. It is very speculative whether the Russian Federation will collapse in the same way the Soviet Union did in 1991, but there can be no doubt that Moscow will lose the ability to project its power beyond its borders for a considerable period of time. It is also possible that the ‘Russian World’ ideology will be abandoned and a new cohort of leaders – more liberal and Western-oriented – will come to power. As the fighting rages on, the adversaries from both sides of the one quasi-nation agree upon one thing: the outcome of this war will be decided on the battlefield.

Because we fight, we are.

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In 1994, I hitchhiked to Ukraine. A long-haired high school student, I was eager to explore what my whole life had lain beyond the family’s holiday plans. For us, children of the Cold War, the Soviet Union was something colourless, menacing and intriguingly off limits. 

I didn’t know Russian, which became a problem when I was thrown off the train in Brest-Litovsk because I lacked a transit visa to a country I barely knew existed. At three o’clock in the morning, in minus 35 degrees Celsius, I had to negotiate with an inebriated Belarusian border guard who knew two words in English: ‘Many dollars’. He wanted a thousand. I offered ten. The visa ended up costing me 40 bucks and a ballpoint pen. On the train I got to know a group of medical students from Sierra Leone. They took pity on me, arranged shelter, guides and a party every night. The Ukrainians were still distrustful of foreigners. On the streets, I learned to look for black people when I needed help.

These were eventful days. Ukraine was experiencing hyperinflation. The currency resembled Monopoly money, and new zeroes were added to the price tags in the shops every morning. The economic state of emergency seemed to increase the tension between ethnic groups. A dark-skinned friend was spat on while we were walking in the city centre. On the tram, a fight broke out because a Ukrainian refused to understand Russian.

On the way back to the West, I shared a train compartment with an elderly gentleman who spoke fluent English, having worked most of his life for the World Health Organization. He had reached the point in his life when the mind turns and is more at ease in the past rather than the future. To pass the time, he told about his childhood as the son of two field medics in the Red Army. One of the stories was about why he smoked Pall Mall. One of his tasks during the war was to open rations from the Allies. Children were put to such jobs because the adults did not trust each other with the goods. No one could decipher the labels, so each of the oversized cans was a surprise package. The doctor’s face lit up when he told of the discovery of a box full of Pall Mall cigarettes with a note that read: From the British workers to the brave soldiers of the Red Army! ‘And that’s how I started smoking,’ he chuckled.

The doctor set out to remedy my lack of knowledge about the country outside the train window. He said that Ukrainians used to be known as ‘Ruthenians’. The Russians called them ‘little Russians’, in the same manner as Slovaks were once referred to as ‘little Czechs’. The difference was that Ukraine has no history as an independent state. Throughout history, there have been many attempts at independence, but without success until 1991. The borders that then arose were the result of Soviet administrative units and Russian spoils of war. ‘U-kraina’ means ‘on the border’ – the borderland that Russia shared with the Ottoman, Tartar, Polish, Prussian and Habsburg empires. The constantly changing borders and weak state power made Ukraine one of the most ethnically mixed regions in Europe, up until the first half of the twentieth century. By 1945, only two major people groups remained, the Russian minority in the east and the Ukrainian majority.

The doctor described massacres of civilians in toe-curling detail. Some were carried out by soldiers, others by civilians, under the cover of war. Entire villages were slaughtered. He told of blood seeping under the soles of shoes from hastily buried corpses. When I asked why this had happened, the doctor replied that we get to see what is hidden in people’s hearts ‘when the light fades to black’. He worried about the future of his new country. Ukraine was too big, he thought – and too divided. After the doctor got off in Lviv, his place was taken over by a black-market shark who got me drunk and persuaded me to smuggle a thick bundle of D-mark (Deutsche Mark) notes across the border to Poland. Cheerful and tipsy, I forgot all about the contraband, only to be chased down by a panting and slightly menacing gangster.

Twenty years later, in 2015, something big was brewing in Ukraine. The profound peace that had underpinned the European state system for a lifetime – the agreement that borders cannot be changed unless a new state emerges – had been broken. Russia had usurped the Crimean Peninsula and supported armed separatists in the east of Ukraine. 

That was not the reason I was in Ukraine again. I was there to visit the land once called Galicia, one of Europe’s forgotten beauties. Together with my driver and guide, Vikentij, I drove two thousand miles along neglected roads. We came from the south, through the black earth belt. No mountains, hills or lakes broke the monotony. The first stop was at Halych, the place that gave Galicia its name. Here lies the watershed, the latitude where the rivers stop flowing to the north and turn towards the Black Sea in the south. 

A watershed is more impressive as a metaphor than as physical reality. The river in front of me flowed neither north nor south, but to the east. The endless horizon in every direction gave me a sense of shrinking. Vikentij must have sensed my anguish, because he put a heavy hand on my shoulder and muttered, ‘You’ll get used to it, just don’t look up.’ We stood like this for a while before, embarrassed, we began to chat aloud about how far we had left to drive.

The hours bled into each other. We passed villages with ornately decorated wooden houses, goose ponds and cemeteries overflowing with flowers. I was struck by how little Ukraine had changed since my last visit. The countryside was barely de-Sovietised. In a café, we were served coffee with grit under a faded mural that proclaimed, ‘Glory to the labour!’. The collective farms that made the farmers tenants of the state had been dissolved, without being replaced by anything new. Much of the most fertile soil in Europe lay fallow. There was little to suggest that a bloody conflict was taking place in the east, apart from the checkpoints manned by shabby soldiers. I must have seen over a hundred privates on the journey, but not a single one whose weapons and uniforms would have passed NATO muster. 

The Soviet monuments were still present in the village squares, along with some new ones. At one point we stopped at a silvery Mother Ukraine breaking the chains between outstretched arms. Vikentij spat on the ground. ‘The politicians deliver neither work nor prosperity, but nationalism – that they are good at.’ The bus shelters along the road were plastered with posters where billionaires had dressed up in Ukrainian folk costumes to curry favour with the voters. ‘The West believes that the new oligarch, Petro Poroshenko, is different, a true democrat!’ He growled the last words as he leaned back with his arms as if carrying a boulder. ‘But he is an oligarch, just like all the others. Just you wait and see.’

We left the hotel in Odesa just as the sun was setting. Well-dressed citizens were wandering under the chestnuts of Pushkin Avenue in a picture of post-communist affluence, while life-weary teenagers smoked weed under the statue of the city’s modern founder, the Duke de Richelieu. Everywhere you looked, in every vista, the blue and yellow Ukrainian flag was fluttering. As I approached the town hall, I met crowds of policemen. It looked like they were expecting a Russian invasion, but in fact they were only preparing for demonstrations slated for the following day, May 2. Southern Ukraine was still predominantly Russian-speaking, and government forces retained a lingering fear of pro-Russian demonstrations and gatherings. The protesters were getting ready to commemorate a tragic event that occurred in 2014: 42 anti-Maidan protesters were killed in a confrontation at the Trade Unions building, where they had been hiding from their opponents.

‘People fear the ultranationalists, but the state just makes room for them,’ Timofei Hryniuk, a young lawyer and activist, told me, referring to the government-sanctioned militias that have sprung up since Ukraine was invaded by Russia in 2014. ‘The problem is, it’s as if the war has created a permanent state of emergency. The city center is being spruced up which is good for tourism, but who mainly benefits from the public spending? It’s the politicians. They are often the contractor and supplier at the same time. And by coddling the ultranationalists’ – who often don the mantle of vigilantes against corruption – ‘they avoid protests.’

Twenty-five-year-old Maksym Ishchuk had a different perspective. He had just graduated from university when the demonstrations on the Maidan in Kyiv broke out in January 2014. He quickly joined the protesters. ‘When Yanukovych’s special police started shooting at us, it was clear that much was at stake. I know how it sounds, but I felt that our freedom was literally at stake.’ Journalist student Khrystyna Melnyk was also present on the Maidan. ‘We thought we were living in a European country, but the state did not protect us. We had to protect ourselves.’

But how? Maksym took part in the fighting on the Maidan and was among the first to volunteer for the so-called ‘self-defense battalions’ that sprung up as Ukraine’s southern province, Crimea, was infiltrated and annexed by Russia, and as rebellion fermented in eastern Donetsk and Luhansk. He had never planned to become a soldier, but in the spring of 2014 the country was in a state of paralysis. ‘A friend, an officer, was stationed in Crimea when the Russians invaded. He called and called to central command but got no orders. So, they surrendered.’

When war broke out in 2014, Ukraine’s army was crippled after decades of neglect. The central staff proposed establishing paramilitary groups to fight pro-Russian rebels. Dozens of such groups were assembled after the Maidan revolution toppled the pro-Russian regime in Kyiv. However, after a few weeks of very basic military training, it became apparent that ‘the generals did not know what to do with us,’ as Maksym told me. ‘We were not sent anywhere.’ He heard from friends that Russian flags were being flown in Odesa and got leave to go home. Odesa has a huge Russian population, and until recently, it had been rare to hear Ukrainian spoken there. ‘We feared that Russia would create a pretext to occupy all of southern Ukraine,’ Maksym continued.

The hostilities peaked on May 2. Pro-Russian protesters barricaded themselves in the city centre. What happened next is hotly contested. Both sides threw fire bombs. Maksym participated in the street brawls leading up to the deadly fire, but he says that by the time he got there, the building was already on fire. ‘We built a ramp to get to the windows. I tried to get in to save the people inside, but the smoke made it impossible. It is sad that people on both sides died. They were being used, without understanding it themselves.’

After the tragedy, Maksym returned home to join a special political battalion, ‘Odesa Storm’. ‘It is important to remember that at this stage, we believed that the unrest in the east should be treated as a police mission, lest it provoke a Russian military intervention.’ The newly assembled paramilitaries led the charge. The battalion was about 200 strong and was sent off without heavy weapons. I asked Maksym if he really left to go to war almost without training. He smiled. ‘Well, my mother was unhappy.’ And his father? ‘He did as most fathers do and spoke with his silence.’

On August 20, the battalion was eight miles outside Luhansk when it encountered an artillery barrage and eventually, the full force of the Russian army. ‘It was the first time I saw the enemy. They attempted to catch us in a pincer manoeuvre, but we dug in and held our position.’ He showed me pictures of smiling soldiers posing with busted Russian military hardware. Battalion Storm lost four men during that fight. Maksym willingly acknowledged that he was initially filled with a sense, as the Roman poet Horace expressed it, of dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – it is sweet and proper to die for the fatherland. But the realities of war tend to curb enthusiasm. When I ask about the weeks and months when he fought in Donetsk and Luhansk, he grimaced. ‘I do miss the simple life at the front, but I do not want to return.’

An inconvenient truth: Soldiers like war. Most men like competing, and war is the ultimate competition. In the chaos after World War I, a volunteer paramilitary faction was formed in Germany to defend its eastern borders against a bevy of new nation states that sought to expand their territories at Germany’s expense. You cannot understand recent German history without understanding the role of these ‘Free Corps,’ and you cannot understand the Free Corps without understanding the Battle of Annaberg in 1921. In his 1930 novel, The Outlaws, Ernst von Salomon described the scene of setting out for the battle [author’s translation from the German]:

The train ran through the night. I stood out on the hallway and enjoyed the thrilling excitement over what had been set in motion. In all the carriages were young men like me standing and sitting. The conductor kept a suspicious eye on them, because they were dressed in worn grey cloth like myself; Their blond hair and arrogant faces gave them a family resemblance. We recognized and greeted each other. Without knowing each other, we had been drawn from all parts of the German-speaking world by the prospect of fight and danger. Without orders and without any other clear goal than reaching Upper Silesia.
In Leipzig, young men with feathers in their hats came on the train chatting in the Bavarian dialect. I walked past them, gesturing to their luggage and muttering. Firearms? The man who stood closest smiled. The boxes were marked ‘Oberland’. They came from all over the German empire. There were frontiersmen from the Baltics, members of student associations, union workers and businessmen. There were men from the Rhine and Ruhr, from Bavaria and from Dithmarschen. Balts, Swedes, Finns, Men from Transylvania and Tyrol, from East Prussia and Saar. All young, all prepared.

The Outlaws, Ernst von Salomon

Although it would be going too far to suggest that modern German identity was created in the Free Corps wars, they nonetheless represented an important step in the evolution of Hessian or Bavarian identity into something bigger – the Deutschtum (Germanness) of which poets and thinkers spoke. The Weimar Republic had neither the ability to act nor the will to try. Von Salomon writes,

Where was Germany? In Weimar? In Berlin? Once upon a time it was at the front, but the front did not exist anymore. Was it the people? But the people shouted for bread and voted to get their thick bellies filled. What about the government? But the state was looking for a role and instead found irresponsibility.

The Outlaws, Ernst von Salomon

The Free Corps were united in their hate of the invaders in the east and of liberal politicians who seemed more interested in making moneyed interest prosper, rather than in the people or their ‘culture.’ The book’s main character, an airbrushed version of the author, put it best: ‘We believed that for Germany’s sake, we and no others should have the power. We felt that we were the embodiment of Germany. The ruling power in Berlin had no such legitimacy.’ 

