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Commemoration and the New Frontiers of War in Ukraine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 August 2019

Catherine Wanner
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Abstract

The war in eastern Ukraine continues to produce casualties and an ever growing number of refugees and displaced persons every day. When urban public space is dedicated to commemorating the dead who have died since the Maidan protests, the frontiers of war become inscribed in the urban landscape and in the everyday life of many Ukrainians. These commemorative spaces are an unrelenting reminder of the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine that threatens to remake political borders once again. Commemorative practices articulate new understandings of relatedness as symbolic statements that, once inscribed in public space, have the potential to affect the thinking of locals and far outlive the actual armed conflict that produced them.

Type
Critical Discussion Forum: New War Frontiers and the End of Postsocialism
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 78 , Issue 2 , Summer 2019 , pp. 328 - 335
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies 2019 

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Footnotes

I thank Harriet Murav, Neringa Klumbyte, Bruce Grant, and Nancy Ries for their thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this article.

References

1. Fassin, Didier, “Policing Borders, Producing Boundaries: The Governmentality of Immigration in Dark Times,” Annual Review of Anthropology 40 (2011): 213–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 215.

2. There is already an enormous literature on the Maidan. Some of the most important eyewitness accounts can be found in Taras Prokhas΄ko, Tsyperdiuk, Ivan, Andrukhovych, Iurii, Zhadan, Serhii, and Vynnychuk, Iurii, Ievromaidan: Khronika Vidchuttiv (Brusturiv, 2014)Google Scholar and Finberg, Leonid and Holovach, Uliana, eds., Maidan. Svidchennia: Kyiv, 2013–14 roku (Kyiv, 2016)Google Scholar.

3. For an analysis of the divisions that existed in Ukraine just prior to the war, see Wanner, Catherine, “‘Fraternal’ Nations and Challenges to Sovereignty in Ukraine: The Politics of Linguistic and Religious Ties,” American Ethnologist 41, no. 3 (August 2014): 427–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. This is a growing trend in memorial commemoration. The 9/11 Memorial in New York and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, just to name two examples, are both deliberately integrated into heavily-trafficked public space so that residents and visitors alike must encounter them.

5. An open competition to create a commemorative public space was announced already in November 2014, followed by extensive public discussion, before the official design was selected in February 2018. See http://www.theinsider.ua/rus/lifestyle/teritoriya-gidnosti-yak-gromadyani-rozroblyayut-pravila-rekonstruktsiyi-maidanu/ (accessed April 1, 2019). To underline the swiftness of the commemorative process in this instance, for the sake of comparison, consider that discussions to commemorate 9/11 began five years after the event and a monument opened nearly a decade after that in 2014.

6. The term “sotnya” refers to late-medieval Cossack military divisions. Claiming national tradition, the Maidan Self-Defense (Samooborona Maidana) uses the term too.