Taras Fedirko

During his stay at the IWM, Taras Fedirko plans to work on two projects exploring the transformation of Ukraine’s civic elites over the last decade. One is a book about conflicts within the Ukrainian journalistic profession in the context of oligarchic competition, inter imperial rivalry, and the war in Donbas. Building on an ethnographic study at the newsrooms of Kyiv’s independent public broadcasters, the book profiles an anti-oligarchic movement for media reform that has mobilized against the mainstream of the profession since 2014. It seeks to explain how media liberals’ attempts to realize their vision of post-Maidan Ukraine contributed to a war-time polarization of the public sphere that took on resonances of a moralized culture war. Fedirko’s second undertaking at the IWM will be an article about the informal economy of the war in Ukraine since 2014. It builds on ongoing research into the conservative elites and political alliances which, having emerged from the war in Donbas, are currently leading the civic response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

This fellowship forms part of a partnership between the Ukraine in European Dialogue program and PeaceRep-Ukraine (the Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform - Ukraine team). PeaceRep is an international research project led by the University of Edinburgh Law School and funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. PeaceRep's Ukraine program is led by the London School of Economics and Political Science in partnership with 7 other global research institutions.