Czech Journal of International Relations

Olesya Khromeychuk: The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister

2024-03-18T08:58:38+01:00

Míla O’Sullivan reviews Olesya Khromeychuk’s timely memoir. According to O’Sullivan, the book is most valuable for portraying Russia’s war in Ukraine from the everyday human perspective against the background of Ukraine’s hierarchical position between the West and Russia. By providing this perspective, it is a vital contribution to the scholarship on epistemic imperialism that highlights the harmful knowledge and misunderstandings permeating the Western debates that get most things wrong about this ten-year war. The book also provides a way that allows the readers – scholars or otherwise – to make sense of their own personal perspectives and positions in this knowledge production and reception. O’Sullivan concludes that Khromeychuk’s memoir is thus both a challenge to the persistent structural inequalities in explaining Ukraine’s fate and a helpful guide to structural change that would allow for understanding Ukraine and emancipating its agency in our scholarly or public debates.

Ukraine in Popular Culture: Editorial for a Special Issue

2024-03-01T17:06:55+01:00

This special issue explores how popular culture shapes local, regional, national, and global perceptions of Ukraine amid the ongoing war with Russia. Integrating literatures on popular geopolitics, vernacular and aesthetic IR, and Ukraine studies, we delve into the complexities of the knowledge-making about Ukraine that takes place at the interstices of the everyday, the aesthetic, and the international. Given the mutually implicated relationship between popular culture and world politics, the popular representations of the Ukrainian subject both mirror and shape prevailing narratives, practices, identities, and power relations. But we also inquire into how popular culture serves as a space for political resistance and activism by those existing at the margins of world politics. By centering the Ukrainian perspective in all its multiplicity, the special issue helps to challenge the Western- and Russian-centric prism through which Ukraine has been approached in IR and related disciplines.

Ukraine at War: Reflections on Popular Culture as a Geopolitical Battlespace

2023-08-10T09:19:54+02:00

Drawing on my previous work on how Western cultural producers have constructed the post-Soviet realm, as well as the feedback loop of popular culture wherein the region’s (non-)state actors mould their images for consumption abroad, this article reflects on popular culture as mechanism of the Ukraine-Russia War (2022-present). The specific focus is on how the Russia’s full-scale invasion and Ukrainian defence of its territory exemplifies the current state of popular culture as a geopolitical battlespace. Following a brief overview of popular culture-world politics continuum, I delineate the pivotal role that social media memes play in the current military conflict via a case study of the Twitter/X feed of Ukrainian Memes Forces (UMF), which employs various forms of youth-oriented visual intertextuality and comedic pastiche to establish Ukraine as a ‘cool’ adaptable, non-ideological agent against an ‘uncool’ hidebound, ideological foe (Russia-Putin-USSR).

A Superhero Army, a Courageous People and an Enchanted Land: Wartime Political Myths and Ontological Security in the 2022 Russian Invasion of Ukraine

2023-09-29T09:11:47+02:00

The first three months of the 2022 full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine saw the rise of mythical stories of fantastical heroes, events, and places in Ukraine’s public space. This article suggests looking at these stories through the frame of wartime political myths providing a greater sense of ontological security. By analyzing four proposed characteristics of the Ukrainian myths – transcendentalism, normativity, identity, and national context – we argue that political myths constitute strategies of resistance that contribute to ontological security. In this case, we observe that they do so in (at least) three ways: by creating myths of a superhero army; by creating myths of a courageous Ukrainian people; and by creating myths of a sacred enchanted land.

Vernacular Geopolitics through Grand Strategy Video Games: Online Content on Ukraine in Europa Universalis IV as a Response to the Russo-Ukrainian War

2023-08-22T08:12:22+02:00

Europa Universalis IV, (better known as EUIV), is a popular grand strategy PC game. Players choose a country to play as and start in the year 1444 with the option to plot new courses in history such as allowing players to form Ruthenia, the game’s version of Ukraine. In this article, I investigate how both Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian online content creators have been making content related to Ruthenia and Ukraine as a response to Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. I highlight how this content allows creators and viewers to voice their opinions on the war, build a sense of solidarity with the Ukrainian military, debate issues related to the war, and raise money for Ukrainians in need. Through close readings of this content, I offer an analysis of how this community uses the game to build a "vernacular geopolitics" in which information about and understandings of international relations and conflicts develop in non-elite settings.

A Solidarity Narrative: The Soft Power of Ukrainian Wartime Poetry

2023-06-21T15:24:15+02:00

This article undertakes an analytical reading of the new wave of contemporary Ukrainian poetry after the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine, in particular the poems written and published online and/or in print between 24 February 2022 and May 2023. This Ukrainian post-invasion poetry serves as a cultural response to the war, shaping the national narrative of the war by undertaking a factual and emotional witnessing of the wartime reality and creating an empathetic connection that engenders a solidarity of the international audience with the Ukrainian people. It therefore functions as a tool of soft power which promotes the foreign-policy goals of Ukraine, namely European and transatlantic political solidarity in countering the Russian aggression.

Contested Identities, Hunger, and Emigration: Themes in Ukrainian Cinema to Explain the Present Day

2023-08-31T15:12:35+02:00

Storytelling is an essential aspect of the creation of a community of the mind. Shortly after its invention, film became instrumental in cultivating national identity. States and national groups are keen to have their stories told in order to reinforce a sense of identity internally and claim relevance externally. This paper explores how film and popular culture help to explain politics and identity in Ukraine, examining how films are reinterpreted, reformulate a canon, and facilitate new political arguments. Therefore, through the films of Alexander Dovzhenko, we can see how the struggle to balance political ideology and national identity depicted in them helps to illuminate and explain politics today. A feature of Ukrainian cinema that is often overlooked is how films made by the diaspora perpetuated national identity, language, and culture through periods of hunger and subjugation. These films are both a statement of political and cultural identification and the basis for current political claims.

“Spiritual Armour”: Crafting Ukrainian Identity through Vyshyvanka

2023-10-08T10:32:10+02:00

The brightly coloured and delicately detailed “vyshyvanka”, the traditional Ukrainian embroidered shirt, has long been a marker of Ukrainian ethnic and cultural identity. In recent years in particular, the vyshyvanka has become an internationally recognized symbol of “Ukrainianness”; and yet despite its importance in Ukrainian identity-building and independence movements, remarkably little scholarship exists on this topic. This lack of academic engagement stems in part from twin forms of domination – colonial domination and gendered domination. Ukrainian history has often been overshadowed by Russo-centrism, while the significance of handicrafts practices such as embroidery has been dismissed because of their association with femininity and “women’s work”. Yet the sheer number of digital images of vyshyvanka and the proliferation of vyshyvanka-related designs in light of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, make this a topic worthy of our attention. In this article, I explore how and why the uses of vyshyvanka have evolved over time, charting differences in how the vyshyvanka has been depicted, and used, both by Ukrainians and by those seeking to denigrate or deny the existence of the Ukrainian nation. I focus in particular on the explosion of digital images featuring the vyshyvanka, which have been circulating since the Euromaidan of 2013-14, and on the history of the creation of World Vyshyvanka Day, now celebrated on the third Thursday of May and serving as a vehicle for mobilizing solidarity with Ukraine from Taiwan to the UK to Israel.