in Kritika (Ukraine), political scientist Ivan Gomza and sociologist Volodymyr Sherkhin discuss democratic peace theory and its limits. Gomza dismantles the comfortable theory that democracies do not fight each other. It is liberal democracies embedded in norms of mutual respect and institutional constraints that tend toward peace, not democracy itself.
Civil liberties are often eroded by the pressures of persistent military conflict, but war can also accelerate democratization, providing an opportunity to rethink how democracy functions and is maintained, as seen in women’s right to vote after World War I.
Gomza and Sherkhin commented that it is methodologically unreasonable that most major indicators rate Ukraine as an unconsolidated or hybrid democracy simply because elections have been suspended under martial law. On the contrary, the interaction between state institutions and civil society in wartime Ukraine has shown remarkable resilience. The mobilization of resources through horizontal networks makes it clear that defense is no longer just a state matter.
What matters, Gomza concludes, is which actors shape the process. Systems do not degenerate on their own. The elite and the people choose the direction.
bicoloniality
Yana Primachenko reviews Svitlana Biedarieva’s book Amphicoloniality and war: The case of Russia and Ukraine (2025). Russia’s gradual absorption of Ukrainian land over the centuries created a symbolic interdependence in which the colonizers absorbed the colonized culture so deeply that it was no longer possible to distinguish between inside and outside. Biedarieva’s concept of bicoloniality captures this process beyond the dualism of colonizer and colonized.
Primachenko places this book within a long Ukrainian intellectual tradition of naming colonial asymmetries. Vasil Shaklai‘s criticism of the Bolshevik nationality policy of 1918 Ivan Dziubaanti-establishment Marxism. Each attempt to name the asymmetry was met with repression rather than debate, confirming, as Primachenko observes, the colonial nature of the relationship.
For Biedarieva, Russia’s desire for Ukraine functions as a psychoanalytic register that combines Eros and Thanatos. In other words, the obsession to own the object of desire turns into an obsession to destroy it. “This structural ambivalence creates an affective logic of desire and violence” that ultimately leads to attempts to appropriate Ukraine’s historical and symbolic resources.
After its annexation of Crimea in 2014, Russia has been actively seeking to exploit Ukraine’s historical heritage by erasing Kiev’s fundamental role in Orthodox Slavic history. Instead, Moscow weaponized the history of Crimea, where Prince Volodymyr was baptized, to claim direct spiritual lineage from Byzantium. A full-scale invasion escalated into what Achille Mbembe called “necropolis.” In this case, it is systematic physical, social and symbolic destruction aimed at completely dismantling Ukrainian subjectivity.
Euromaidan was the point of no return and shattered the communication model on which both colonial relations depended. Primachenko points out that Russian scholars have long developed the concept of internal colonization in order to dissolve the Holodomor into a federation-wide famine. Biedarieva’s framework illuminates this movement by showing that this supposedly “internal” process always maintains a hierarchy between the imperial center and the colonized periphery.
imaginary orient
In the closed-off Soviet society of the 1970s, circles of cultural opposition found in Asian literature and philosophy a resource that ideology could not colonize, writes Mykola Ryabchuk in a personal essay published in Japanese. Persian Sufi poetry, Japanese haiku, and the works of Hermann Hesse Siddhartha: These constituted “our Bible, the Qur’an, and a short course in Marxism-Leninism.” This essay illustrates how this “imagined Orient” helped fill an ontological gap, providing an existential dimension that official communist ideology and state-controlled Orthodoxy could not.
This essay focuses on his residence at Hokkaido University in 2024. There, fantasy gives way to reality with small surprises, such as an ambulance siren blaring eerily close to an air raid siren. At a suburban train station, a stranger who cannot explain the directions in words runs through a tunnel and up a flight of stairs to point to the correct platform. Ryabchuk’s curiosity is his method. “I discovered all these wonders completely by accident. I was not an expert in film, literature, or even history.” What drove me was pure curiosity, a desire to understand more about this land and its people. ”
The essay ends with a diplomatic argument wrapped in memoir. Japan is Ukraine’s seventh largest donor, but because it does not have a military component, its contributions are underreported in Ukrainian media. But cultural diplomacy must go both ways. It is not enough to buy a few Ukrainian books in Japan on Amazon. Riabchuk argues that political emancipation must be accompanied by cultural and epistemological emancipation. “Our ancient journey to the East is taking on unexpected form and content. Don’t give up.”
philologist at play
Vitaly Zezera, Theater Journal Editor-in-Chief ukrainian theaterThe book features three prose books published posthumously by the late Ukrainian literary scholar, folklorist, and writer Stanislav Rosovetsky (1945—2002).
Although it is a novel, Brutal Kiev romance Although the book was written in 2012, two years before Euromaidan, it is surprisingly prophetic, including Pechersk tanks and cruise missiles coming from the east, and it is Rosovetsky’s language that is of primary interest to Jezera.
Rosovetsky was bilingual, raised in a Russian-speaking environment and trained in Russian philology. All three books contain significant residues of Russian lexical and syntactic interference. Jegera reframes this linguistic hybridity as an assertion of creative identity rather than a failure of technology. “Rosovetsky seems to have written the novel rapidly, without giving himself time to find the right words and phrasing. He used whatever was at hand and edited it later if he felt like it.”
This approach allowed Rosovetsky to forget the framework of philology and instead maintain a connection with the linguistic environment of his youth, “drawing from the fountain of language that lives in the soul.”
Review by Kseniya Kharchenko
Source: Eurozine – www.eurozine.com
