Beyond Maps of Power: rethinking conflict and solidarity

Insight by Dalia Ismail

The public debate around the war in Ukraine has been rigid from the start, quickly funneled into a binary narrative that mirrors - both in structure and logic - the one observed during the Syrian conflict.

On one side, Ukraine is celebrated as the frontline of liberal Western values against Russian imperialism; on the other, part of the anti-imperialist left tends to reduce the conflict to a mere proxy war waged by NATO against Russia - effectively denying the Ukrainian people any form of agency.

In this polarized climate, it has become increasingly difficult to express human solidarity with those under attack by powers like Russia, China, or Iran without immediately being placed within an ideological framework.

Because these actors are seen as opponents of the United States, any condemnation of their actions risks being interpreted as alignment with the West and a reinforcement of its propaganda.

This dynamic ends up obscuring the fact that these powers, too, engage - though in different ways - in imperial logics of domination and geopolitical projection.

At the same time, dominant narratives in Western media - amplified by governments and news outlets - often exploit the Ukrainian tragedy to further NATO’s strategic agenda. In this process, the recognition of Ukrainian self-determination is reduced to a rhetorical device, rather than valued in its autonomous and plural dimensions.

This context reflects a broader fracture in contemporary public discourse: the apparent incompatibility between geopolitical analysis and the understanding of social realities, collective emotions, popular aspirations, and human rights.

There is a tendency to separate global strategy from lived experience, as if speaking about state interests excludes the subjectivities directly impacted by them.

And yet, as philosopher Étienne Balibar points out, it is precisely at the intersection of humanity and politics that the possibility of genuine solidarity is built - one capable of avoiding the traps of ideology.

Geopolitics is not necessarily cynical or dehumanizing: it can, and should, take into account the complexity of desires, fears, contradictions, and choices of the societies involved in conflict, without reducing them to mere instruments of state actors.

The world is not black and white. Global powers act out of interest and calculation, not ideology, and recent history is filled with ambiguous alliances.

One example that illustrates just how blurred and complex international dynamics can be is Russia’s position during the war in Ukraine. While Moscow presents itself as an enemy of the West and NATO - and openly criticizes U.S. influence in the world - it has nevertheless maintained strategic economic and political ties with certain NATO member states, particularly Turkey.

Turkey, in fact, is an emblematic case: on one hand, it has declared its support for Ukraine, even selling it military drones; on the other, it has strengthened ties with Russia, purchasing S-400 missile systems in 2017 - a move that sparked serious tensions with the United States.

Moreover, Ankara has opted not to fully implement Western sanctions against Russia, keeping economic and diplomatic channels open.

Further confirmation of this logic can be found in Syria.

Before the fall of Assad, and despite Russia’s formal alliance with Iran and Syria, Moscow maintained close military and diplomatic ties with Israel throughout the conflict.

Israel regularly bombed pro-Iranian militias in Syria - often with the consent of Russia, which controlled the country’s airspace.

This illustrates how international relations rarely follow rigid or ideological lines. Instead, they are shaped by practical calculations, partial convergences, and strategic compromises.

Likewise, every society involved in a conflict contains internal fractures, debates, and contradictions. Reducing a population to a mere proxy of greater powers strips it of both humanity and autonomy.

The aim of this article is to open up critical space where, for example, Ukraine’s right to self-defense can be acknowledged without being trapped in propaganda narratives - whether Western or anti-Western.

Because while it’s true that armed conflicts cannot be understood without geopolitics, they also cannot be understood by dehumanizing the people experiencing them in the name of geopolitical analysis.

Campism and Its Analytical Limits

One of the main obstacles to a clear understanding of the war in Ukraine lies in an approach still deeply rooted in part of critical thought and anti-imperialist movements: the so-called campism. This worldview divides reality into two opposing camps - the imperialist West on one side, and anyone who resists it on the other - assigning intrinsic legitimacy or value to the latter, regardless of other dynamics.

Within this framework, Russia is not analyzed for what it is - a power with its own expansionist interests - but rather framed as a “counter-hegemonic” actor. Ukraine, in turn, is no longer seen as a political subject with its own history, divisions, desires, and demands, but merely as a pawn of the West. This reading is not only simplistic, but epistemologically flawed: it erases complexity, denies the plurality of Ukrainian positions, and reduces all forms of local resistance to an external power dynamic.

A clear precedent for this can be found in how parts of the left narrated the Syrian conflict. In that case too, attention focused almost exclusively on the role of foreign powers (the U.S., Russia, Iran, Israel), while the Syrian popular uprising - born from below and driven by democratic and social demands - was systematically erased or viewed with suspicion.

As Syrian activist Wafa Mustafa noted in an interview with Middle East Eye:

“Everyone manages to erase the agency of the Syrian people. (...)‘It’s just a proxy war’ - and yes, it is, but not only. The Syrian people simply don’t exist in that narrative. Assad was also partially toppled because millions of Syrians fought against it.”

Campism, in this sense, is an analytical method born out of the desire to oppose Western hegemony. But when taken to the extreme, it ends up reproducing the same power logics it claims to resist: it hierarchizes peoples, erases subjects, and determines who is and isn’t worthy of solidarity.

