Since 2014, when the Ukrainian people successfully toppled the pro-Russian, authoritarian-leaning regime of Viktor Yanukovych, Russia has sought to reassert its dominance over Ukraine through military aggression. The annexation of Crimea and support for its proxies in Donbas exposed Russia’s imperial ambitions and never-relinquished appetite for military conquest. For a lack of strong response from the global community, international institutions, or Ukraine’s security guarantors under the Budapest Memorandum (USA and UK) to its illegal incursions into Ukraine, aerial bombardments in Syria, electoral interferences, and widespread disinformation campaigns, Russia was given a green light for its most audacious to this date full-scale invasion of Ukraine with the purpose of total subjugation, annihilation of Ukraine’s leadership, and erasure of Ukraine’s identity and statehood.

The existential war for Ukraine’s survival has brought forth a host of paradoxes and dilemmas that challenge everyday lives of Ukrainians, while posing profound sociological and philosophical questions. Domestically, as the war goes on, the Ukrainian government has pushed forward a number of controversial reforms: carrying on with the land market launched in 2021, despite numerous concerns raised by the farmers and civil society; releasing little of the state-owned land up for private lease and auctioning permissions for peat and amber mining on what should have been a protected forest territory; adopting the new labour legislation that brings challenges for the workers; closing educational and medical facilities exacerbating the crisis of care infrastructure and social reproduction; and encouraging mobilization practices that benefit economically privileged and deepen existing inequalities. On the other hand, Ukrainian society rose to the challenge and demonstrated unprecedented levels of regional solidarity, mass volunteer movement, and a strong bottom-up response to the invasion. The visible involvement of previously marginalized groups, such as LGBTQ+, ethnic, and religious minorities, into the war effort, produced higher visibility and acceptance in Ukraine’s political community.

In light of these seemingly contradictory processes, we might ask: How does the class feature in war logistics, mobilization, and management? How can we understand the commitment of Ukraine’s Left, LGBTQ+, ethnic, and religious minorities to the war effort on frontlines or volunteering, considering the masculinized, patriarchal, and often homophobic nature of the military structures? Is it uniquely new or simply less invisibilised than in previous wars?How does Ukraine’s mainstream neoliberal ideology coexist with an overwhelmingly state-funded wartime economy? Is the mixture of state and market, especially while at war, a surprising phenomenon or a regularity in world political and economic history? How does Ukraine’s pluralistic and inclusive civic identity evolve, what chances it has, in response to the new forms of belonging and othering that the war conditions produce? Whose grievances will be taken into account in the post-war recovery? Who will be the marginalized “others”?

Environmentally, the Russian war in Ukraine has brought devastating and irreversible consequences that many scholars rightly characterize as ecocide. Its weaponization of energy and food, as well as the sheer amount of poisonous substances from mines, shells, and missiles that now populate Ukraine’s fertile black soil, forests, and rivers, will reverberate for decades and generations to come. At the same time, being at its most vulnerable, Ukraine is at risk of foreign and domestic exploitation of its grain, land, and natural assets. How are these resources positioned within the frameworks of geopolitical strategy and global capitalism? How can we unpack the constellation of domestic business and state elites and international financial institutions driving Ukraine’s agriculture and environmental reforms?

The Russo-Ukrainian war is a conflict that plays out at multiple scales simultaneously - in people's homes, in Ukrainian soil and waters. However it is the conflict that spills out beyond the state and the region, a global affair with actors around the world - private, state,non-state, and non-human/natural and biospheric - implicated, complicit and affected. Its outcome will shape lives for generations within Ukraine as well as the architecture of the international order, altering geopolitical alignments and priorities worldwide. In its ten’s year, we can already dissect certain trends and continuities that have already altered regional and global geopolitics. How has the war reshaped regional geopolitics with the EU members, such as Hungary, Germany, and Poland? Considering the complicated history of Polish-Ukrainian relationship with legacies of both inter-ethnic violence and anti-imperial solidarity, how can we theorize it from a materialist perspective and what does it mean for the future politics? Finally, how have transnational solidarities, specifically between Ukraine, Palestine, Syria, Taiwan, reimagined and reconfigured the Big Power politics?

This special issue invites contributions that critically examine the intersections of class, gender, sex, race, culture, and geopolitics in the context of Ukraine, with a particular focus on the structural and ideological dimensions of war, colonialism, and global capitalism. We welcome submissions from diverse disciplinary perspectives, including political science, sociology, history, gender studies, cultural studies, and economics.

Please submit abstracts to: praktyka.teoretyczna@gmail.com

Examples of inquiry questions:

• Class analysis of war and mobilization
• Trade unions and labor rights in the war economy
• Ethnicity, language, culture, and religion in conflict
• Gender, sex, and queer dimensions of war
• The Ukrainian Left and the war
• Ecoside and environmental consequences
• Inter-state relations and shared histories: Polish, Hungarian, German cases
• Geopolitics and Regional Entanglements
• Transnational Solidarities and Decolonial Struggles
• Land, Grain, and Resources in Global Capitalism
• Reconstruction of Ukraine after the war