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A former showman, Volodymyr Zelensky took the theater out of Ukrainian electoral politics by using genuine communication, not pressure, to garner votes. Comedy as a tool of democratic resilience and contestation has remained central to his leadership. In his previous career, Zelensky promoted an expansive vision of Ukrainian political nationhood that elevated local identities. As president, he continued decentralizing reforms. These reforms may hold the key to protecting democracy in postwar Ukraine, where risks may include the reappearance of the partially staged democratic elections that were a key element of politics in independent Ukraine prior to Zelensky. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of the political culture among students is a process that is influenced by various historical, social, economic, and political factors. In order to streamline this process, to deprive it of spontaneity, it is important to outline the purposes and tasks that the Ukrainian society sets for itself to build a democratic rule of law state. The study is aimed at analysing the political culture of the Ukrainian population and identifying changes in the Ukrainian political culture. The methodological basis of the research is a set of philosophical, general, and specialised research methods. The study proves that the key element of identity policy is the implementation, maintenance, and adjustment of symbolic boundaries between people. The authors analyse the relationship between social boundaries and symbolic boundaries, examine the role of symbolic boundaries in the political sphere and their place in symbolic politics, show how symbolic boundaries are used in various forms and areas of identity politics. The study analyses the specific features of Ukrainian internal political development, the fluctuations occurring in the country between the presidential-parliamentary and parliamentary-presidential government forms. The authors concluded that the causes for the development of a new political culture as a stabiliser and destabiliser in society indicate the complete absence of clear purposes and objectives at all levels of this culture and the urgent need for stability and cultural rationalism to resolve social contradictions. The practical significance of the research lies in the experimental verification of the conditions that contribute to the intensified development of political culture; introduction of the methodology on the development of political culture to citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of the violent Revolution of Dignity (2013/2014) and the subsequent war in Donbas (2014–), a heroic story about the new beginning of a "united, Ukrainian nation" began to emerge. Shaping this new narrative are new museum projects devoted to Ukraine's developing history. This article examines the process of these new institutions' formation, the content of created exhibitions, and the activities conducted therein. It focuses on the role of the museums in activating, unifying, and integrating both the Ukrainian national community and civil society. This article is based on a qualitative analysis of materials collected during seven research stays in Ukraine, from June 2017 to August 2019, and focuses on four cases–Ukraine's First ATO Museum in Dnipro; the Museum of the Heavenly Hundred in Ivano-Frankivsk; the Ukrainian East exhibition in the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in the Second World War in Kyiv; and a project of the Museum of the Revolution of Dignity in Kyiv. The examined institutions are presented not only as places for gathering artifacts but also as laboratories of civic activism, participation, and dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the idea of Ukraine in the imagination of the Little Russian politicians during the revolutionary period of 1917–1919. It chiefly focuses on figures of the Little Russian movement, such as Vasiliy Shulgin (1878–1976), Anatoliy Savenko (1874–1922), Andrey Storozhenko (1857–1926), Aleksandr Bilimovich (1876–1963), and others. This article explores the ideas of the Little Russians regarding the term Ukraine and their views concerning the Ukrainian people and its ethnographic and historical boundaries. It argues that Ukraine and Ukrainians were perceived as a Little Russia, Southern Russia, Southern Rus', and Little Russians accordingly. By their assessment, Ukraine had not included the Taurida (the New Russia region) and the Crimea, but had included Eastern Galicia and Volhynia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article leverages saliency theory to explore how regimes may use state-controlled media to intensify nationalism and gain legitimacy. I explore mainstream news coverage in Russia and Ukraine with a particular emphasis on how political leadership frames nationalist rhetoric in the two countries to emphasize certain issues over others. I focus on relevant media content that contains nationalist rhetoric before and after the invasion of Russia into Ukraine's territory in the spring of 2014. Content analysis suggests that political leaders in both countries have focused on political issues, while largely ignoring economic issues in their nationalist rhetoric. The analysis also shows that state leaders can successfully promote nationalism by emphasizing cultural issues and concerns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Athenaeum: Polskie Studia Politologiczne is the property of Faculty of