Date:
Location:
Mychailo Wynnyckyj, HURI Research Fellow in Ukrainian Studies; Associate Professor, Sociology Department, National University "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy"
In Person
Abstract
In social sciences literature, Ukraine long has been portrayed as regionally divided, with a weak civil society and a political class exemplified by cronyism or outright corruption. When Russia launched its full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukrainians surprised the world with their activism, unity, and resilience. Their collective agency demonstrated unmistakably that something was wrong with past scholarly interpretations of Ukraine’s economic, political, and social development.
This presentation will outline the contents of a book started during my HURI fellowship, in which contemporary theories of social change (specifically concerning agency and structure) are applied to Ukraine’s turbulent history as an independent state. The result is an interpretation of Ukraine’s 35-year development (from the late-Soviet period to the onset of full-scale war) as a process of “punctuated morphogenesis”: a series of critical junctures followed by periods of structural elaboration.
In Ukraine, this sequence of “critical juncture followed by structural elaboration” was repeated three times during a span of less than 35 years – i.e. in much more compressed intervals than has been observed anywhere else. During each cycle, elements of the previous structure survived the critical juncture, but each crisis also generated novelty that determined the rate, substance, and trajectory of development during the structural elaboration (morphogenesis) phase that followed. Taken together, the succession of “critical juncture” and “social elaboration” forms a story of successive creativity and destruction with crises generating the underpinnings of transformation (structural elaboration), and each period of relative stability generating the tensions that erupted most evidently during crises (critical junctures). It is this combination of latency and creative destruction that makes the Ukrainian case instructive for the analysis of change in other societies.
About the Speaker
Mychailo Wynnyckyj is currently a Research Fellow at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University. He will return to the National University “Kyiv-Mohyla Academy” where he teaches in the Sociology Department and the Business School, and where he was recently appointed Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies. Until early 2022 he served as Head of the Secretariat of Ukraine’s National Agency for Higher Education Quality Assurance and prior to that as Advisor to three of Ukraine’s Ministers of Education (2015-2019).
Originally from Canada, Wynnyckyj has lived permanently in Kyiv for over two decades. He was awarded a PhD in 2004 from the University of Cambridge (U.K.) and gained Ukrainian citizenship in 2019.
Wynnyckyj is a regular commentator for English-language media outlets (CNN, Fox News, Al Jazeera, BBC, CBC, CTV, Kyiv Post, and others) and provides analysis on current events in his "Thoughts from Kyiv" blog. His book Ukraine’s Maidan, Russia’s War: A Chronicle and Analysis of the Revolution of Dignity was published in English in 2019 and in Ukrainian translation in 2021.
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