Remember that Ukraine is about as far from the Netherlands as Rome is from Amsterdam.’ It could poison life for everyone for a long time to come. There is not enough understanding of how this is also an attack on the West and could spill over. I still see how the war is considered an external problem.
But I don’t think that Western audiences fully understand the scale of the threat. ‘The media attention for the war is unparalleled. How can I now sit down and cold-heartedly write about my research in the past tense, when the context has changed so dramatically?’ Western audiences do not fully understand the scale of the threat And then the war started, and I had to drop out from this project. I was studying the coolest things happening in terms of citizen participation and democratic innovation to see what and how the West could learn from Ukraine. For example, in the months before the war, I worked on a project on democratic innovations in non-Western democracies. ‘Some of my work has become obsolete because of the war. I can also call myself an Ukrainian studies scholar, because some of the research I do focuses strictly on Ukraine, on Ukraine’s civil society, politics and culture, and the transformation in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union. I focus on EU policies towards Eastern European countries and post-Soviet space, and Ukraine is of course one of the countries in the region. As an IR and EU studies scholar, I study EU external relations, in the fields like trade, political and institutional reform, culture.
Studying Ukraine ‘Ukraine is an important theme in my work.
It is paradoxical that I introduce my work in this article, and not over coffee with them.’ Now suddenly so many colleagues reach out to me, while I did not have the opportunity yet to meet them.
‘At that time we were still in lockdown, so it was only in February that I could start meeting my colleagues. She lives in Brussels and joined the University of Amsterdam in January. Olga Burlyuk is a scholar from Ukraine and studies Ukraine within an international context.
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