Towards the Abyss: Mass Protest, War, and What Ukraine Reveals About the Global System

Over the course of the past decade, Ukraine has been roiled by war and upheaval that stretches from 2014, when pro-EU protestors toppled the government in Kiev, through the ongoing Russian invasion that began in 2022. Throughout that time, Volodymyr Ischenko has provided invaluable commentary on Ukraine’s accelerating downward spiral. While the particulars-the drawn-out process of demodernization following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Russia’s increasingly desperate attempts to maintain its fractured hegemony over its former satellites-may be unique to Ukraine, a surprisingly similar pattern has emerged across much of the globe in the 21st century.
For this event, Ishchenko will be in conversation with Vincent Bevins, author of If We Burn, to discuss the situation in Ukraine, how things went from mass protests to war in that country, and what that process reveals about the global order.
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Speakers:
Vincent Bevins is the author of The Jakarta Method (2020) and If We Burn (2023), and previously served as a foreign correspondent for fifteen years, primarily in Southeast Asia and Latin America.
Dr. Volodymyr Ishchenko is a Ukrainian sociologist, currently at Freie Universität Berlin. He published widely on contemporary Ukrainian politics, the Euromaidan revolution and the ensuing war, notably in the Guardian, Al Jazeera, New Left Review, and Jacobin. He is the author of Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War.
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This event is sponsored by Haymarket Books While all of our events are freely available, we ask that those who are able make a solidarity donation in support of our important publishing and programming work.

[@alexanderfuchs8742]

i wish i had kept an ongoing list of disagreements ... some are: 1 the blunt assertion that yanukovich "stole" the 2004 election: the measure for that was the discrepancy between US-funded exit-polls and the outcomes counted (see: michael mcfauls lengthy memo on the orange revolution) ... not the best measure imo (which would also apply to the 2004 US-presidential-election btw) ... not to mention the 100s of millions of dollars the US spent on defeating yanukovich and bring his opponent to power who showed his gratitude by sending ukranian soldiers as auxilliary forces to the middle eastern wars ... not sure why this kind of manipulation doesnt count as "stealing" an election (for example: mcfaul mentions conducting "get-out-the-vote"-campaigns in western ukraine specifically and surely in order to maximize the nationalist and the western-oriented turnout ...) 2. the lack of mention of pro-maidan oligarchs like victor pinchuk 3. not mentioning the reasons yanukovich rejected the EU-association agreement in 2013 ... also claiming that he sought greater powers while he actually implemented every single political reform the EU had asked ukraine to make. it all came down to the IMF-loan + austerity program that the EU wanted to impose as a last-minute condition on signing the treaty ... which might explain the reason why organized labor wasnt on board with the protests much better than what the sociologist can offer from combining gramsci & soviet diaries from the late 1950s ...

[@vivalaleta]

I wish more Americans could find their way past US propaganda. Our government would never allow some anti US union of countries to add Canada to their list.

[@perlefisker]

38:10 Why is that remarkable? That Western sponsored NGOs select the most articulate natives to promote their cause?