Political Science & Security Studies Nicolaus Copernicus University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, the problem of determination of the legal personality of indigenous people as a subject of international law is considered. Hence, the problem articulated above leads to the issue related to aspects of practical realization and protection of rights and freedoms of indigenous people enshrined in international legal instruments, which is revealed. The confusion of the term "indigenous people" with that of "national minorities" can be avoided by the subjects of international law. However, one cannot find a solution to this problem without envisaging written rules on the concept of ingenious people in one obligatory, for contracting parties, an international legal instrument. Thereafter, the concept of indigenous people must be unified and, consequently, used by all international legal community. The relevance of this study is due to the need to determine the legal status of indigenous peoples in Ukrainian law. Ukraine has recently acceded to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which defines the need to implement these provisions in national legislation and ensure the practical implementation of the rights and freedoms enshrined for indigenous peoples. To date, the Constitution of Ukraine makes a distinction between the categories of national minorities and indigenous peoples, but there is no specialized comprehensive law that would determine the legal status of indigenous peoples in Ukraine, in the presence of such a law on national minorities. Thus there is a need to determine the concept of indigenous peoples in Ukrainian legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent concerns around the declining support for democracy worldwide add urgency to the question of why ordinary citizens desire a democratic system. An emerging theory is democratic knowledge, which argues that knowing more about the rights and liberties provided by a democratic system leads citizens to want democracy as a result. This paper tests this theory in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus, where conventional wisdom suggests that citizens will be less familiar with the features of a democratic system. Using the World Values Survey, it finds that democratic knowledge is a stronger predictor of democratic support than modernization, political learning or political socialization. Moreover, this effect is strongest amongst Ukrainians who grew up in the post-Soviet period, indicating that democratic knowledge is a powerful antidote to the disillusionment that flawed or limited democratization may bring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Espacios is the property of Talleres de Impresos Oma and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article is part of the special cluster titled Conceptualizations of the Holocaust in Germany, Lithuania, Poland, and Ukraine since the 1990s, guest edited by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe. In 2007, Roman Shukhevych (1907–1950), the commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), was designated an official Ukrainian state hero. He has since become the object of an elaborate cult of personality. Lauded for his resistance to the Soviet authorities in 1944–1950, Shukhevych is highly controversial in neighbouring Poland for the ethnic cleansing that the UPA carried out in 1943–1944, as he commanded that organization. Over a few months, the UPA killed around ninety thousand Poles, expelling hundreds of thousands of others. The brutal efficiency of this campaign has to be seen in the context of the larger war, not least Shukhevych's training by Nazi Germany, in particular the military experience he obtained as a captain in the Ukrainian formation Nachtigall, and as a commanding officer in Schutzmannschaft Battalion 201, which served in occupied Belorussia. This article is an attempt at reconstruct Shukhevych's whereabouts in 1942, in order to establish the context and praxis under which Shukhevych operated until deserting the auxiliary police in January 1943. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question, if and to what extent the Ukrainian nationalists murdered Jews in Volhynia and eastern Galicia during the Holocaust, has haunted Jewish and Ukrainian communities in various countries of the Western world during the entire Cold War. It also puzzled German historians of Eastern Europe and Nazi Germany. Historians, although in theory responsible for investigating and clarifying such difficult aspects of the past, have for various reasons not investigated them or they investigated only other aspects of the Holocaust in Ukraine. This article briefly explains how factions of the Ukrainian diaspora invented a narrative that portrayed Ukrainian nationalists as anti-German and anti-Soviet freedom fighters who did not kill or harm any Jews during the German occupation of Ukraine. In the next step, it shows how testimonies and other sorts of documents left by survivors from Volhynia and eastern Galicia can help historians understand the role that ordinary Ukrainians and the OUN and UPA played in the Shoah in western Ukraine. Finally, it asks why it took Ukrainian, German, Polish, Russian, and other historians so many years to investigate and comprehend the anti-Jewish violence of the Ukrainian nationalists, if relevant documents were collected and made accessible as early as in the middle 1940s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions about state-sponsored communication with foreign publics are increasingly framed in the language of "information war" rather than "public diplomacy," particularly in Eastern Europe. For example, media projects supported by Western governments to engage Ukrainian audiences, and Ukrainian government efforts to engage international audiences via the media, are considered necessary responses in the information war with Russia. This article highlights several potentially problematic assumptions about communicative influence that are embedded in the language of information war. First is the assumption that communication can be targeted like a weapon to achieve a predictable impact. Second is the assumption that audiences engage with communication from an adversary because they are "vulnerable." Third is the assumption that "winning" in an information war means getting citizens to believe particular facts. Although these assumptions may hold to some degree, this article argues that adopting them uncritically can have detrimental consequences in policymaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on ethnographic and interview data from the 2013‐2014 Euromaidan mobilizations in Ukraine, I use the example of the "secondary city" of Cherkasy to show that protest participants used shifting scales to participate in the protests in Cherkasy and in the capital city of Kyiv. This participation showed national unity across Ukraine at the same time that it refocused Cherkasy residents' attention to local political issues. These processes call into question protesters' definitions of Europe, democracy, and national identity, all contested across Ukraine during Euromaidan. This article argues for greater attention to secondary cities in the context of mass mobilization, as local instances of protest participation redefined notions of community at multiple scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Protest performances inside parliament during 2012–2016 articulated claims to uphold democracy that contributed to the maintenance of pluralism in Ukraine during attempted authoritarian consolidation. Simultaneously, such protests were para-institutional instruments in the ongoing power struggle engendered by a patronal system where formal institutions and norms weakly constrained actors. A diverse repertoire of protest, including rostrum-blocking, visual protest, withdrawal, auditory disruption, somatic protest and spectacle, was used frequently and adapted in response to changes in the political opportunity structure. Innovations to the repertoire drew on and modified performative methods used by social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the rise of the Azov movement and explains the process through the political opportunity structure theory. We argue that a loosely coherent winning coalition of the post-Euromaidan ruling elites enabled Azov's participation in conventional politics. As a result, Azov launched the ongoing institutionalization process which is largely responsible for Azov's success as compared to other far-right movements. We show that two movement entrepreneurs' profiles, namely political activist and radical , dominated the Azov leadership structure and managed to promote their strategic vision on cooperation with state officials effectively combined with contentious action. We find that political activist entrepreneurs tend to push institutionalization alongside particular institutionalization axes, namely adaptability, reification, and systemness, whereas radical entrepreneurs are responsible for Azov's transformation into an intense policy demander. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While democratic revolutions are not uniform in their pursuit of democracy, they do have something in common: those calling for revolution and participating in demonstrations do so under the banner of democracy. However, studies have revealed that these citizens were not at first committed to democracy per se; rather, they took the opportunity to vent their frustration against the current regime because of their struggle against poverty and social inequality. Why, then, do citizens who are not pursuing democracy per se participate in revolutions under the banner of democracy? Previous studies have failed to clarify this point. To fill this gap, we outline three strategic rationalities and necessities behind the use of "democracy" as a common slogan to justify civil revolutions: 1) organizing large scale dissident movements in a country; 2) attracting international support; and 3) imitating successful examples from the past. Evidence from the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia and the 2005 Orange Revolution in Ukraine supports this theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the Maidan protests of 2013–2014 were a space for the collision of conflicting narratives on what Ukraine is and what it should be, and how past, present, and future were used to imagine contemporary Ukraine. Making use of speech acts by local and international actors and politicians on the Ukraine crisis, historical narratives on Ukraine, Maidan protest slogans, and field work data gathered throughout 2013–2016 in Ukraine, we identify four meta-narratives that enable us to unravel such an imagining: (1) Ukraine as a liminal category between East and West; (2) Ukraine as Russia, Ukraine as non-Russia; (3) Ukraine as Europe, Ukraine as non-Europe; and (4) Ukraine as Ukraine. We trace and contextualize these narratives in four separate