A similar mentality can be found among volunteers in the now-infamous Azov battalion. Nestor Makhno is a nom-de-guerre. Behind the tinted windows of a restaurant in the Odesa district of Arcadia, he had few good things to say about the government in Kyiv. ‘We have given our blood for Ukraine. Ukraine was forged as a nation in our struggle. Are we nationalists? Of course we are! And people know we will not accept betrayal. Not by terrorists and not by our own politicians.’ I asked why the right-wing nationalists have so little support in elections. He waved his fist under my nose: ‘The politicians lie, steal and cheat. When the people wake up, we are ready.’ For what? ‘For revolution,’ he responded.

Ukraine’s paramilitaries trace their lineage to Germany’s Free Corps, specifically to their popular struggle against French occupation under Napoleon. The term itself refers to armed political formations, organised according to military principles. They represent not only the power of violence, but also a new source of political authority and organisation of the state. In the book Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War (Oxford, 2012), Ukrainian academician Serhy Yekelchyk describes how nationalist groups played a key role during the civil war in Ukraine in 1917–1920. He claims that they are not best understood as the armed wing of a united Ukrainian people’s struggle for independence. Rather, the Ukrainian Freikorps represented ‘a confusing struggle between Ukrainian patriots of different shades’ about what the future of Ukraine should be.

The same is true of today’s Ukrainian militias, which after 2014 have fractured into ever smaller ideological segments. Some of the paramilitary formations have been incorporated into the Ukrainian military forces, but not all. Despite international criticism of the fact that some of these groups harbour right-wing radicals and neo-fascists, the integration process has been slow. This has to do with the fact that these groups are popular: their young men were willing to sacrifice themselves when the Ukrainian state floundered. Another reason is that paramilitaries are cheap; they come without pension obligations and are always ready to fight.

Yekelchyk claims that the defeat of the Free Corps at the hands of the Red Army owed a great deal to what he calls ‘failed state-building.’ A shared struggle, it turns out, was not sufficient to create a functioning state. The same conclusion held when Ukrainian patriots once again came together in various paramilitary organisations during World War II. One of the leaders of that time, Stepan Bandera, is today one of modern Ukraine’s heroes. This is despite Bandera’s collaboration with the Nazis, his death at the hands of Communists, and his willingness to abandon all principles in order to achieve an independent Ukraine. 

Historian Jens Petter Nielsen has written that ‘the anarchy that developed in Ukraine after the February Revolution in 1917 triggered dormant contradictions, conflicts and enmities that were previously suppressed or played themselves out under the surface in controlled civilised forms. Now they were fought on open ground with weapons in hand, in violent confrontations.’ Bandera saw the militias as the manifestation of the Ukrainian nation, even when fighting other Ukrainians. What was once an icon of football hooligans and the radical right has been embraced by the Ukrainian state. 

Statues of Bandera are mushrooming all over Ukraine in the shadow of the ongoing conflict with Russia. Scientist Vyacheslav Likhachev concludes in a report to the French Institute of National Relations, ‘The mere fact that these volunteer formations materialised had a propaganda value in the first weeks of the conflict but, on the whole, the media has seriously exaggerated the role of volunteers in the anti-terrorist operation. They did not actually play a significant role during the military operations.’

And yet they have become significant players in Ukrainian politics. The Pravyi Sector, the militias’ umbrella organisation, has been highlighted among the EU’s running concerns about the internal situation in Ukraine. Artem Filipenko, who has been active with the Border Guard in Odesa, believes Pravyi Sector is ‘a ghost’, a phenomenon that acts as a kind of franchise – a label that Russian propaganda uses to justify the fiction that Pravyi Sector is the armed wing of a ‘fascist regime’ in Kyiv. 

Artem gave Battalion Storm support and equipment in 2014. The state had some weapons but lacked uniforms and boots. The lack of equipment is now less of a pressing issue, partly because of support from the United States. Artem believes that Western Europe’s warnings against nationalism are misplaced: ‘Modern Ukrainian nationalism is a self-defense ideology, not a political project.’ Nobody knows how long the Minsk agreements, whose goal is to de-escalate the conflict, will hold. Artem believed that the war could flare up again: ‘The Ukrainian army is much stronger than it was in 2014 and is likely to reclaim areas in the east, unless Russia intervenes…’ 

This may be a part of the logic underlying the fact that, despite repeated promises, Kyiv failed to disband the militias, which continued to fight against the Russian-supported separatists in the east between 2014–2022. However, these informal groups have proven to be difficult to control, and some are criminal outfits. Many have either been integrated into the armed forces or sent home, but not Pravyi Sector. The group reportedly has many thousands of members, including a battalion with hundreds of soldiers. They fight side by side with the government army, but it is unclear how much they respect orders. 

Perhaps the state of play can be best understood as a kind of internal ceasefire. Some commentators have argued that Pravyi Sector has become less interested in the corruption that characterises parts of the political system. Meanwhile, Ukrainian authorities have striven to explain away the Pravyi Sector to Western observers. Radical statements and actions are attributed to a small minority of members, which may well be true. But the group has indubitably attracted right-wing radicals and fascists from a number of European countries, and it takes only one Nazi to give an entire group a bad reputation. 

Ukrainian paramilitaries figured high on the list of Russia’s justification for its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. In the struggle that followed, Ukrainian free corps were to be found where the fighting was most intense: in Mariupol, Kharkiv and Bakhmut. Timofei, Artem and Maksym all answered the call and are – as I write this in May 2023 – at the front.

The war in Ukraine has left military theorists befuddled. New technologies formed the battleground, but failed to transform it. While precision guided munitions, drones and electronic warfare have been important, the actual war has been fought with infantry and artillery, as in the past. Many expected for infantry to lose its role in modern conflicts, yet they have played the same role in this war as in wars bygone. It appears that the paramilitaries have taken the role of the old guard, the experienced fighters, at a time when the army consisted mostly of raw conscripts. While Ukraine’s use of paramilitary formations will come under criticism, it may also come to be emulated.

The Cracks are Beginning to Show in the Big Data Monolith

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Data isn’t going away. That much is clear. Short of a solar flare, societal collapse or extinction event, data will continue to underwrite the twenty-first century information economy. As digital connectivity increases, so too will the vectors, methods, and types of data expand to further the size and scope of what can be collected. The internet-of-things, biotechnologies, machine learning applications: all promise new and refined insights to churn through the organs of big data to bear ever greater truths about our world.

But the mythology that underpins big data is a different beast. It is essentialised in the West by 21st century marketing neologisms and business jargon: such maxims as ‘data is the new oil’ and the promises contained therein. This mythology posits the world as ‘one big data problem’ and promises the heroic venture into the morass of complexity which envelops reality, from which, underpinned by a positivist ontology and aided by modern computation, a limitless cornucopia of knowledge can be derived. Much like the monolith in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the big data mythology has propelled an immature and unaware humanity forward through the provision of its knowledge and tools. And much akin to HAL 9000, the fruits of this advancement ultimately proved of great consequence for humanity.

The big data mythology has been sustained by an enormous investment of faith by the global economy since the era of the iPhone 1 and Facebook. It has informed the norms, preconceptions, and behaviors that serve to maximize data collection, storage, and use. An interconnected clergy of actors has been responsible for selling this salvation. At its apex: big tech, though governments and broader industry have too played their part. But as big data has matured, many of its auspices – heralded at the flourishing of the information age – have ultimately been unveiled as shortsighted, reflexive, and naive.

The sins of big data

It did not take long before big data’s offering of bespoke, individualized user service, such as curated social network feeds and tailored advertising, was hijacked and amplified to fuel a regime of surveillance and addiction. The realization that the worst excesses of human psychology maximized user time-on-site was quickly capitalized upon by all manner of interested parties, including political consultancies, marketing agencies, and more to drive engagement, influence election outcomes, and supercharge consumerism. The innate human susceptibility to addictive feedback loops and to material that inspires hatred, division, and controversy, in its worst manifestations, has been weaponized to initiate interpersonal grievances, instigate the persecution of minorities, and sow demoralization across the world’s democracies.

Those trace elements of online user interaction, left by every minute act or non-act on a digital medium, helped form vast yet intricate mosaics of the human experience of billions. Entire portraits of individuals could be compiled across data ecologies, enabled by a rapacious, unmoderated disregard for user privacy in a digital world gone mad. The founding libertarian vision of the internet had, in a way, been fulfilled – though perhaps not in the manner initially conceived. Cyber-Hobbesian anarchy gave rise to titanic virtual sovereigns that have usurped and, in some cases, imbricated themselves with, the state. The infrastructural power key to these entities’ success – the proprietary platforms through which the data is coursed – continues to afford them unrivaled dominion over the information space.

Yet the great irony remains that, despite the incalculable volumes of bits that have been sacrificed at the altar of the big data monolith for the bestowal of data-driven insights, the technologies big data has exploited and enabled, as well as those that have enabled it, have produced the converse: a global information ecosystem deluged in falsehood. The epistemic commons has been torn asunder, and our capacity to discern truth from falsehood consequently diminished. Of course, big data thrives in this chaos and opacity, offering a way out of the cave for a fee.

The ‘science’ of big data

The big data mythology has posited its namesake as a superior science to the epistemologies that preceded it. It rests upon the presumption that computation is inherently advantageous to cognition, and that a datum stands as a positivist ontological referent for reality. Yet, this science has proven itself to be less a faithful exercise in the advancement of human knowledge, and more about the control and profitability associated with the identification, definition, aggregation, analysis, and inferencing of data.

At its core, big data seeks to subordinate the phenomenal world to computability. Here, it can divine – through its black box crystal balls – the myriad political, economic, environmental, and social trends worth a buck. It’s hard to argue with its sample size, too. Any finding postulated by big data is often given a priori credence based purely on scale. This scale is how it attempts to elude the fickle unreliability of human cognition. Though it is often said that big data ‘speaks for itself’, its innate value lies in how ‘raw’ data can be fashioned into a narrative worth selling. “Torture the data long enough and it will confess to anything”.

Shifting sands

Though the big data monolith has remained firmly planted as the sacred object of the information economy for decades, there are continued signs of its withering. Repeated failures by the world’s public and private organizations to responsibly own, use, and protect data has drawn increasing scrutiny and ire from populations to whom mass data aggregation are subject. Emerging cybersecurity risks, dawning technological obsolescence, and growing calls for regulation are three such empirical factors that are beginning to test the primacy of the big data mythology.

(1) No rules of engagement

The cyberwar is now waged universally, surreptitiously, and asymmetrically across every corner of the internet. What used to be the reserve of intelligence agencies and uniquely talented hackers has now become democratised to a population of digitally native threat actors which knows no jurisdiction and, often, is constrained by no ethical guardrails. Though money or geopolitical gain is often the ends of their pursuits, it is almost always the case that data stands in between.

This intensifying cyber risk is forcing organisations to reconsider the scope, extent, and security of their data collection, use, and storage. Those organisations with the largest concentrations of sensitive data: government entities, healthcare, telecommunications, financial services, and legal firms are increasingly suffering major data breaches and ransomware attacks across the globe. These attacks have never been easier to pull off. Otherwise shielded by skyscrapers, offshore bank accounts and squads of lawyers, today major corporate entities can be brought to their proverbial knees by a sole employee’s errant click on an email attachment. No amount of cyber defence can completely protect organisations from the soft, fleshy problem.

When organisations are hit, it is often not known where affected data is stored or what security protections are afforded it. ‘Data governance’ is growing in prominence in the wake of these events as governments and companies the world over recognise the worth in knowing what information they have, where it is stored, who has access to it, and how secure it is. Data mesh, data lakes, data warehouses, data lakehouses: entirely new technical architectures are being offered to service the need to store, use, and protect information well. Where there is a dearth of a clear business need for owning data, it is increasingly being culled. How we’ve run a global information economy for thirty years to this point without knowing where things are is astounding.

(2) Date lean tech

Though many new technologies work in service of the big data monolith, there are also those which appear to be displacing it. Innovations in digital identity seek to standardise the disparate technical frameworks that govern information exchange on internet applications. Implemented correctly, digital identity would eclipse the need to indefinitely surrender one’s personal details: emails, birthdate, address, etcetera – but would simply be posed a one-time query to temporarily access certain information such as ‘are you over 18?’. A central repository within which person’s personal information is contained would then dispense only the requested data to the transacting platform. In parallel with the push towards implementing zero trust architecture, wherein user authentication is required at every level of a digital transaction as is practicable, piloting states could potentially secure and minimise the global exchange and storage of personal information. Blockchain, too, offers hope in this regard.

Even those technologies which owe their existence to big data may forsake their birthright. Diminishing returns on the efficacy of large datasets in foundational machine learning models could potentially burst the hype bubble in which the technology has remained aloft for the past year. When these models are trained on their own synthetically generated data, they experience a form of autophagia, whereby their capacity to produce synthetic content itself degenerates. As more and more synthetic data percolates onto the internet, machine learning firms will increasingly need to monitor the nutritional content of that which they feed models. Hoovering up vast sums of internet data, such was the approach adopted by OpenAI to build ChatGPT, might prove impracticable going forward. In this way, and rather ironically, big data risks becoming an existential threat to AI. There are also signs that future machine learning models might not even require the quantity of data and computing power needed at present to sustain their effectiveness, potentially resulting in a methodological pivot in the ways AI is constructed at scale. Who could have guessed that focusing on technique rather than supersizing datasets would yield a more refined product?

