Since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Ukraine has pursued an accelerated programme of “decolonisation”: an official effort to purge the public sphere of elements of Russophone culture, history, and heritage. Widely framed as a moral and wartime necessity, this process has also generated sustained debate about cultural freedom, pluralism, and the limits of state power.
This workshop examines Ukraine’s recent experience of decolonisation across education, cinema, literature, and heritage. Bringing together Ukrainian scholars and practitioners, it approaches Ukraine as a critical case within the global politics of decolonisation—one that invites reflection on how emancipatory languages and projects travel, transform, and acquire new political uses.
The workshop is informed by a broader collaborative inquiry into decolonisation as a state project. Across diverse settings—from universities and cultural institutions to state-led geopolitical agendas—the language of decolonisation has, in some contexts, become institutionalised as a powerful and prestigious idiom. Rather than presuming a singular trajectory from domination to liberation, we ask how decolonial discourse can also operate as a resource of authority: shaping orthodoxy, delimiting debate, and legitimising new forms of political and cultural intervention.
Drawing on vernacular political theory developed within the European Research Council–funded project India’s Politics in Its Vernaculars [grant number], the workshop foregrounds ethnographically grounded categories and language to attend closely to how decolonisation is understood, enacted, and contested in practice—in Ukraine and comparatively—without reducing it to either coercion or emancipation.
The workshop follows on from the February 2025 Einstein Forum conference on BRICS and the Postcolonial Condition.
Participants: Benjamin Zachariah, Inna Holubovych, Vladislav Vodko, Maya Dimerli, Eva Neymann, Kateryna Mikheitseva, and Anastasia Piliavsky.
With the support of the European Research Council and the Einstein Forum.