"Russia Against Modernity is a useful corrective for some on the left (and far right) who are instinctively suspicious of American actions and see merit in claims that Ukraine is a “proxy war” by NATO against Russia. Systemic factors in Russia are more than enough to explain the war, without having to disentangle the history of NATO enlargement or the contribution of Western blundering in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan."
I wasn’t expecting to agree with so much of this. While there are a few major assumptions (typical “what Putin wants” rhetoric), the rest is surprisingly spot-on analysis on why the “rest of the world,” tiring of US hegemony, want to be just “the world.”
Plenty of boring ways to explain my research topic & why it motivates me to get out of bed every morning. Here’s a more interesting way though, thanks to Tami Amanda Jacoby (2015): “the construction of grievance-based identity is a fundamentally contested process as the lines between victim and perpetrator are blurred by ongoing cycles of belligerence and retribution”.