NewsNet January 2025

Challenges and New Trends in Ukrainian Studies: An Interview with Emma Mateo 

NewsNet | January 21, 2025

Why does the study of Ukraine remain important? What do you consider some of the most important questions about Ukraine that scholars today need to address?

Photo by Emma Mateo.

I’ve been studying Ukraine since 2012. Sadly, for all the wrong reasons, it’s a lot easier to make the case for studying Ukraine now. Ukraine faces huge challenges because of Russia’s full-scale invasion – not only how to secure a just peace, but how also to uphold democracy and social cohesion, how to stave off a demographic crisis, how to rebuild the economy and destroyed cities and infrastructure, just to name a few. As scholars, we can help identify and better understand these challenges, and also contextualize them within broader scholarship and amongst other cases. There is no lasting peace to be had in Eastern Europe without understanding Ukrainian society, politics, and history.

Beyond my field of social science, the study of Ukrainian literature, art and culture also remains vital. Russia is seeking to deny and destroy Ukraine’s language, culture and identity, and scholars can play an important role in preserving it, promoting it, and uncovering elements lost to Russian colonialism.

Ukraine also remains an interesting a relevant case for scholars studying a variety of phenomena, that have nothing to do with war, such as mass protest, national identity, democratization, decentralization, and anti-corruption reforms. War is understandably overshadowing everything right now, but there are plenty of other reasons to study Ukraine, beyond conflict.

There is no shortage of questions about Ukraine that scholars need to address. Some of the big questions that come to mind: What would a just peace look like for Ukrainians, and how can it be achieved? What are some of the tensions emerging in Ukrainian society that could pose problems when the war ends? What impact is the trauma of war having upon the Ukrainian population? How is Ukrainian democracy weathering the war, and how can it be supported and upheld in a post-war scenario?

I have also always maintained that the rest of the world has a lot we can learn from Ukraine. This remains true even in wartime: What factors have helped Ukraine’s state and institutions withstand all-out war? What has contributed to the resilience of Ukraine’s civil society during conflict? What innovations in public services and governance has Ukraine rolled out – like the ‘Diya’ app – that could be applied in other emergency contexts? What military advances have we seen on the battlefield that can help us prepare for future threats? What does Ukraine have to teach us about combatting Russian disinformation and hybrid warfare? Ukraine has been a trailblazer in dealing with Russian hybrid warfare and then all-out aggression, and has a lot to teach other countries that face similar threats.

Would you tell us more about the work research are doing on Ukraine? What are the implications of your work for how we understand Ukrainian politics, and political dynamics in general?

Much of my work focuses on Ukrainian protest and civil society. During my PhD, I mapped nationwide protest events during the Euromaidan, and earlier mass protests, seeking to understand what shaped the patterns that I found. If we look this history of activism and civil society, we should not have been so surprised at the levels of resistance that we saw in Ukraine following Russia’s full-scale invasion. In February 2022, I was sure that Ukraine would not fall within days because I was familiar with Ukraine’s strong history of mobilisation.

Now, my postdoctoral work focuses on this civilian wartime engagement. My book project examines the actions and motivations of Ukrainian civilians who chose to stay in their place of residence following Russia’s full-scale invasion, and engage in the war effort as non-combatants. I focus on Bakhmut, Chernihiv, and Dnipro, as three cities which experienced high levels of threat but very different wartime conditions. I conducted fieldwork in Ukraine in summer 2023, and it was incredible to see first-hand the huge variety of ways in which ordinary Ukrainians were contributing to their country’s resistance. It’s crucial that we keep working to understand the actions and dynamics of Ukraine’s civil society in wartime, because it will impact so many things – civilians not only continue to provide vital support for the military, and fill in gaps left by the state during all-out war. Their experience and skills also have the potential to play a hugely valuable role in reconstruction and recovery of the country. At the same time, this highly engaged population will also have very strong opinions about the way that the war ends.

What does the public and the academic community commonly misunderstand or get wrong about Ukraine today?

Photo by Emma Mateo.

I think a longer-term perspective on Ukraine is still largely absent. People often lack the understanding that Ukrainians have experienced not just three years, not even decades, but centuries of Russia consistently undermining their identity, sovereignty and independence. It’s crucial to consider Ukraine’s history with Russian imperialism, in order to understand why Ukrainians are so afraid of an incomplete, negotiated settlement to end the war. History shows them that Russia will just come back for more – this is why Ukrainians want security guarantees. Similarly, the resistance that we have witnessed in response to all-out war is not an aberration. Ukraine has had multiple mass mobilisations where people have called for greater democracy, freedom and independence from Russia, and Ukraine had the highest number of dissidents per capita of any of the Soviet republics. The country has a long history of resistance. Scholars new to researching Ukraine have a responsibility to inform themselves about this longer history.

