Abstract
Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022 not only disrupted life in a 40+ million polity but also posed multiple challenges for adjacent states, problematizing the very foundations of the European - and a broader - order. European public and scholarly debates came to recognise that this war, unprecedented for decades on the European continent in terms of the scale of military engagement and subsequent destruction, stands as a historical caesura that suspends established (geo)political patterns and scholarly paradigms. The resulting push to revise our epistemologies and practices proves the need for renewed scholarly knowledge based on nuanced analysis of developments on the ground, as well as their broader reverberations. While Russia has endorsed "an alternative Europe" of authoritarian states based on "traditional values" before recently swinging to the global South, Ukrainians increasingly centre their identity around the concepts of freedom and democracy. Thus, it would not be an exaggeration to assume that the outcome of the ongoing war directly implicates the future of democracy and of the European project.
The event aims to bring together Ukrainian scholars living through the war, where their social roles of researchers and citizens get inextricably intertwined, and scholars working on Ukraine outside the country that keep their intimate connection with the object of their studies and bridge several polities in their reactions to the war. Researchers working on other contexts will share how the war in Ukraine affected their field of study and their approaches. A broader audience will be invited to the keynote speech.