Domination by destruction: Russia’s antiurban way of war

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has foregrounded its distinctively antiurban way of war. Historically, Russian warfighting has been intertwined with antiurban violence and the use of artillery and aerial bombardment to destroy the civilian fabric of the city has been an operational strategy. The targeting of homes, offices, roads, power grids – the infrastructure of everyday civilian life – is deliberate and widespread. In this article I examine this antiurban way of war and argue that these attacks on civilian urban fabric can be understood as both a clearing of space and an undoing of interconnection as both punishment and manipulation of morale. As such they are strategies of domination: antiurban war seeks to erode the capacity to resist. The article introduces 3 conceptual innovations for international politics. First, the concept of strategies of domination provides tools for thinking about the politics of violence. Second, I show that that urban destruction is always already targeted towards civilians and thus challenges the basis of International Humanitarian Law. I show how the concepts of reverberating effects and entanglement help international politics scholars to think about the legacies of violence. Finally, I show that the slow violence urban destruction causes challenges the temporal registers in which international politics scholars traditionally understand war and violence. Instead, I argue that it is necessary to think about the way in which the legacies of destruction lead to long-term effects.