What new insights emerge when we think of Palestine and Ukraine in conversation with one another? In this dialogue, Svitlana Matviyenko and Malaka Shwaikh will critically examine the limits of the discourse of “resilience”—a term that often obscures the structural conditions of violence. They will explore how imperial subjects become implicated in sustaining colonial regimes, thereby reinforcing global systems of domination. By analyzing these mechanisms, the speakers will articulate solidarity not as a sentiment, but as a method of resistance—an active challenge to colonialism embedded within broader international structures of imperial expansion.
Malaka Shwaikh is an associate lecturer at the University of St Andrews, where she teaches and researches peacebuilding with decolonial and intersectional perspectives. She has over six years of experience in academic and consultancy roles, working at the intersection of prison studies, hunger strikes, peacebuilding, and resilience. She has published a book (co-authored with Professor Rebecca Ruth Gould), multiple articles and book chapters on the politics of hunger strikes, the limits of resilience, and the Palestinian question.
Svitlana Matviyenko is an associate professor of Critical Media Analysis in the School of Communication and Associate Director of the Digital Democracies Institute. Her research and teaching, informed by science and technology studies and history of science, are focused on information and cyberwar, media and environment, critical infrastructure studies, and postcolonial theory. Matviyenko’s current work on nuclear cultures and heritage investigates the practices of nuclear terror, weaponization of pollution, and technogenic catastrophes during the Russian war in Ukraine.
Mariia Shynkarenko, IWM Research Director of Ukraine in European Dialogue, will moderate the discussion.