Beyond AI looms the spectre of quantum computing. The vast sums of money that have been thrown at quantum by nation-states in the last few years – with China far exceeding that of the rest of the world – should flag the technology’s political, economic, and strategic significance. Quantum decryption, whereby the concentrated power of a quantum computer is channelled at cracking an encrypted asset, could potentially negate many standard data protection methods. Though we may be decades away from the prospect of strategic use of quantum computing, threat actors are currently engaged in the theft of encrypted information right now for its eventual decryption via quantum. The only surefire way to protect information in the quantum age or even preceding it? If it doesn’t exist.

(3) Rage against the machine

Lastly, growing regulatory pressure – sourced from global public discontent convergent with the above-mentioned drivers – is threatening the near limitless freedom big data actors have enjoyed in their indiscriminate data scraping for nearly two decades. The public, now acutely aware of the scope and extent of modern data collection practices, as well as the value and security risks associated with the information held about them, is increasingly expecting more socially responsible behaviour from holding institutions.

The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), by introducing the concept of adequacy for data exchange, has effectively already paved the way for global data reform from as early as 2018. Though not entirely unproblematic, it could soon be accompanied by AI and data privacy reform both within the EU, and in other jurisdictions such as Canada and Australia. These statutes could prompt reforms in other countries, further advancing the global pressure on organisations to act more responsibly in their collection and use of data. States are also experiencing growing calls to support Indigenous data sovereignty, which could here be reflected. Greater regulatory impost has been flagged, too, by the US’ 2023 National Cybersecurity Strategy, which seeks to ‘rebalance the responsibility to defend cyberspace’ unto those who are asymmetrically more capable of acting. Those who have more data will be increasingly expected to govern, use, and protect it well.

Regulatory pressure may also emerge in service of reducing energy use. The volume of energy expenditure necessary to support global data storage and utilisation is anticipated to increase exponentially over the next five years, potentially exceeding that of entire nation states. This will likely place a premium on the use and storage of data and machine learning models, forcing alternative practices and data minimisation.

These three empirical drivers: cyber risk, technological change, and regulatory pressure, indicate that big data is fast proving a liability more so than an asset. The limitless and carefree collection, use, and storage of excessive volumes of insecure and poorly managed data is rapidly becoming prohibitively expensive for actors in the information economy. The cost/benefit analysis of holding large quantities of data will soon be overwhelmingly biased towards the former.

Discursive and epistemic upheaval

Yet empirical factors may not be wholly sufficient for eroding faith in the big data mythology. While increasing cyber risk, technological change, and current institutional and regulatory levers will likely disrupt modern data collection practices, they may not be adequate for altering them sustainably into the future. If the global economy’s approach to ecological collapse is any indication as to how contemporary global challenges are collectively addressed, then it will require a reframing of the conceptual grounds on which big data is perceived and discussed for meaningful change to be effected. The hegemony of big data will need to be challenged.

Such a global discursive and epistemic shift to the ways in which we perceive the world and in our relation to data is, in many respects, already taking place. Academic scepticism and critique of the big data episteme is not new, though its translation into more mainstream discourses is starting to gain renewed purchase. David Hand’s work on dark data, that which we are unaware of or is not easily captured, measured, or quantified, but nonetheless bears considerable meaning on the ways in which we interact with the world, is an important model to integrate into one’s apperception. Dark data is complementary of Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s much-referenced work on black swan events, those which we cannot prepare for based on our preponderant ignorance to their catalysing circumstances. Both attend to Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns which, by all accounts, comprise the nigh-infinite majority of knowledge categorisations that make up phenomenological experience. No amount of data or Bayesian inferencing can, at present or indeed into the future, attend to this problem set.

Reframing the ontological and epistemic confines by which we can come to know things can aid in the provision of more sensible solutions to some of our most pressing challenges. It also protects us from succumbing to the hype machine Silicon Valley is so well-versed in driving. Reconceptualising data itself, for example, as something inherently relational, transient, and ethereal, rather than analogising it to physical property and situating it in a logic of individual rights, might position us better to regulate it more effectively.

Ozymandias

Increased cyber security risk, burgeoning technological obsolescence, and growing public discontent indicate the potential death of the mythology that has sustained big data for two decades. Underpinned by a global discursive and epistemic transformation in the ways in which we understand our relation to data and to knowable experience, this shift is likely to be accelerated.

The data collection practices of the future appear less dogmatic – less obsessed with its maximisation, and more considerate of its implications for privacy, security, and authentic value. Though datasets may remain ‘big’ by any objective measure, they will lack the frivolity and obfuscation which currently inform their capture. Less will truly be more in the post-big data age.

The big data monolith has set its foundations on sand. As the sands shift towards a new era, the fragility of the monolith is laid bare. Beyond this broken edifice dawns the possibility of a more responsible, secure, and dignifying future for data collection, storage, and use: one in which the subjects of data reserve greater agency and security concerning the information held about them. An information age reformation could well be taking place.

All views expressed are those of the author alone.

Ukraine: trying to make sense of identity and war in the age of the smartphone

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Ukrainian identity is being reinvented by war. Ukraine’s Ministry of Culture and Information Policy has helped to orchestrate this reinvention through social media campaigns – #standwithukraine – while engaged in a daily struggle against Russian cyber attacks and direct artillery bombardment. At the same time, self-organising groups like the North Atlantic Fellas Organisation seek to limit debates that might undermine Ukrainian messaging. In between the meme wars and the trolling, an image of Ukraine emerges: battered but defiant. Stoicism and resilience in the face of Putin’s extermination. Such messages may resonate with Western populations. Beyond the West, the smartphone delivers Russia’s propaganda to a global audience.

The smartphone represents the manifestation of a complex ecosystem of information infrastructures. As a device for recording the ‘now’, the smartphone adds geolocation to videos of events. It has limitations, if belligerents switch off the internet, but both sides recognise that it is vital to society, government and the conduct of the war. The internet makes life in the warzone possible, enabling the fighting and supporting Russia’s population engineering in the occupied zones. The smartphone is changing events, reformatting their representation, manipulating users’ thoughts, and redefining how the war is being fought. Consequently, the war in Ukraine is the most connected conventional conflict in history.

Compact and handheld, the smartphone helps soldiers connect to family at home, relax with a game and catch up with events. For civilians, the smartphone enables refugees outside Ukraine to maintain contact with the homeland. With one device you can access the government, amplify the war, kill the enemy, donate to crowdfunding campaigns, and collapse the frontline and the home front. Soldiers use phones as controllers for their drones, helping them to adjust artillery fire on to targets. Ukrainians caught up in the occupation zones risk taking photographs of Russian movements. Social media influencers use them to spread warnography and disinformation. Handheld smart devices provide the technology platform for battlefield target identification, coordination and prioritisation software. Energy grids and electricity supply are limited, forcing a critical choice upon soldiers and civilians alike: turn on the lights or power up the smartphone?