Western Propaganda and False Solidarity: The Roots of Distrust

If campism reduces the war in Ukraine to a mere extension of conflict between imperial blocs, mainstream Western narratives are in many ways even more problematic. In much media and institutional discourse, Ukrainian suffering has been framed almost exclusively in anti-Russian terms - turned into rhetorical fuel to reinforce NATO’s political and military agenda, rather than as a starting point for genuine solidarity.

This instrumentalization weakens the credibility of those who sincerely seek to defend Ukraine’s rights. When human rights are invoked only where they align with Western interests, solidarity begins to look selective, conditional, and subordinated to power. This fuels a legitimate suspicion: that even the defense of Ukraine is less about ethics than about geopolitical objectives.

As a result, many critics end up rejecting any pro-Ukrainian stance altogether, struggling to distinguish between support for resistance and participation in war propaganda.

This same dynamic plays out in other contexts: the Women, Life, Freedom movement in Iran, anti-government protests in Cuba, the Taliban’s repression of Afghan women - all express profound demands for freedom, justice, and self-determination. And yet, they are often framed in ways that serve Western interests: used to justify sanctions, diplomatic pressure, or even military invasions.

This history of selective “solidarity” toward popular causes in the Global South has produced a deep, structural distrust - one that resurfaces forcefully every time human rights are invoked in sensitive geopolitical contexts.

It is in this vacuum of trust that an opposite reaction grows: a radicalization of suspicion, which leads many to reject any critical voice raised against non-Western powers - even when that voice stems from legitimate popular struggles.

In the name of anti-imperialism, this tendency ends up justifying or ignoring other forms of oppression, losing the ability to distinguish between government propaganda and the real demands of peoples.

Recognizing propaganda without slipping into cynicism is one of the most urgent challenges today for anyone seeking to exercise a form of critical, yet human, thought.

Imposed Representations

Populations entangled in wars between global powers are often confined to narrow, preassigned roles in media narratives: mere “civilians,” “Islamists,” “Nazis,” or “brave women.” The dominant narrative - regardless of its source - has already decided what role to assign to those who suffer: pawns, martyrs, accomplices, symbols, but rarely active agents or political interlocutors.

This mechanism has been particularly visible in both Syria and Ukraine. In Syria, the international public gradually internalized the idea that the conflict was too complex, too infiltrated by foreign powers, that all actors were equally “tainted”- and therefore that there was no point in taking a side. The same logic now applies to Ukraine: the more the war is interpreted through a purely geopolitical lens, the more Ukrainian society is seen as a passive container, a battlefield for external interests, rather than a diverse collective of active, divided, and transforming subjectivities.

But peoples do not disappear just because they are ignored in analysis. Their memories, languages, and their capacity to narrate themselves continue to exist - even when misused or misunderstood. In Syria, this has taken the form of grassroots resistance aimed at building a more just and inclusive society, of exiled activism, and of an extraordinary cultural output. In Ukraine, this process is also underway across different spheres. There are groups and individual activists who reject both Western instrumentalization and Russian occupation. Some openly denounce internal forms of discrimination in Ukraine, which have been among the many contributing factors to the conflict - alongside NATO's role and the political use of historical memory.

Acknowledging these subjectivities does not mean romanticizing them or instrumentalizing them to reinforce one ideological front over another. It means re-centering politics as the space of human conflict, not just of state strategies. It is not true that global powers hold the whole power while peoples hold none: wars are also shaped by what societies do, demand, and build over time. The fall of Assad in 2024 is proof of this.

Yes, the weakening of Iran and Hezbollah over the past year and a half played a role in the regime’s collapse - but without the sustained pressure from local forces in Idlib, where armed groups and civil networks resisted for years, that outcome would not have been possible.

History is not only made by those who rule, but also by those who put a vision into practice.

Rethinking War

The war in Ukraine forces us to reconsider not only what international solidarity means today, but also how we observe and interpret wars. Ideological polarization has made it difficult to distinguish between legitimate support for an attacked population and the political cooptation of its demands by one of the global blocs. But this very ambiguity demands a qualitative leap in our analysis: to read wars not as abstract power struggles, but as concrete processes lived by complex, divided, living societies.

Rejecting ideological frameworks does not mean adopting a neutral or disengaged position. On the contrary, it means taking seriously the subjectivities involved, recognizing their contradictions, and resisting the urge to flatten them into pre-packaged geopolitical templates.

It also means recognizing that people can be both attacked and instrumentalized - that their right to self-determination does not cease to exist when it becomes inconvenient for our worldview.

The war in Ukraine is not just an international crisis: it is also a mirror of how global discourse tends to simplify the world’s complexity.

Critical thought today must start here: with the ability to listen without absorbing, to discern without simplifying, to take a position without erasing the social and political reality of those involved.

In this sense, speaking about Ukraine - like Syria, Iran, or Sudan - means speaking about our understanding of justice, solidarity, and the role of politics in the contemporary world.

It is not about choosing sides reflexively, but about rebuilding a political gaze capable of holding together ethics, critique, and responsibility.