World-Loss and Re-Worlding: An Arendtian Reading of Russia’s War against Ukraine

Abstract

Author develops an Arendtian account of war as driver of world-loss, arguing that war destroys not only lives, territory, and infrastructure, but also the material and public conditions through which a common world can appear and endure. Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s works, the article identifies two connected forms of war-caused world-loss. First, war attacks the durable human artifice (infrastructure, homes, cultural sites, etc.), thereby eroding the material “in-between” that stabilises common life and links generations. Second, it damages the public world in which plural beings appear to one another through speech and action, replacing conditions of freedom with fear, necessity, and force. The actuality of this problem is demonstrated through selected testimonies, reports, and examples from the Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine. Its original contribution is the concept of re-worlding, understood as an Arendtian analytical category for practices of different collective actions that resist world-loss under conditions of war.