Taras Fedirko

Short Biography

Taras Fedirko is a Senior Research Fellow at the IWM and lecturer (assistant professor) at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow. He received his PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from Durham University and held postdoctoral positions at the Universities of Cambridge and St Andrews. He is a political and economic anthropologist whose research explores how social movements organise to transform war economies; states; and capitalist labour and value regimes. He has conducted long-term ethnographic research in Kyiv and London, and has most recently led a collective project exploring civic and military networks underpinning Ukraine’s war effort. His research has been supported by the British Academy, European Research Council, Horizon Europe, and international development agencies of the UK and Germany among other funders.

Areas of Expertise: 

• political economy of war
• media
• oligarchy and corruption
• state building
• historical sociology
• social anthropology

Publications: 

Fedirko, T. (Forthcoming 2025). Martial citizenship: military voluntarism and the transformation of the Ukrainian nation-state. For: Humanitarianism From Below: Alter-Politics and Struggles for the Universal, ed. T. Mostowlanski and E. Muratova. UCL Press.

Candea, M., Fedirko, T., & P. Heywood. (Forthcoming 2025.) Modalities of free speech. Annual Review of Anthropology.

Artiukh, V. & T. Fedirko. (Forthcoming 2025.) War and dependent state formation in Ukraine. Focaal.

Candea, M., Fedirko, T., Heywood, P., & F. Wright., eds. 2025. Freedoms of speech: Anthropological perspectives on language, ethics, and power. University of Toronto Press.

Fedirko, T. 2023. Failure and moral distinction in a Ukrainian marketplace of ideas. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 29 (S1): 62-78.

Fedirko, T. 2022. In the shadow of power: ethics and material interests in Ukrainian parliamentary reporting. L’Homme 243-244: 61-94.

Fedirko, T. 2021. Suspicion and expertise: following the money in an offshore investigation.Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27(1): 70-89.

Fedirko, T.  2021. Liberalism in fragments: oligarchy and the liberal subject in Ukrainian news journalism.’ Social Anthropology 29(2): 471-489

Fedirko, T., Samanani F., and H. Williamson. 2021. Grammars of Liberalism. Social Anthropology 29(2): 373-386.