Editorial

Abstract

Over the last few months, grassroots activists based in urban Russia have got involved in humanitarian projects supporting the inhabitants of Mariupol, a city almost fully destroyed by what the Russian government calls a ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine. Control over the city was surrendered to the Russian military in May 2022. Volunteers provide survivors of a three-month-long siege with clothes, food, medicine and firewood – the latter being important as heavy bombardment and severe fighting have damaged the heating systems of residential apartment blocks, which means that many individual apartments are kept warm this winter with the help of home- or industrially made metal wood-burning stoves. Yet, apart from bringing these material necessities to Mariupol, volunteers also return with new perspectives on the conflict. ‘Mariupolitans are remarkably resilient’, explained one of the volunteers. But they also pointed to the ‘flip side’ of this resilience: ‘This woman, for instance, thinks that after managing her daily survival thanks to the stuff that we bring, things might start looking up and [that] she might be eventually able to continue as before, living essentially a European life’. Volunteers saw their duty here also in explaining that the inhabitants of Mariupol had yet to fully grasp what kind of society they were now a part of. Conveying new regimes of silence and hierarchies can be seen as a form of grassroots humanitarianism. The present special issue of Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale explores cases of humanitarianism and their sociohistorical conditioning.