Civilian Resistance in Ukraine, 2014-2022, with Olga Boichak

05/11/22 • 68 min

Alice's guest on this podcast is Dr Olga Boichak, a Ukrainian-born sociologist who works as a lecturer in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney.
Editor of the Digital War Journal, Olga’s particular research interest is the war-media nexus. She has spent years studying participatory warfare in Ukraine, looking at how civilians have used mobile media and open-source intelligence to engage remotely in military conflict; and also at how digital media have been facilitating grassroots activism, from local military crowd-funding to the development of transnational humanitarian aid networks. Her research helps us understand the symbiotic relationship between digital and real-world activities: not just how war and digital media shape each other, but how digitally-driven volunteer movements that emerge in wartime can have longer-term effects on civil society development and broader institutional change.
In the podcast, Olga discusses the 'reflexive control' that Russia has long tried to exert over Ukraine since its independence in 1991. She then reflects on the long history of 'productive resistance' that ordinary Ukrainians have engaged in, which over the years has helped to forge a stronger sense of collective identity and shared civic values. She discusses the many forms of civic participation in military activity that have evolved since Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, and this gets us talking about blurred boundaries between war and peace, about people's proximity to and distance from conflict, and about the ethical dilemmas surrounding involvement and non-involvement.
Along the way, we discuss the role that digital media have played in the conflict in Ukraine. Olga analyses Russia's use of social media from 2014 onwards, in particular their efforts to convince the wider world that people in Donbas have long had strong separatist leanings. She explains how social media activists in Mariupol helped to disrupt that message back in 2014, which is perhaps why Russia has been so determined to conquer Mariupol in 2022.
We also talk about the ways in which social media have facilitated a range of humanitarian responses to the war in Ukraine - and how social media have been shaping our understanding and perception of the conflict more broadly. In many ways, our twitter feeds are full of very conventional pictures of war (tanks, bombed out buildings, soldiers firing weapons), reinforcing long-established habits of visualising conflict. At the same time, more innovative forms of data visualisation (such as stats on the length of time people are spending in bomb shelters each day) are helping us to grasp the 'slow violence' of conflict on civilian populations. New trends in representation are emerging all the time, challenging the traditional metrics we have long used to assess the costs of war and offering us different conceptual frameworks for understanding what is going on.
Olga has family in Ukraine, so we talked a little about what they have been going through. If you are moved by anything you hear, please consider donating to organisations such as the Ukraine Crisis Appeal and UNICEF's Ukraine appeal.
For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews Visualising War website.
Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Previous Episode

How can children and young people help us re-visualise war?

Please note: this episode was recorded before recent events in Ukraine. We stand in solidarity with everyone caught up in this terrible conflict, and our thoughts are particularly with its youngest victims. Children's voices on conflict matter more than ever at present.
This episode is no. 50 in the series! Listeners might remember that our first guest on the podcast was Lady Lucy French, the founder of Never Such Innocence, an organisation which gives children and young people a voice on conflict. In this episode, Alice interviews three Never Such Innocence Ambassadors - Molly Meleady-Hanley, Jasleen Singh, and Vasko Stamboliev - to help kick-start a new Visualising War project looking at the forces that influence young people's habits of visualising both war and peace.
In this new project we will be collaborating with a wide range of researchers in childhood studies, critical security studies, peace studies and futures thinking, to build an extensive network of academics and practitioners to ask some of the following questions:

What kinds of war stories are children of different ages most regularly exposed to in different parts of the world (through films, gaming, school curricula, local folklore, graffiti, news reports, and so on)? What aspects of war dominate the narratives that children are exposed to? And what narratives about war’s aftermath, conflict transformation and peace-building tend to circulate in the media that children most frequently engage with?
What do children and young people think about dominant modes of representing war and peace in different media? How do they describe the impact which different narratives of war and peace have had on them? And how differently might they represent or narrate war, conflict transformation and peace, if they were in charge of the storytelling themselves?
Finally, what impact can children’s voices have on entrenched adult habits of visualising war and peace, both now and in the future?

In the podcast, Molly, Jasleen and Vasko share their memories of the war stories they grew up with, and they reflect on how war and peace were taught in the different school systems (in Greece, Serbia, Australia, Ireland and England) which they were part of. We dive into the poems, speeches and artwork which they have authored themselves, to express their own views on conflicts past, present and future. We discuss what impact children's perspectives can have in helping all of us re-visualise conflict from many different angles. And they explain how empowering it has been to have their voices heard, thanks to Never Such Innocence. Their experiences underline the vital importance of involving children in conversations about war and peace, and we celebrate the amazing work done by Never Such Innocence in bringing young people from all around their world into dialogue with each other and in giving them opportunities to address world leaders in lots of different places, from Buckingham Palace to the Bundestag.

We hope you enjoy the episode! You can read Molly and Jasleen's poems and see Vasko's artwork in this blog, and you can find out more about Never Such Innocence via their website.
For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews Visualising War website.
Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin

Next Episode

Visualising Young People as Peacemakers with Helen Berents

In this podcast Alice interviews Dr Helen Berents, a senior research fellow in the School of Justice at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.
Helen’s research focuses on the involvement of children and young people in international conflict and peace-building processes, and she advocates strongly for wider recognition of their contributions and capacities in navigating violence and building peace. Her book Young People and Everyday Peace explores the presence and influence of youth voices in everyday efforts to respond to ongoing violence and insecurity in a small community in Soacha, Colombia. She has also looked at adult representations of children and young people in contexts of crisis and conflict, comparing them with the stories that young people tell themselves when given the chance. Helen is currently working on a project funded by the Australian Research Council on Youth Leadership and the Future of Peace and Security, exploring the role of youth-led advocacy and engagement in building more inclusive, durable forms of peace in different parts of the world. One aim is to improve the ways in which young people are supported and empowered in conflict-affected contexts; another is to develop new recommendations for the involvement of young people in peace and security policies in future.
In the podcast Helen discusses widespread assumptions about children and childhood, which condition us to view them as victims in need of protection rather than as experts or agents in peace-building contexts. As Helen explains, it is important to be mindful of their potential vulnerabilities; but this can be compatible with recognising their lived experiences of conflict as valuable forms of expertise. We discuss the places where children are typically thought to 'belong' in times of war and peace, the images of child victims of conflict that often go viral, and the long-running marginalisation of their voices. But we also consider the work that young people have been doing in many different parts of the world to make their voices heard, and the impact of the UN's Youth, Peace and Security agenda.
Along the way, Helen talks about the differences between 'liberal', top-down peace and grassroots, 'everyday' peace. Citing Veena Das and Christine Sylvester among others, Helen explains why we cannot simply study war and peace 'from the high places' (i.e. solely from the perspective of governments or abstract ideals) and why we need a 'descent into the ordinary' to excavate multiple lived experiences of violence and peace-building rooted in the everyday. Above all, Helen invites practitioners and policy-makers to consider what changes adults need to implement to make more space for children in different peace-building contexts, including recalibrating what 'expertise' looks like and ceding power to young people. We hope you enjoy the episode!
You can find out more about Helen's work here. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. Please visit the University of St Andrews Visualising War website for more information about our project.
Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin