As of October 2022, more than six thousand people had been confirmed killed and about ten thousand injured in Russia's invasion of and continuing war in Ukraine, according to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCR). Overall numbers of deaths and injuries are likely higher, as gathering accurate informati[...]

Danilo Mandić spent the summer of 2022 in Ukraine interviewing forced migrants. Below he shares a few destinies of people enduring the Russian invasion. Respondents have been pseudonymized. The Underground When I met 40-year-old Irina, she had spent two months and three weeks sleeping underground. She was among seven families— christened by one onlooker as the "last partisans[...]

In times of war, gendered analyses—already marginalized in geopolitical thinking—are often seen as superfluous. When I am asked as a feminist sociologist with regional expertise on Ukraine and the former Soviet Union (FSU) to comment on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, my interlocutors expect me to talk about women, first as victims and then as empowered resistors. However, I s[...]

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 promises to be among the critical events moving the end of this epoch in which we live. It has manifestly disrupted, and destroyed, the lives of so many Ukrainians and brought Russians into [...]

Sociological work on colonization and settler colonialism tends to emphasize the material motivations of empires, invasions, and conquests. It speaks to one of the roots of our discipline, founded in theories of Marxism and resource-based group conflict. But, while colonization unquestionably produces material benefits for the metropole, it starts much earlier. Conquest begins in t[...]

Putin attacked Ukraine on February 24, 2022. No matter the outcome of the war, on the losing side stand Ukraine and Ukrainians. This is because, in the present world order, sovereignty is wielded equally by dictators and democrats, but not by its supposed foundational structure, a nation-state. The attack against Ukraine is yet another show of how sovereignty is, in reality, det[...]

On June 9, 2022, the supreme court of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, the territories claimed by pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine, sentenced to death three individuals—Aiden Aslin and Shaun Pinner from the United Kingdom and Brahim Sa[...]