The War in Ukraine and the Collapse of the Liberal World Order, or What Kind of „We“ Will Ukrainians Be After the War?

Irina Zherebkina

When the invasion of Ukraine by Russian troops began on February 24, 2022, flagrantly violating the international borders established after World War II, it seemed to many to be temporary and regional anomaly; the situation would soon return to a state of normalcy and the legal status quo in the region restored. But today, four years later, it is clear that the invasion of Ukraine was only the beginning of a larger global process to disrupt the normative international order: the post-Cold War liberal order is being replaced by some kind of new world order, in which international law is abolished and world and regional hegemons make the rules in their spheres of influence. 

These political transformations challenge political theorists and researchers, who are forced to critically analyze power politics in a situation where authorities do not hesitate to openly flaunt their violence and flagrantly destroy liberal democratic norms and institutions that have been the target of progressive criticism for decades. Many critical intellectuals in the West today find themselves confused and even depressed in the face of the anomie of the new world order. If not so long ago it seemed that if one exposed the ineligibility of modern power, its hypocrisy and its „genuine“ obscene face – bare violence hiding behind the façade of liberal democratic normality – it would reveal its emptiness, helplessness, and impotence. Alain Badiou calls such a critical gesture a demonstration of the „pornographic“ nature of power,¹ or a representation of the exercise of power as a comedy, which, in his words, allows „both to expose what, in the present, is power and to show that no sooner has it been exposed, no sooner has it appeared, than this power disintegrates and displays its nothingness, its emptiness“.²

However, in the context of the new world (dis)order, it turns out that the demonstration of obscenity and loss of dignity by the authorities paradoxically does not indicate the weakness of their power, as Slavoj Žižek notes, analyzing the phenomenon of Trump and Trumpism. Although Trump, according to Žižek, is an authoritarian without authority (since he constantly undermines his authenticity and dignity and behaves like an obscene clown),  nevertheless, „[h]e has a lot of power, and he knows how to use it“.³ Therefore, Trump has to be taken seriously as a threat, and the Marxist-Hegelian formula „first tragedy, then comedy/farce“ in relation to Trumpism should, according to Žižek, be reversed: first comedy, and then tragedy.⁴ A tragedy for progressive forces and critical theory, which turn out to be powerless and helpless in the face of the „vilest strength of the monster“ of pornographic power. 

The fact that many critical intellectuals in the West today find themselves confused and even depressed in the face of the anomie of the new world order, emblematized by what Žižek calls „Trump’s new barbarism,“ is explained by Maurizio Lazzarato by the consequences of the disorienting influence of the poststructuralist theories of power that have dominated recent decades.  In his opinion, they have focused on criticizing the normalization of liberal power and have therefore been unprepared neither to the realities of war, nor to the figure of state power which, abandoning the constitutional and ethical principles that traditionally limited it. In the words of Lazzarato, „Western critical thought (Foucault, Hardt-Negri, Agamben, Esposito, Rancière, Deleuze-Guattari, Badiou, to cite only the most significant) has disarmed us, leaving us defenseless in the face of class confrontation and international war, realities that it could not anticipate because it did not construct the concepts and affects requisite for analyzing them, let alone intervening in them.“⁵

The limitations of previous critical theories of power, according to Lazzarato, are due to the fact that they are essentially reformist and assume that capitalism can be „democratized,“ while in fact capitalism is ontologically non democratic. The truth of capitalism, in his opinion, manifests itself in the mode of war, which is revealed now, with the advent of the era of new „wars of extermination“, as Etienne Balibar calls them.⁶ Therefore, the only solution that can be an effective counter to the power of militarist capital is, as Lazzarato argues, an anti-capitalist revolution, driven by new militant political actors (above all anti-racist and feminist) who are called upon to put an end to the position of the working class at the center of the revolutionary process.⁷

There is also a tendency among feminist theorists today to include in the feminist conceptual arsenal the ideal of revolution and the strategy of the revolutionary imagination, which presents the task of feminist emancipation as an act of radical transformation of the foundations from which human existence arises and as a call to the reimagining of other possible social orders and views of justice.⁸  However, as the Argentine feminist theorist Veronica Cago and William Callison stated, the leaders of the populist right today also adopt the concept of revolution and actively appropriate “ the whole revolutionary language of transformation and daring“, positioning themselves as revolutionaries: „we are the revolution, we will change everything, nobody will stop us“.⁹ That is why, according to Žižek, today right-wing populists are ahead of left-wing populists in the effectiveness of mass mobilization, causing „admiration and horror“ among the liberal left with such mass actions as, for example, the seizure of the Capitol by a crowd of Trumpists on January 6, 2021, when “the protesters breaking into The Capitol –  “ordinary” people breaking into the sacred seat of power, a carnival that momentarily suspended our rules of public life“.¹⁰