In the first year of Russia’s full-blooded invasion of Ukraine, the war appeared at first to resemble the iconic conflicts of the twentieth century. Images of tanks and airpower recalled the old Second World War newsreels, while trenches and Maxim machine guns evoked even older Great War imagery. Yet neither analogy does justice to the lethality of the Ukraine battlefields, the brutality of Russian occupation, or the way digitisation saturates every aspect of the fighting.

This digital saturation is self-evident in virtually every video of the frontlines. Soldiers carry smartphones alongside their assault rifles. They record themselves fighting and dancing, distributing the footage for memes and propaganda. Ukrainians do this and a Western audience views the videos on social media. (The Russians do the same and all Westerners hear is how the Russians have stupidly given away their positions and then been targeted by Ukraine’s artillery.) Offering the means to produce, publish and consume information anywhere in the world, smart devices are the essential, ubiquitous, and subsequently mundane civilian technology platform of the twenty-first century, and one that has now been adapted for war. These changes reflect a new geometry of power that is transnational in nature, underpinned by information infrastructures that are rarely considered or reflected upon. This is not just a matter of Elon Musk’s Starlink low orbital satellite technology, but is also related to the plethora of other systems that make the internet possible.

Inevitably, this is challenging the existing ways of making sense of war. The smartphone is collapsing the once distinct categories of soldier and civilian into the shared realm of participant, enabling everyone to engage in the fight, no matter where they are in the world. Working via various Telegram channels, including the 350k-plus subscribers to the IT Army of Ukraine feed, the Ukrainians crowdsource information operations, successfully shaping the West’s media narrative. Scripted in advance, there is no surprise that the opening weeks and months of the war were dominated by discussions on a no-fly zone and the Finnish-Soviet War of 1939-40. So successful were these information campaigns that senior Western academics and commentators parroted the talking points without much scrutiny. This approach chimed with those who wanted history to provide easy guide rails for current events, but neglected to take into consideration the ways in which the narratives were being manipulated for the ready consumption of audiences needing digestible answers.

Both the emerging practices of war and the manners and methods of its representation constitute a paradox. The technologies that shape our approaches to understanding the fighting in Ukraine are transnational in nature, but some of the most dominant messages that emerge from these platforms reflect the reinvention of Ukraine’s national identity. The messaging is subject to algorithmic intervention, leading to a variety of outcomes. For instance, on several mainstream social media platforms, violence is downplayed. By contrast, on Telegram the violence is unrestrained and brutal, breaking all the norms of mainstream media reporting, but has become mundane in its regularity. In this new paradigm, the war is not an anomaly limited to Russia and Ukraine. Rather, it reflects a fundamental shift in the operation of government, the definition of geopolitics, and the ways in which identity is forged when forms of violence are widely available online.

When it comes to government, for example, transnational information infrastructures are constructing a new digital sovereignty. Prior to the 2022 invasion, Ukraine’s government bureaucracy had a physical presence located in sovereign Ukrainian territory. Now government services are hosted by Amazon Web Services in the cloud, on servers outside Ukraine. Only by going online can one access the services that previously required a visit to a government office. Once controlled by employees of the state, Ukraine’s future is now bound to the internet service giants that power much of the world’s networked economy. Even if Ukraine ceases to exist territorially, it will survive as a virtual space with a global diaspora dispersed around the world. The future memory of Ukraine will have a life regardless of the outcome of the war.

This potential hauntology of Ukraine tells us something about identity in the contexts between memory, conflict and contemporary technology. Where in this conglomeration of socio-technical systems does Ukrainian identity begin and end? On the battlefield? In the amplification of memes? In some future cyberspace? With mainstream Western social media platforms restricting Russian access, we watch the façade of the internet as a global commons being torn down. Russia likewise is trying to cut off access to Twitter and Facebook. Now splinternets are the order of the day. Will the new identities forged in war become known in future to those living on different informational grids – or will we remain locked within our own media ghetto for ever?

When it comes to fighting, the implications of the war have stretched the utility of the smartphone beyond the realm of information operations. Now the smartphone shapes the conduct of battle, making it hard to define where the battlefield starts and where it ends. Indeed, this new ecology of war has not been properly quantified. Civilians from a neutral country on the other side of the planet can help with targeting data for Ukraine’s intelligence fusion cells just as easily as can Ukrainian citizens on the frontlines. Targeting is itself now outsourced to private companies crunching open-source information and working alongside Ukraine’s armed forces. This complex stack of interlocking socio-technical systems increases the attack surfaces available for kinetic and cyber attack. Are these people or organisations legitimate targets for Russian strikes? What about the data centres and the satellites, the cellular networks and the undersea cables?

If Ukraine shows us that anyone can participate in war, then what happens to the bystanders? This question is not limited to people at home amplifying social media messages, but also includes the possibility that ordinary civilians can participate in targeting adversaries simply by processing open-source information. Yet civilians are not restricted from participating remotely. On the frontlines or while under occupation, noncombatants can photograph and geolocate the enemy, then pass that information on to intelligence fusion cells. At the same time, soldiers are using the same technology to develop the necessary situational awareness to locate enemy units and target them with artillery. Can these civilians now be regarded as combatants in the same way as soldiers, just by dint of using the same software and devices? The implication then is that the differences between soldier and civilian, armed forces and society have collapsed. To be provocative – in this new world, you cannot be a bystander if you carry a smartphone.

Even if the warzone could be properly delineated, making sense of what remains creates its own challenges. The increased datafication of the battlefield has led to an explosion of data points on the war. Ten years of civil war in Syria has reportedly generated 40 years of footage. In comparison, the first 80 days of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine has generated 10 years of footage. In these circumstances, thinking through the global implications of the war in Ukraine with regard to identity and future geopolitics tends towards re-hashing twentieth-century historical analogies. Clearly, the old and the new sit alongside each other even as this war is being prosecuted. When it comes to explaining the evolution of ideas, it nonetheless must be conceded that there is something very revolutionary going on in Ukraine. It implies a radical rupturing with the past.

These changes need to be further contextualised against the emergence of a new digital sovereignty, where the bureaucracy’s physical presence is limited, and government services are only available online. In these circumstances, it might be appropriate to question what remains of Clausewitz’s famous trinity of state, society, and the armed forces. Are we left only with the ontological core of Clausewitz’s claim that war is fighting? Although this ontological claim still has resonance, much of what defines war – and not just its character – surely needs re-examining. For the very way in which war and its representations are made known to us has fundamentally changed. War in the twenty-first century has gone through the same epistemic revolution that has affected much of the rest of society, as it grapples with the changes brought about by the fourth industrial revolution.

