Dr. Volodymyr Ishchenko is a research associate at the Institute of East European Studies, Freie Universität Berlin. He is currently working on the project “Resolving or reproducing the political representation crisis? Case of the Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine” supported by the Einstein Foundation. 

He defended a doctoral thesis in sociology at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (Ukraine) and lectured at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and Kyiv Polytechnic Institute as well as initiated and supervised Ukrainian Protest and Coercion Data project. He used to be a postdoctoral fellow within Comparing protest actions in Soviet and post-Soviet societies research project coordinated by the Research Center for East European Studies, Bremen University (supported by Volkswagen Foundation) and at the Institute of Slavic Studies, Technical University of Dresden (a fellowship from Alexander von Humboldt Foundation).

His research focused on protests and social movements, revolutions, radicalization, right and left politics, nationalism, civil society. He authored many peer-reviewed articles and interviews on contemporary Ukrainian politics, the Euromaidan revolution, and the following war published in European Societies, Post-Soviet Affairs, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, Globalizations, New Left Review, among other journals. He has been a prominent contributor to The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and Jacobin. He is a member of the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia) network administered by George Washington University, D.C., and a research fellow at Alameda Institute.

His book Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War appeared in 2024 in Verso. It was included in the list of “one hundred indispensable works for thinking in our times” by Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology and in the list of the best books on foreign policy in 2024 by the Quincy Institute.

In 2024, he was awarded a runner-up Daniel Singer Prize for his essay “Ukrainian Voices?” published in New Left Review.

The full CV is available here.

Selected academic and research publications are listed below. Here one can find all my publications.

Books

Ishchenko, Volodymyr. 2024. Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War. London: Verso.

Articles

Ishchenko, Volodymyr. 2024. “Class or regional cleavage? The Russian invasion and Ukraine’s ‘East/West’ divide”. European Societies 46(2): 297-322.

Ishchenko, Volodymyr. 2023. “The Minsk Accords and the Political Weakness of the ‘Other Ukraine’.” Russian Politics 8(2): 127-146.

Ishchenko, Volodymyr. 2022. “Ukrainian Voices?” New Left Review 138: 29-38.

Ishchenko, Volodymyr and Oleg Zhuravlev. 2022. “Imperialist ideology or depoliticization? Why Russian citizens support the invasion of Ukraine.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 12(3): 668-676.

Ishchenko, Volodymyr. 2020. “Insufficiently diverse: The problem of non-violent leverage and radicalization of Ukraine’s Maidan uprising, 2013-2014”. Journal of Eurasian Studies 11(2): 201-215.

Zhuravlev, Oleg and Volodymyr Ishchenko. 2020. “Exclusiveness of civic nationalism: Euromaidan eventful nationalism in Ukraine”. Post-Soviet Affairs 36(3): 226-245.

Ishchenko, Volodymyr. 2020. “Left Divergence, Right Convergence: Anarchists, Marxists, and Nationalist Polarization in the Ukrainian Conflict, 2013-2014.” Globalizations 17(5): 820-839.

Ishchenko, Volodymyr. 2016. “Far right participation in the Ukrainian Maidan protests: an attempt of systematic estimation.”European Politics and Society 17(4): 453-472.

Ishchenko, Volodymyr. 2011. “Fighting Fences vs Fighting Monuments: Politics of Memory and Protest Mobilization in Ukraine.” Debatte: Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 19 (2): 369-395.

Chapters in edited volumes

Ishchenko, Volodymyr and Oleg Zhuravlev. Forthcoming. “Post-Soviet vicious circle: the crisis of hegemony and the crisis of revolution.” In: The Anthem Companion to Gramsci, ed. by Dylan J. Riley and Marco Santoro, Anthem Press.

Ishchenko, Volodymyr. 2023. “Ukraine”. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Left Parties in Europe, ed. by L. March, F. Escalona, and M. Vieira. Palgrave Macmillan.

Ishchenko Volodymyr. 2017. “Ukrainian New Left and Grassroots Social Protests: A Thorny Way to Hegemony”. In:Radical Left Movements in Europe, ed. by M. Wennerhag, Ch. Fröhlich, and G. Piotrowski. Routledge. Pp. 211-229.

Analytical essays and policy papers

Ishchenko, Volodymyr. 2023. “The Russian Invasion and the Left in Ukraine.” LuXemburg. Available at: https://zeitschrift-luxemburg.de/artikel/the-russian-invasion-and-the-left-in-ukraine/

Ishchenko Volodymyr, Ilya Matveev, and Oleg Zhuravlev. 2023. “Russian Military Keynesianism: Who Benefits from the War in Ukraine?” PONARS Eurasia policy memo No. 865. Available at: https://www.ponarseurasia.org/russian-military-keynesianism-who-benefits-from-the-war-in-ukraine/

Ishchenko, Volodymyr. 2022. “Behind Russia’s War Is Thirty Years of Post-Soviet Class Conflict.” Jacobin. Available at: https://jacobin.com/2022/10/russia-ukraine-war-explanation-class-conflict.

Ishchenko, Volodymyr and Oleg Zhuravlev. 2021. “How Maidan Revolutions Reproduce and Intensify the Post-Soviet Crisis of Political Representation.” PONARS Eurasia policy memo No. 714. Available at:https://www.ponarseurasia.org/how-maidan-revolutions-reproduce-and-intensify-the-post-soviet-crisis-of-political-representation/

Ishchenko, Volodymyr. 2018. “Nationalist Radicalization Trends on Post-Euromaidan Ukraine”. PONARS Eurasia policy memo No. 529. Available at: http://www.ponarseurasia.org/memo/nationalist-radicalization-trends-post-euromaidan-ukraine.