THE IM/MEDIACY OF THE WAR

Abstract

In the given article, the author addresses the issue of the perception of war in the information age through the prism of the concept of “im/mediacy”, considered in several interconnected aspects. Of special interest are the following questions: How the effect of the im/mediacy of the war is being constructed and produced in the current political, media, cultural and technological context? What factors define the distancing of and/or proximity of the war, and what role do the languages of war and resistance (as tools of communication) play in this process? The author discusses these key issues on the example of two specific cases — the full-scale Russian war against Ukraine that started in 2022, and the undeclared war of the authoritarian regime in Belarus against civil society that began in 2020. The author places this discussion in a larger context of the debates on decolonization of knowledge and culture in the ex-Soviet spaces. The conceptual framework employed combines semiotics, deco- lonial approach and poststructuralist philosophy.