Why is Ukraine important? Challenging the colonial and Cold War legacies in European social sciences
Abstract
The article focuses on structural distortions in knowledge production on Ukraine arguing for the need to critically address the underlying colonial and Cold War legacies. It exposes the cultural hierarchies and power asymmetries in the academic division of labour, where Ukraine is excluded from Eurocentric social sciences as epistemologically }}secondary(( and marginalised in largely Russocentric East European studies as peripheral, and thus geopolitically }}non-important((.
The Russian full-scale invasion exposed the futility of those assumptions, which might provoke a double paradigm shift, in area stu-dies and generalist disciplines alike. This shift must be geared towards the inclusion of minor agencies and situated knowledge within )methodological cosmopolitanism(.
Against multiplying challenges to Eurocentric universalist claims, alternative - yet, complementary - epistemologies from the margins might become a meaningful substitute for radical decolonisation. The case of Ukraine provides useful insights, in particular, into popular agency, grass-roots mobilisation, and extra-institutional democratisation.
For them to be incorporated, the structural premises of the )regional( and )general( disciplines must be rectified.