sections. Positing all narratives in a discursive battleground and problematizing them as a struggle between stories, the article demonstrates that the imagining of contemporary Ukraine is deeply conditioned by the conflict between all four narratives. Ukraine is simultaneously all and none of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After Russia's seizure of the Crimean peninsula and military incursion into the eastern Donbas region, the Ukrainian government made significant efforts to censor Russian-language media and suppress Soviet-era symbols and communist parties that have support in eastern Ukraine. Some of these efforts have been consistent with international principles defining the balance between free speech and security. Other measures, however, not only threatened the country's democracy but endangered its national security by alienating precisely those groups in the southeast that Russia's President Vladimir Putin has been trying to divide from Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The city of Slavutych was built specifically to house the workers who would continue to work post-disaster at the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP) and their families. It was the pinnacle of Soviet planned cities, the culmination of decades of lessons learned from similar projects, and the architectural embodiment of Soviet multinationalism. However, in spite of all the excitement the new city elicited, within just a few years the now-independent Ukrainian government, under pressure from international organizations like the International Atomic Energy Association and the United Nations, established a hard expiration date for the shutdown of all ChNPP reactors, which in turn would mean economic devastation for Slavutych and render its existence wholly unnecessary. Rather than wait for the inevitable, city leaders and residents leveraged global and national interest in the Chornobyl disaster and its aftermath, drawing investments from multinational corporations, international organizations, and states to keep the city alive. Their scattergun approach to economic diversification and pre-emptive urban revitalization paid off, as Slavutych thrived even as the rest of Ukraine suffered major economic and demographic crises. This paper examines how Slavutych citizens were able to forge, and then to act upon, geopolitical relationships to mitigate the lingering social, political, and economic effects of the Chornobyl disaster in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current political process in Ukraine, which currently has a dominant electoral component, has a significant research interest for a number of related sciences. The tools and methods of political sociology are now most effective in this context. It is capable, based on empirical data, to determine the characteristics and to identify trends in electoral space. The objective of this scientific article is to find out the peculiarities of the electoral space in modern Ukraine through the prism of the aggregate toolkit and the data of political sociology acquired through it. This is the study of three important components of the electoral space - sociological data, electorate and candidates. A number of approaches and methods have been applied to achieve the research goal, in particular factor and correlation analysis, quantitative approach, data analysis and comparison, cognitive approach, etc. Thus, with the application of these methods, data from sociological surveys for the period 2014-2019 were analyzed, that revealed trends in the ratings of future candidates and actual candidates for the President of Ukraine. They are of peak support indicators with preserving places in the top mainly those three who underwent monitoring during major fluctuations. Instead, candidates with stable support eventually left the polling distance. Among the trends identified during the study there are also the variability of choice, the lack of a consistent vision of the country’s course through the prism of its identification with a particular political figure, creation and promotion of «worship ratings» as the leading tool of propaganda, using the presidential campaign by the most of the candidates as an official application for participation in subsequent elections (parliamentary and local), etc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the Europeanisation literature has examined several aspects of EU transgovernmental cooperation under the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), very little is yet known as to the extent and the conditions under which such cooperation effectively transfers EU norms to ENP countries. Using a qualitative comparative analysis of 32 Twinning projects in Ukraine, the article finds that legal and institutional convergence with EU norms has occurred mainly because of the policy fit of a Twinning project with the needs and technical capacities of the beneficiary administration, notwithstanding sector politicisation, EU sectoral conditionality or the quality of socialisation between civil servants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did Taras Shevchenko become the symbol of Ukrainian identity and freedom? This paper analyzes the narrative of his journey, aspiration, contribution and sacrifice. The narrative of this Ukrainian hero is comprised of a system of stories with a common trajectory andreoccurringarchetypes built on previous Ukrainian stories which form a national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]