Ukraine: United, Divided, Imagined: Local Roots of Civic Ukrainian Nationhood

Application summary

My project investigates local roots of contemporary civic national identity in Ukraine based on the hypothesis that the seemingly spontaneous rise of civic nationalism after the Russian invasion has in fact been prepared by decades of socialisation into local, mostly urban, civic identities. I argue that one source of civic nationhood is publicly contested civic symbols that have endorsed the values of self-governance, civic rights, local belonging and shared responsibility beginning from the late Soviet period. Based on the conceptualisation of the civic symbol as a social imaginary that institutes societal values and identities (Castoriadis, 1998), I will investigate the entirety of Ukrainian municipal symbols through a combination of quantitative, qualitative and GIS methods and tease out a history and a geography of civic identifications in Ukraine. My project will examine the distribution of various values and identifications inscribed through city symbols and produce a ground-up history of how they evolved and coalesced into a shared sense of civic nationhood that was further catalysed by the Russian invasion.