I would like to start by thanking all my friends and relatives from Ukraine and Russia whose contributions to my research have been invaluable. Divided over Euromaidan, the annexation of Crimea, and war the in Donbas, we have nevertheless been communicating, exchanging opinions, and resisting the temptation to withdraw into separate spheres. Holding different political views, speaking different...

Although the criticism of Enlightenment ideas has become widespread in academic circles, the basic Enlightenment narrative—an inexorable movement of humankind toward a progressive common condition—remains an assumption widely shared (implicitly or explicitly) by many movements for social justice and democratization. As this book demonstrates by analyzing the discourses of three social...

Many social activists today argue that, because of the recent rise in socio-economic inequality on a global level, we need to expand the frame of reference for democratic struggle from the local to the global (Holden 2013; Khasnabish 2008; Kurasawa 2007; Routledge and Cumbers 2013; Scholte 2014; Scipes 2016; Smith 2008; Smith et al. 2015). They assert that the movement for “democratic...

Since the advent of modern times in Europe, it has been common sense to ascribe to the modern identity such attributes as individuality, mobility, competitiveness, inventiveness, and reflexivity.1~ This part of the chapter is a modified version of the articles “Ukrainian Euromaidan: The...

Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (HSS) appeared in 1985 in response to the quick proliferation of new social movements and their challenge to the whole conception of socialism resting upon the ontological centrality of a working class conceived as “perfectly unitary and homogeneous” (1985, 2). Drawing on French post-structuralism and psychoanalysis, Laclau and Mouffe...

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, Russia witnessed two big waves of mass protest movements. One of them was a series of marches against the...

As I mentioned in chapter 1, in the aftermath of Russia’s 2012 presidential elections, I analyzed the discourse of anti-Putin activists through their speeches on Echo of Moscow—a Russian independent radio station that serves as an important node in the network of communication among those who struggle for democracy against Vladimir...

As mentioned in chapter 1, while analyzing the discourse of uniprogressivism related to this case, I did not confine myself to Echo; along with it, I analyzed another famous Russian medium known for its irreconcilable oppositional stance—Novaya Gazeta (Novaya). The history of this newspaper and its service as a public platform for alternative...

As discussed in chapter 3, drawing on the discourse theory of Laclau and Mouffe (1985) and conceptual frameworks from a variety of other fields, Carpentier (2017) identifies three nodal points that, in his view, constitute antagonistic discourse: (1) the radical difference of the enemy, who is kept at a distance, (2) homogenization of the self in opposition to the enemy, and (3) the need to...

The Euromaidan (also “the Maidan”) started in Kyiv on November 21, 2013, when protesters expressed their disapproval of President Victor Yanukovych for refusing to sign an Association Agreement with the European Union. This agreement was an extension of the European Neighborhood Policy (ENP) project launched by the EU in 2004 with an idea of creating a comfort zone around the...

One of the most popular legends of the Euromaidan says that the revolution started after Mustafa Nayem, a Ukrainian journalist, put out a call on Facebook for people to gather in Maidan Square in Kyiv to protest. When the Euromaidan began, Nayem was an investigative reporter for Ukrayinska Pravda (hereafter UP), which has been central in providing Ukrainian society with...

In the uniprogressive discourse of UP columnists and bloggers, as presented in the previous chapter, it is possible to discern all the nodal points of antagonistic discourse that I discussed earlier with respect to social movements in Russia. In the articulations of UP contributors, their anti-Maidan opponents appeared as fundamentally different—as the constitutive outside of...

It is impossible to understand the dynamics of confrontation between the two Ukraines (pro-Maidan and anti-Maidan) without accounting for the complex interconnections between the discursive and the material in the course of the unfolding of the Ukrainian crisis. In this chapter, I will try to incorporate the material into my analysis of the discursive using Nico Carpentier’s model of the DMK...

* This chapter is a modified version of the article “In the name of national security: Articulating ­ethno-political struggles as terrorism,” published in Journal of Multicultural Discourses, 2017, Volume 12, no. 4, pp. 332–348.

I started this book by taking issue with the argument that we need to expand the frame of reference for democratic struggles from the local to the global in order to stir human imagination so that suppressed possibilities of development can potentially be imagined. The following questions marked the starting point of my critique: What exactly do we mean by “democratic globalization”...

I was born in Kharkiv, a Ukrainian border city only forty kilometers from Russia. As the first capital of Soviet Ukraine, Kharkiv was one of its leading educational and scientific centers; the city’s residents pride themselves on living in the “intellectual capital” of the Ukrainian East. On the other hand, Kharkiv has also been a huge military-industrial...

Olga Baysha is an assistant professor at the National Research University “Higher School of Economics,” Moscow, Russia. Olga Baysha earned her MS in Journalism from Colorado State University and PhD in Communication from the University of Colorado at Boulder. Previously, she worked as a news reporter and editor in Kharkiv, Ukraine, then as an editor-in-chief of a documentary...