Emotional geographies of activism during the Donbas war in Ukraine

Freimane, Inga (2019) Emotional geographies of activism during the Donbas war in Ukraine. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University.

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Abstract

The Euromaidan protests that swept Ukraine in the winter months of 2013 – 2014 marked the beginning of unprecedented crisis, including Russia’s annexation of Crimea and a start of the protracted armed conflict in the Donbas region. The classical geopolitical analysis that has dominated much of the literature on these events privileges certain apparently ‘bounded’ sites, geographical scales and bodies; while obscuring others and rendering them seemingly irrelevant to these sweeping changes. Inspired by a theoretical framework of feminist geopolitics that is sensitive to the ‘emotional turn’ within geography, this thesis redresses this imbalance by bringing sharply into focus the emotions of activists as an alternative spatialisation of the geopolitical. Bringing three distinct geographical literature sets into conversation (feminist geopolitics, emotional geographies, geographies of protest and activism), this thesis asks: What emotional geographies are revealed by focusing on activism during the Donbas war in Ukraine, and how do these emotional geographies contribute to a more nuanced understanding of this geopolitical crisis? To answer this question, this dissertation draws on empirical material collected during fifteen months of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in Ukraine (April 2015 – July 2016). This work traces connections between intimacy and geopolitics in the everyday lives of activists, demonstrating how these scales are interconnected through the emotional intensities of fear, anxiety, blame, and care.

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