Vol. 67 No. 1–2 (2023)

Guest Editors:  Julia Buyskykh and Tetiana Kalenychenko

Russia's shocking military aggression against Ukraine has created new challenges for academics, leading to a crisis of values and raising questions about the meaning of academic work. The war has demonstrated that Ukrainian social scientists must combat not only Russian neo-imperial totalitarianism but also a kind of Western epistemic colonialism.

The use of colonial rhetoric creates a division between widely recognised, “stable” centres that are legitimised by knowledge, politics and a monopoly on “theory”, and “unstable” peripheries that are supposedly characterised by localism, a lack of scientific maturity, and an devalued approach to research problems, often dismissively glossed as being “emotional”. The following articles are a response by Ukrainian anthropologists, sociologists and historians to such discursive trivialisations and to the unwarranted gatekeeping of Ukraine’s agency as a sovereign state, or of academics who would offer their deep insights to these conversations. This special issue explicitly rejects the epistemic violence directed at Ukraine and its academic knowledge production.

The entire context for working on this special issue is deeply intertwined with the course of the war. We issued our call for applications in mid-September 2022 with the deadline for abstract proposals of  December 1, 2022 – a period of active warfare in Ukraine that had been punctuated with intensifying Russian missile shelling of civilian targets since October 10, 2022. On November 15, 2022 alone, Russia shelled Ukraine with more than a hundred missiles. These attacks targeted the country’s energy infrastructure and were designed to cause a total blackout in Ukraine. Indeed, from mid-October 2022 to early March 2023, Ukrainians lived with recurring blackouts, leaving more than a million households across the country without electricity and many more with only limited access to electricity, heating, hot water, and mobile and internet connection. March 1, 2023 was our deadline for manuscript submissions. Currently, approaching the finishing line before publication and contacting our authors for last-minute corrections, we are fearful for their lives and well-being, as well as the lives of our friends and relatives in Ukraine, which has experienced severe shelling on December 12 – 13, 2023.

The central aim of this issue is to amplify the voices of Ukrainian scholars and scholars engaged in researching Ukraine in order to present their invaluable ethnographies, sociological studies and historical research. While a few texts were written in academic offices, the majority were composed under more difficult conditions, lacking access to libraries, writing under siege, and living with only sporadic access to electricity, internet or heating. All of these articles, therefore, articulate important ethnographic contexts from Ukraine that offer a real contribution to the current academic debate and provide an opportunity for more informed, empathic, and extensive discussions that are shaping the discipline of anthropology today.