Terra Invicta

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 produced not only military and humanitarian responses but also scholarly and artistic ones from Ukrainians looking to the future of their country.

Terra Invicta is a series of critical and creative articulations of pasts, presents, and possible futures involving humans and the more-than-human world. Contributors suggest that Ukraine is caught in an environmental war, waged by a fossil-fuel superpower against people who are prepared to lay down their lives to protect their land. This volume explores the relationship between Ukrainians – a multiethnic and multireligious people with a complicated history – and the Ukrainian land, the zemlia to which they belong. Themes include decoloniality, ecocultural identity, the politics of reconstruction, and artistic responsibility amid a war for national survival. Chapters emphasize the value of reviving multispecies relations with the land, positively transforming multicultural relations with history, and reinvigorating grassroots engagements with the state and society.

Terra Invicta grapples with the role of artistic expression in the face of war and collective loss and what it means to commit to a place, a land, a territory, in a world set in constant motion.

"We in Ukraine have been breathing war for more than two years. War is part of the air, just like oxygen. And this is not a metaphor. The war in Ukraine affects the ecology of nature and the ecology of consciousness throughout the world. This book is the best way to understand Ukraine today and the impact of Russian aggression on your life, no matter what country you live in." Andrey Kurkov, author of The Silver Bone

"Terra Invicta does something urgently needed but nonetheless new: it makes it clear that there is no choice between ecological concerns and the struggle against military aggression. In Ukraine, they are two moments of the same struggle. Terra Invicta deserves to become an instant classic, a volume that everyone who wants to grasp the contours of our global crisis should read." Slavoj Žižek, author of Zero Point