The culture of war: how we know about war, how war is organised as a social activity, and how war connects back to the traditional structures of state, society and the armed forces will require recalibration. This is not to imply that everything is now different. Rather, it is to argue that we need to carefully contextualise and understand the dramatic changes that the war in Ukraine has produced. That is to say, we must test how radical the breaks are with the past, recognising that this war is certainly different from previous wars. Much of what is new on the battlefield reflects wider changes in society and its relationship to connected technology and work. In their obsession with artificial intelligence and the latest wunderwaffe, defence intellectuals have forgotten to pay attention to wider changes in society. These changes are not concerned simply with identity politics but also with the technologies that now frame the ways in which people make their living. The gig economy is here to stay. The question for armed forces is how these changes will impact them, not just in terms of who they might recruit, but in the ways that they come to know and fight war.

This question is especially important given that identity formation in online environments has a different dynamic to society’s traditional methods of creating a shared sense of community. Social media connects people across the world, driving politics in ways that do not always immediately relate to a particular nation. Traditional forms of identity formation (i.e. through remembrance and shared historical understanding) struggle to be heard in contemporary social media spaces. War in Ukraine has forged cohesion into Ukrainian society. Conversely, Western citizens are struggling to sustain their interest and/or attention in the context of a fragmented media ecosystem and a cost-of-living crisis. In this context, the war in Ukraine may yet produce the shattering of resolve among Western nations who otherwise wish to hide the dramatic geopolitical consequences of Russia’s invasion.

Partner – Proxy – Glitch

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The conflict in Ukraine offers unexpected insight into a military construct which has previously been mostly theoretical. The scenario of Ukrainian ground forces fighting beneath an information domain dominated almost exclusively by American intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities, while no US forces fight in the conflict, is what 1990s military theorists and strategists described as a ‘vertical coalition’. They conceived of it as the future of American warfare, during a brief period in which violent ground-based conflict among powerful states was believed by some to be vanishing from the world. The correlating concept of sovereign identity, as the founding principle of nation-statehood, was likewise considered by these vanguard thinkers to be malleable, or changing in historically unprecedented ways. Tracing the brief history of vertical coalitions reveals the unravelling of an entire way of seeing the world, even as they make their first appearance in the most unexpected war of the twenty-first century. They offer a live study in how truth and reality trade blows under modern conditions. 

Historical attempts to describe human beings and their affairs in reductionist, mechanical terms have acquired, over time, a spurious sense of the force of nature about them. Some contemporaries even find argumentative utility in placing these trends along something as absurdly modern as an arc of history. The truth is more banal. Much of the force in question can be explained by a repeating series of misappropriations. Context-dependent insights from the natural sciences get recursively generalised into the social and political sciences for contingent and partisan reasons. In other words, conventional political struggles for advantage play out behind the storied veil of epistemology. But the fact that patterns found here don’t necessarily apply over there has become something of a modern heresy in the age of statistical inference. Grand visions and historical arcs need only be invoked for the purposes of mythmaking; therein, perhaps, lies the rub. 

Post-war cybernetics and the cauldron of military affairs nonetheless supplied the impetus and an array of rhetorical language games – the implications of which continue to reverberate today – for the positivist and romanticist legacies, which interweave the meaning and role of the natural sciences in military and societal affairs to continue vying for advantage. Little distance, in fact, has been traversed beyond the French and German dichotomies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Twenty-first-century enlistments of nature’s irrefutable general laws as applied to war and society are in fact a pitiable muddle of positivist and romanticist humanisms. Little wonder at all that it feels befuddling to be alive right now. Both are stumbling recursions of Platonic and Monotheistic tales about the mysterious nature of truth and likewise its mysterious unfolding in human time. Neither copes well with the uncertainty that frames and penetrates human reality – indeed, the uncertainty that represents genuine insights from advances in science. Western modernity, in this sense, has demolished itself. Science discovers and explains – people recoil and retreat from what it finds. It has always been so. It is unscientific to believe otherwise, yet our culture continues to valorise the iconoclast’s hammer. For this reason alone, small worlds will soon rule the political landscape again. 

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So too have the critics of these importations and enlistments pointed beyond discrete instances of promiscuous agency to bigger things. Jessica Riskin, in her book The Restless Clock, explained the forcefulness of a passive mechanistic depiction of nature in scientific history as an attempt to preserve a God-shaped explanatory void. If nature was passively machine-like, how could it emerge autonomously without recourse to the divine? Likewise, in post-war cybernetics, the ability to describe the human element of machinic feedback requires the reduction of human features to a mechanisable and thus computable ontology. The tail wags the dog in the same way that the tool uses the user. Raising the machinic to the comparatively human, as seen in the current discursive on the sentience of statistical inference software, is evidently to stretch the silliness a little too far. It appears much easier to get humans to think and act mechanically – to downgrade their sentience to a Bayesian system-of-systems that few laypersons can critically evaluate. It’s difficult to judge whether the positivists or the romanticists would be more disappointed, as such cartoonishly commercial incentives have displaced the great questions of knowing. Nevertheless, the stubbornly reflexive human animal remains the primary glitch in the science and pseudoscience of control. Ironically, when we are talking about emergence in complex systems, the forces favouring ontological monism seem to invoke their own opposition. Some of this undoubtedly prefigures the contemporary significance of the politics of identity. 

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Vertical Coalitions

Informed by several such enlistments, in the 1990s much of the conversation within the US national security and strategy communities focused on what advantages could be expected from the future of networked digital information technologies. As owner and administrator, the US stood peerless atop this new regime of technology. No other nation approached the American military’s capacity to sense – and with the revolution in precision-guidance, no one doubted its ability to shoot at what it sensed. For a time, this regime was referred to as dominant battlespace knowledge (DBK). But how to translate DBK into military and strategic outcomes? Serious heads, such as the late Andrew Marshall and his pupil Andrew Krepinevich, frequently counselled on the need for technological innovations to be culturally and organisationally materialised for advantage to accrue, lest their value be squandered. One answer spanning the gamut from tactics to strategy was the concept of vertical coalitions.Vertical coalitions supposedly offered a US military enterprise wielding DBK the prospect of greater strategic value, at lower operational cost and reduced political risk.

Vertical coalitions were a military adaptation of the vertical alliance concept originating in corporate business. There, the term describes a business-level strategic relationship between a firm and its suppliers or distributors, aimed at improving competitive advantage. Vertical alliances deepen relationships between the firm and its suppliers and distributors, through the exchange of knowledge and commercial intelligence, to mutual benefit. When a supplier or distributor agrees to work exclusively with a firm, it can bring about a ‘lock out’ dynamic that further enhances the firm’s competitive advantage by denying valuable commercial intelligence to rivals. Suppliers benefit by becoming actively involved in product design and distribution arrangements. A supplier might only agree to being ‘locked in’ if it sees for itself a strategic advantage in doing so, for example the prospect of a powerful market position or, better yet, a monopoly. Indeed, choosing the right partner is an important factor in the success of the strategy, making common intentions and compatible business visions a must. In the business world, actors considering a vertical alliance analyse each other’s corporate cultures to map learning opportunities and avert communication problems. It’s easy to see why military thinkers considering the implications of the digital networked age would be attracted.

