Featuring a special section on “Identity Clashes: Russian and Ukrainian Debates on Culture, History, and Politics” This issue's special section explores the discursive gaps, tensions, and ruptures between Ukrainian and Russian narratives of national identity. It gives the floor to Russian and Ukrainian authors with a view to enabling analytical comparisons between the dominant narratives in the two countries, including their cultural, historical, and political dimensions. This juxtaposition of Russian and Ukrainian insights is aimed at deepening our understanding of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.
Andrey Makarychev is guest professor at the Johan Skytte Institute of Political Science at the University of Tartu. His areas of expertise include EU-Russia studies, the EU-Russia common neighborhood, and regionalism in the post-Soviet space. He is coauthor (with Alexandra Yatsyk)
of Celebrating Borderlands in a Wider Europe: Nations and Identities in Ukraine, Georgia and Estonia (Nomos, 2016) and
Lotman's Cultural Semiotics and the Political (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017). His articles appeared in
Russian Politics, Region: Regional Studies of Russia,
Eastern Europe and Central Asia,
Ethnopolitics,
Geopolitics,
Slavic Review,
Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, and other academic outlets.
Julie Fedor is Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of Melbourne.
Andreas Umland, M.Phil. (Oxford), Dr.Phil. (FU Berlin), Ph.D. (Cambridge), Research Fellow at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs in Stockholm, Senior Expert at the Ukrainian Institute for the Future in Kyiv, and Associate Professor at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy.