Description
This paper explores how Ukrainian men who have chosen not to participate in the armed defence of their country negotiate questions of responsibility, subjectivity, and masculinity amid the ongoing war. The study draws on a series of peer-to-peer interviews, designed to create dialogical spaces where participants could articulate experiences and moral reflections in conversation with other Ukrainian men. This approach foregrounds shared vulnerability, relational knowledge production, and the co-construction of meaning under conditions of conflict. Theoretically, the paper situates itself at the intersection of critical masculinity studies, feminist security studies, and poststructuralist theories of subjectivity. It understands masculinity as a relational and situational project shaped by entanglements of power, morality, and affect. Refusal to fight is read not as passive withdrawal but as a performative and ethical act that unsettles hegemonic narratives of courage, patriotism, and masculine duty. Participants describe their choices as ongoing ethical struggles marked by guilt, solidarity, and the search for moral coherence, while situating themselves within both national and transnational expectations of loyalty and belonging. Their reflections reveal how war reproduces yet also destabilises gendered subjectivities, opening spaces for alternative articulations of self and community. The paper argues that acts of refusal — as revealed through peer-to-peer dialogues — constitute productive epistemic sites where new forms of responsibility, belonging, and masculinity are negotiated. In doing so, it contributes to conceptual debates on the intersections of gender, ethics, and political subjectivity in wartime.