At the same time, contemporary right not only actively use radical revolutionary rhetoric, but also traditional revolutionary identity politics of the left, which relies on the undermining of normative models of identity and the strategy of dis-identification.  As Brian Massoumi notes, today the right’s identification strategy is post-normativity and the identity flexibility and fickleness that Trump demonstrates. According to Massumi, “Fickleness: a stereotypically feminine characteristic that has led a number of commentators to underline that Trump does not embody the steeliness of the traditional strongman. … His embodiment of what are traditionally coded as feminine characteristics, including his proclivity for the decorative detail, led one of his strongest celebrity supporters (Roseanne Barr) to call him “the first woman president of the United States.”¹¹

In this situation, when the right has appropriated the strategies of mass political mobilization and subversive identity politics that have traditionally been in service of the left, some on the left are thinking about redefining traditional left-wing identity politics and making a turn towards more traditional, humanistic political ideals and values. Žižek, in particular, reflects on the possibility of countering the identification strategies of a-normativity and demonstrative obscenity of Trump and Co. with the more traditional behavior of European leaders, who must demonstrate dignity.¹² What if the left today changed its tactics, Žižek asks, and instead of relying on the subversive deconstruction of bourgeois liberal identity, refocused on strengthening European identity as a universal value of human civilization? After all, Žižek reminds us, its normative background is “the emancipatory legacy of the Enlightenment”.¹³ 

From this perspective, the main force defending both European identity and the universal values ​​of human civilization from Trumpian and Putinist barbarism today, according to Žižek, are Ukrainians, and support for Ukraine’s struggle against Russian aggression is, in his words, part of this fidelity to the old civilizational order. „With all the mistakes – corruption, misjudgments, nationalist excesses – that Ukraine made, and whatever the outcome of the war will be, one should unambiguously assert that its resistance to the Russian aggression is the act of an unheard-of popular heroism. If Ukraine miraculously survives as a state, it will be because of this heroic resistance – without this resistance, it would already be a part of Russia”.¹⁴

Badiou, coinciding at this point with Žižek, also sees in the orientation towards universality a remedy against the contemporary political disorientation, advocating a renewed universality as the „universalized universality“ of communism and contrasting it with the particular monetarized universality of capitalism, fraught with „generic fascism“.¹⁵ Badiou believes that heroism can be a way to realize a renewed universality, but only as a figure beyond war and military heroism, in other words, as a figure representing the act of the infinite in human action, which takes humanity “beyond the natural limits of the human animal”¹⁶ and organizes new, more inclusive and egalitarian forms of collective action. At the same time, military heroism, which Badiou defines as sacrificial heroism, aims to provide the subject with the assertion of his exclusivity and superiority through sacrifice to an imaginary community – national or religious, that is, a way of social being that Judith Butler calls the „ontology of individualism“.¹⁷

The social ontology of individualism that, as Butler argues in Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, is the basic ontology of war, that offers a vision of the world and human life in which lives are unevenly distributed and divided into those that are 1) more precarious and deserve protection and grief, and those that 2) are less precarious and less deserving of protection and grief. Respectively, certain lives are produced as designed not for life, but for annihilation, or as killable lives, as Donna Haraway put it, ¹⁸ in order to protect and preserve lives that are truly valuable and possessing of dignity. The paradigmatic subject of this social ontology is, according to Butler, the nationalist subject who recognises the precarity of only his own life imagined as heroic and seeks to deny that we are all dependent on each other in a shared precariousness.¹⁹

In times of modern wars of extermination, such as the war in Ukraine, it may seem that the logic of differentiating the value of human lives and practising of military heroism is the only possible and correct one for effective resistance to aggression. Therefore, it is followed by many supporters of Ukraine, such as Žižek and his associates, who want to see Ukrainians only as resilient heroes who sacrifice themselves today twice: first, for their own Nation, and second, for Europe, the EU and European values. At the same time, it is possible not to notice the „non-heroic“ Ukrainians, and also not to see in Ukraine the corruption of the authorities, forced mobilization, the rise of far-right nationalism, etc. But can such a strategy of selective recognition of the value of human lives really help to emphasize the ethical strength of the Ukrainian resistance, in contrast to the „barbarism“ of the aggressors, and mobilize as a result the mass transnational solidarity of progressive forces in support of it?

