Making sense of (the Russian war in) Ukraine: On the politics of knowledge and expertise

Abstract

The 2022 Russian invasion has led to unprecedented public and political attention to all things Ukrainian.In this intervention, we contend that critical geographic scholarship about Eastern Europe remains wanting and that the recent attention to Ukraine may reproduce and perhaps even exacerbate entrenched perspectives.If we are to overcome the lopsided politics of knowledge and expertise about Ukraine and the wider region, underlying biases should be taken seriously in the current debates about the war.We write in solidarity with people in Ukraine affected by the war, and with those facing repression for anti-war activities elsewhere. 1In what follows, we briefly revisit the problematic coverage of Ukraine in popular media and reflect on the conditions and patterns of knowledge production on Ukraine and the war in academic geography.We conclude by offering some thoughts on the possibility of decolonizing geographic knowledge production in this context.Unsurprisingly, past international interest in Ukraine is eclipsed by the recent surge of public attention and media coverage due to the 2022 war.According to Google Trends searches containing the word "ukraine" over the past 18 years, international attention to Ukraine has surged twice: first after the Russian annexation of Crimea in March 2014, and much stronger in February 2022 (Fig. 1).Looking at Ukraine mainly through the lens of war and conflict, however, raises the risk of seeing and making sense of Ukraine through a narrow set of perspectives while marginalizing others.Monochromatic views of Ukraine have already led to questionable representations in the wake of the Euromaidan, the Revolution of Dignity, the annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the war in the Donbas in 2013/14.Many Western news agencies were not well equipped to cover these events as few had Ukraine-based offices or correspondents (Fengler et al., 2020), and to the best of our knowledge, this remains true at present.Marta Dyczok (2016) finds that many

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