“We Made a Contribution to the Revolution”: Shifting Scales of Politics and Unity in Ukraine

Abstract

Based on ethnographic and interview data from the 2013-2014 Euromaidan mobilizations in Ukraine, I use the example of the "secondary city" of Cherkasy to show that protest participants used shifting scales to participate in the protests in Cherkasy and in the capital city of Kyiv. This participation showed national unity across Ukraine at the same time that it refocused Cherkasy residents' attention to local political issues. These processes call into question protesters' definitions of Europe, democracy, and national identity, all contested across Ukraine during Euromaidan. This article argues for greater attention to secondary cities in the context of mass mobilization, as local instances of protest participation redefined notions of community at multiple scales.

After Dobbs: Reflections on political and legal anthropology

“…Ethnographic documentation of such projects of knowledge implicitly suggests the inadequacy of vertical scaling as a model of jurisdiction and political engagement. For example, Emily Channell‐Justice, working with Ukrainian activists for democracy before the current war, finds that for activists from Ukraine's secondary cities, the national maidan mobilization was also experienced as an urban movement (2019). For Nick Seaver, working on algorithms in the context of recommendations for employment, the axiomatic inverse relation of large scale and thin relations of care is flawed in relying too much on the logic of fixed costs as an inefficiency.…”