One of the chief thinkers on vertical coalitions for the military was Martin Libicki. Libicki used the term to describe the way in which US air power and expeditionary forces were used commonly in the past, in combination with a beleaguered ally on the ground who was expected to provide the bulk of ground forces. In contrast to ‘horizontal coalitions’, which involved two or more brigades fighting side-by-side in combined operations, Libicki anticipated that future military coalitions would be decidedly more vertical, and that the emerging reality of DBK would be the critical enabler. In sum, it was a vision of how the United States would fight and win in the future. Libicki wrote in 1995, 

We would supply overall intelligence on the whereabouts and movements of distant echelons. Our overhead systems (both space and air breathing) would permit pinpointing of enemy platforms. Our distributed sensor systems would be put in place to operate, analyze, and convert data into fire-control solutions. This would permit friendly forces to take precise measure of the enemy, providing them with real-time one-shot, one-kill capability. We might even control the targeting once they have fielded the weapon. In some cases, the United States might be able to tilt the contest to one side without unambiguous proof that we had intervened at all. The use of stand-off sensors as a substitute for forces also frees us from the necessity of overseas bases; they permit more operations to be planned and conducted from international waters.

– Martin Libicki

Critically, vertical coalitions offered junior partner states a quid pro quo. As the predominant actor in the information domain, the US was able to provide its partner states with access to otherwise unavailable information needed to manage their spatial environments. In this way,the DBK regime was scalable. This arrangement did not apply only to the contingencies of high-intensity warfare. The US could provide a variety of information, includingenvironmental degradation, law enforcement (particularly in the maritime domain), transportation, transnational crime, disaster relief and so forth. In return, US sensor systems would be granted access to such entities as open skies, extant monitors and databases, supply lines and logistics. Sensing the underlying political tension, Libicki thought that such an arrangement was contingent on the provision of information at such a level of detail that the US could not be accused of only granting access to information supporting its own objectives.

Nonetheless, the US’ owner and administrator status would have a subtle but pervasive effect on what partners saw when they plugged into the system. It guarded US sensitivities, emphasised strengths and acted as a powerful moderator of adventurism, given that all participants were acutely aware of their own transparency. Broadly speaking, Libicki enunciated a vision of the ‘illumination’ of the battle space and the proprietary ‘unbundling’ of that illumination to include allies and partners with the potential to keep alliances and coalitions together, drive down risk and mistrust caused by opacity, and increase cooperation on the back of common goods.

Notwithstanding its political and identarian vulnerabilities, this expansive vision had a technical Achilles heel. How would vertical coalitions turn out in a world where cyber vulnerability had become the defining condition of anything relying heavily on use of the EMS? Further, was it a realistic prospect when politics among nations returned to its historical norm, after a brief and hubristic hiatus post-Cold War? Either way, few military analysts anticipated that we would get the chance to see a vertical coalition in action, let alone in a hot war with the Russian Federation this shallow into the twenty-first century. The fate of junior nation-states in vertical coalitions with the US should now be front of mind in every capital in which the digital age of networked everything is already a fait accompli, because we are watching the construct operate in the furnace of battle.  

Sovereign identity in networks

Tear-lines and NOFORN classifications have long been a reality of coalition warfare. The political and technical logistics of information sharing carries a rather tortured legacy in military operations, even among the closest of allies. Today, governments frequently espouse their commitment to the importance of knowledge and concurrence regarding the use of national military forces, platforms, personnel and territory. A closer look reveals moving hands. The technological functionality of information systems under networked warfare may have been a chief focus of critique over the past three decades since Libicki’s writing,precisely because it is easier to point out the vulnerabilities in cyberspace than it is to tackle the question of sovereign accountability within networks. Knowledge and concurrence is understood by the layperson to be more than a matter of administrative confidence in the systems in question. It’s still about what the system spits out, and why. People under sovereign government care about why their government acts. 

Several features of the war in Ukraine raise questions not prefigured in the discourse on vertical coalitions of the 1990s. For example, few envisioned the senior partner supplying all the armaments. US dominance in exquisite high-end weaponry was not expected to be accompanied by the massive drain on basic artillery stocks witnessed in Ukraine. In addition, the truly vertical nature of the coalition may be questioned, when the dispersed geographical footprint of the digital stack which drives digitised warfare is properly understood. A targeting system ingesting data and developing fire-control solutions for the frontline is part of the military kill chain, is thus a legitimate target in war, and is operating outside local territory. Vertical coalitions create horizontal risks.

Crucially, the increasing use of statistical inference software for intelligence products and decision making within US-led coalition environments introduces another whole species of political questions. Beyond tear lines and NOFORN, the inscrutable nature of statistical inference products buries issues of knowledge and concurrence for sovereign governments even more deeply. The commercial private sector entanglement of such products enjoins a sprawling commercial ecosystem of digital stakeholders, vulnerabilities, and influences of interest to governments sending forces into battle over which they have little provenance. Indeed, the inscrutable nature of vanguard automated data science may present the greatest challenge to sovereignty within coalitions that we have seen to date. To return to Libicki’s sense of the political tension, in the age of statistical inference via Bayesian reasoning, the system administrator may be unaware of the origins of certain features of an intelligence output, let alone able to present it as transparent. In other words, the way that the intelligence might support parochial interests is buried too. If it arrived via a neural network of Bayesian probabilities, who would know? Don’t ask the data scientists, because they cannot tell you. 

One thing is known. The disciplines of security studies and international relations are not yet in possession of the explanatory tools to grapple with these issues. Until they are, our understanding of politics among sovereign nation-states – allies, partners, and enemies –during and outside of wartime remains mired in an opaque interregnum. Political leadership can only be downstream from this, democratic accountability even further. This is dangerous because sovereign people will demand that their government acts in ways that do not violate their political identity. Sooner or later. If governments can’t say why they acted, because the reason was a probabilistic inference spawned from the fusion of poisoned and leaking data, the absence of an answer to that question is not an answer. Not when lives, and the meaning of those lives as political actants, are at stake. 

As Margaret MacMillan reminded us on the eve of its hundred-year anniversary, we still do not really know why World War I happened. Cartoonish enlistment of trends in pop science, and the unwillingness to confront actual learnings from those enlistments gone awry, may have been politically ignorable in the brief holiday from history from which we have recently been returned. It would be a historical anomaly if such hubris did not come at great cost now that the holiday is adjourned.   

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