Description
This paper challenges elite-centric approaches to the Russo-Ukrainian war and emergency politics more broadly by switching the focus to the agency of Ukrainian citizen groups. With the help of 30 semi-structured interviews and hermeneutic textual analysis, I argue that the ability to mobilise in response to emergencies is not an inherent property of Ukrainian civil society but a result of the cascade of emergency events that happened between 2013 and 2022. I begin by demonstrating that civil society first became drawn into the politics of security during the Revolution of Dignity when it spontaneously emerged as a securitising actor in opposition to the government. The onset of the Donbas war in early 2014 was the second emergency that propelled the growth of civil society into a full-fledged provider of security in competition with the state. I then examine the changes that Ukrainian civil society underwent against the backdrop of low-intensity warfare that preceded Russia’s full-scale invasion. I capture a curious dependence of civil society on the reproduction of emergency politics as a means of preserving its concerted power, which explains its resistance to the idea of returning to politics as normal. The paper concludes by highlighting important continuities between the pre- and post-2022 periods.