In the context of the (now collapsing) liberal world order, a model of successful war emerged, the so-called „new wars“ (see Mary Kaldor, Martin van Creveld, Herfried Münkler and others). These are characterized as rapid, asymmetrical, and limited in time and place. They are waged in accordance with the values of “post-heroic societies,,” as Edward Lutwak dubbed them, where individual life and a high standard of living are valued above military prowess and heroism.²⁰ In contrast to the classical model of a successful war, which is oriented towards the Clausewitzian concept of „absolute war“, a new war is one that is not waged on a country’s own territory, but is forced outward, to the periphery. There a state of permanent war is established, and the state turns into a war machine, when society is entirely mobilized for the sake of war and becomes a society of war and for war. According to Bruce Kapferer, this is what is happening now with Israel and Hamas.²¹

It was this type of successful „new war“ (by analogy with the quick and bloodless seizure of Crimea in 2014) that Putin apparently planned to carry out in Ukraine when he declared his special military operation. However, since he failed to localize this military operation in time and space, he was put in the position of a politician who, although not a loser, did not sufficiently master the technologies of modern great power warfare, as the United States pointed out to him by conducting an exemplary “special military operation” in Venezuela on January 3, 2026 in 3 hours, which they are trying to repeat with much less success in Iran. In this situation, in order to prove his effectiveness and potency in waging modern wars, Putin needs to turn Ukraine into a machine of permanent war, in which all social life is inseparable from the war, while the Russian Federation will continue to live as if there is no war for it. Therefore, according to the leading theorist of new wars, Mary Kaldor, “Putin will have “won” if he succeeds in reducing Ukrainian society, through a combination of war and negotiations, to a fragmented sectarian violent condition, in which a small group of oligarchs/ethnic warlords/ criminal gangsters continue to amass riches while everyone else is prey to criminality, ethnic violence, poverty and predation”.²²

If this is the meaning of Putin’s victory, what would be a Ukrainian victory? Ukraine’s victory in the war with Russia is not just the preservation of the Ukrainian state, but a state that would not turn into a war machine, which is what both Putin and those internal beneficiaries of the war in Ukraine seek, for whom the war has become a means of increasing their political, economic and cultural capital, the level of which would be unattainable in the „peace“ regime (in this their goals paradoxically coincide). In other words, in order not to lose the war, it is important that Ukraine survives as a state that will be fundamentally different from both autocracy and the kind of simulated/imitative democracy called „porno-politics“ by Badiou, when behind the pretentious statements about pluralism and dignity there is a suppression of any dissent in the country, which basically marks the political life as a situation of „bare violence“. 

It is clear that after the end of the war, Ukraine will face not only serious economic problems, but also the disruption of democracy caused by years of martial law and the suspension of the functioning of democratic procedures and institutions. In order for democracy in Ukraine to be restored, there must remain in Ukrainian society a strong desire for democracy, a desire to live by the democratic principles of freedom and equality, or, as those whom Butler calls „the aspirational „we“, for whom freedom, and therefore equality, is most important. Such an aspirational „we“ proves, in Butler’s words, that “[t]he desire to find and express one’s own desire for freedom discovers that freedom can never be exclusively one’s own. To be free to desire one’s own freedom one must desire the freedom of the other, since one cannot want autonomy without wanting it for another”.²³ In this, Butler’s notion of an aspirational „we“ resonates with Laclau and Mouffe’s project of radical democracy, which radicalizes demands for „freedom and equality for all“ and opposes the ideology of right-wing populism, which constitutes a „people“ that excludes many categories of citizens. 

Of course, it is difficult for Ukrainian citizens to maintain such a radical democratic desire in the conditions of the current war of extermination, when the strongest desire becomes the desire to win as a desire to humiliate the enemy, based on the logic of recognition, which Butler considers the basic logic of frames of war. Moreover, this desire is intensively produced and reproduced at all levels by the various ideological apparatuses of the belligerent states (both Ukraine and Russia), including literature, art, and philosophy, which today celebrate their special relevance and flourishing.  

But let us not forget that military victories have rarely brought prosperity to the culture of the so-called „victors“ but, on the contrary, have thrown them back to a state of regression and barbarism. Whereas the defeats of the great emancipatory projects in history have often revealed the true greatness of the human spirit, or, in Badiou’s words, that part of human nature which does not exist but must become, so that the infinite may appear in the humanity.  As Žižek put it in In Defence of Lost Causes, quoting G.K. Chesterton: “the lost causes are exactly those which might have saved the world”.²⁴

The outcome of the Russian-Ukrainian war is not only a question of the state and its territories. It is the question of what „we“ – we, Ukrainians –  will turn out to be after the end of the war, and what the aspirations and desires of this post-war Ukrainian „we“ will be aimed at.²⁵ The answer to this question will depend largely on the extent to which we can rethink the concepts of military heroism and the historical experience of our „lost causes“ outside the fantasies of religious and nationalist sacrifice and resentment victory. 

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Notes

1. Alan Badiou. The Pornographic Age, Translated, edited and with an Afterword by A.J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens. Commentary by William Watkin (Bloomsbury Academy, 2020). ↩︎
2. Badiou, Alain. Images of the Present Time. Translated by Susan Spitzer, Introduction by  Kenneth Reinhard (Columbia University Press, 2024), 9. ↩︎
3. Slavoj Zizek. “The need for a colonoscopy of Donald Trump”. Zizek Goads and Prods, January 31 https://slavoj.substack.com/p/the-need-for-a-colonoscopy-of-donald ↩︎
4. Idid. ↩︎
5. Maurizio Lazzarato. “The Impasses of Western Critical Thought”.  Ill Will. April 22, 2025 https://illwill.com/impasses ↩︎
6. Etiene Balibar. “Palestine, Ukraine and other wars of extermination: the local and the global”. Bisan Lectures Series. December 13, 2023. https://aurdip.org/en/bisan-lecture-series-etienne-balibar-palestine-ukraine-and-other-wars-of-extermination-the-local-and-the-global/ ↩︎
7. Maurizio Lazzarato. The Intolerable  Present, the Urgency of Revolution. Minorities and Classes. Translated by Ames Hodges (Semiotext(e), 2023). ↩︎
8. Judith P. Butler. “The Aspirational “We””. Philosophy & Social Criticism. Volume 52 Issue 1, January 2026. ↩︎
9. William Callison & Verónica Gago. “The Chainsaw International. From Trump to Milei, the far right is betting that spectacles of revenge will compensate for steep economic sacrifice”. Boston Review. April 3, 2025 https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-chainsaw-international/ ↩︎
10. Slavoj Zizek. Freedom: A Disease Without Cure (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023).  ↩︎
11. Brian Massumi. “Norms Behaving Badly. Normopathy Today”. Substack. January 24, 2026. https://brianmassumi.substack.com/p/norms-behaving-badly ↩︎
12. Slavoj Zizek. “The need for a colonoscopy of Donald Trump”. ↩︎
13. Ibid. ↩︎
14. Ibid. ↩︎
15. Interview with Alain Badiou: A Renewed Universality. Crisis & Critique. Volume 12, Issue 2, 2026.  https://www.crisiscritique.org/storage/app/media/2026-22-01/interview-with-alain-badiou-a-renewed-universality.pdf ↩︎
16. Alain Badiou. “The Contemporary Figure of the Soldier in Politics and Poetry.” lacan.com. January 2007. ↩︎
17. Judith Butler. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (Verso, 2009). ↩︎
18. Donna Haraway. When Species Meet. (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 80. ↩︎
19. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?, 48. ↩︎
20. Edward Luttwak. “Who Will Win a Post-heroic War? Neither Side Is Prepared to Fight”. UnHead. June 19, 2024. ↩︎
21. Bruce Kapferer. “Own goal! When war becomes its own end – and society the means”. Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology. Volume 2025: Issue 103. ↩︎
22. Mary Kaldor. “Commentary on Kogler: Analysing the Ukraine War through a ‘New Wars’ Perspective”. European Journal of Social Theory. 26, no. 4 (2023). ↩︎
23. Judith P. Butler. “The Aspirational “We””. ↩︎
24. Slavoj Žižek. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (Verso, 2012), 1010. ↩︎
25. This text is accompanied  by the work of the Ukrainian artist Davyd Chychkan with a strong pro-feminist position who gave his life on the front lines fighting for a future for Ukraine that he envisioned as socialist and internationalist. The title of his work is „Network of Circles for Social Revolution and Coordination of Initiatives for Liberation of Labor.“ For more about Davyd Chychkan’s political creativity, you can read here. ↩︎