Relatedly, I would love to see a greater appreciation for Ukraine as a country, beyond that of a state at war. I worry that when the general public imagines Ukraine, they picture a desolate wasteland of rubble. Of course, this is what some cities have been reduced to by Russian forces. But Ukraine is so much more than a place of violence. I hope that, over time, people develop a greater appreciate for Ukraine’s rich culture and history, including its art, music, natural environment, literature, food, and film.

Photo by Emma Mateo.

Lastly, I’d really like it if people could spell Ukrainian place names properly. We still see people getting it wrong in the media and academia. There’s no excuse for this in 2024. It’s Ukraine, Kyiv, Odesa, Kharkiv, and Luhansk – not The Ukraine, Kiev, Odessa, Kharkov and Lugansk. Let’s refer to places the way Ukrainians do, not according to old Russian transliteration. It might seem like a small mistake, but it’s perpetuating the historic erasure of Ukrainian culture and language.

What is the most challenging part of doing research on Ukraine today?

Research access and research ethics are important considerations for those of us working on Ukraine today. The wartime context poses a whole host of challenges. Fieldwork will be permitted by some of our institutions, but even where it is allowed, we need to think carefully about whether and why it is necessary, how we can minimize the risks. We must ensure that we do not put additional strain on the resources of colleagues and institutions in Ukraine. Moreover, many of us may be familiar with Ukraine, or the wider region – but we have never done research in conflict zones before. We need to look to and learn from scholars who have experience in conflict contexts.

In contexts when travel to Ukraine is not possible, or preferable, how can we still ethically do research? We should not be relying on Ukrainian colleagues to assume all the risks of data collection such as interviews or focus groups, only to be credited in our acknowledgements. How can we work alongside and support our Ukrainian colleagues and research assistants? Even when we are relying on data like online/telephone surveys and government statistics, which are less risky to collect, we need to think carefully about what groups these data may or may not be representing. Who doesn’t answer the phone? Who doesn’t speak freely? Who has been displaced beyond Ukraine’s borders? There aren’t easy answers to some of these dilemmas, but it’s crucial that we are transparent and honest about these challenges.

For those wishing to incorporate Ukraine into more of their research and teaching, are there particular books, articles, blogs, news sources, or datasets you would recommend that are particularly useful?

There are some great datasets out there, particularly from Ukraiian institutions. I would like to flag REESources, the educational platform of Lviv Center for Urban History. They have a large wealth of original, primary sources available, of interest for historians, social scientists, and scholars of culture. The website is still growing, and they are developing modules, online courses, and sharing syllabi. Our Ukrainian colleagues have done amazing work to get this up and running in wartime conditions. Kyiv School of Economics also has wide-reaching datasets for local-level data in Ukraine, which cover social, economic, demographic and administrative variables. I recently contributed to a course on the history of Ukrainian Civil Society, with leading Ukrainian scholars, which is freely available online. For news sources, Ukrainiska Pravda is a long standing independent Ukrainian newspaper, which has a good English-language site with concise articles. The Kyiv Independent is also a young, English-language media outlet, co-founded by Ukrainian journalists in November 2021, that has been producing some great reporting. Finally, this recent article by Olesya Khromeychuk, “Too many still view Ukraine through the prism of Russian imperialism”, is also essential reading for anyone new to researching and teaching on Ukraine.

Emma Mateo is a postdoctoral fellow who studies political behaviour in times of crisis, such as mass protest and war, with a regional focus on eastern Europe, particularly Ukraine and Belarus. Her current monograph project explores civilian responses to conflict, focusing on the case of Ukrainian mobilisation during the Russo-Ukrainian war. Drawing upon fieldwork in Ukraine and systematic analysis of local and social media data, the project investigates the actions and motivations of ordinary Ukrainians in different local contexts who engaged in the war effort as civilians. Emma also researches subnational mobilisation during mass protest, mapping and analysing local protests Belarus and Ukraine for her doctoral research. Emma’s interest in the intersection of protest, civil society, media and technology has led her to make innovative use of social media data, such as Telegram Messenger. Her work has been published in Post-Soviet Affairs and Social Media + Society, and featured at major conferences and expert workshops in the US, Canada, UK, and EU. She has previously worked at Columbia University as a Postdoctoral Fellow at The Harriman Institute, and Adjunct Lecturer in Sociology. Emma holds a PhD in Sociology (2022) and MPhil in Russian and East European Studies (2018) from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Modern Languages (Russian, French and Ukrainian) from the University of Cambridge. 

Sarah Wilson Sokhey is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Colorado Boulder, the founding director of Studio Lab for Undergrads, and a Faculty Associate at the Institute of Behavioral Science. Her research focuses on the interplay between politics and economics. Her book, The Political Economy of Pension Policy Reversal in Post-Communist Countries (Cambridge University Press, 2017) examines backtracking on social security reforms in the wake of the 2009 financial crisis and won the Ed A. Hewett Book Prize for outstanding publication on the political economy of Russia, Eurasia and/or Eastern Europe from ASEEES. Her current research focuses on the provision of public goods at the local level in Ukraine.