SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The street protests that erupted in Ukraine in late 2013 prompted by the government’s sudden pull-back from the process of joining the European Union, leading to the government’s collapse two months later, are widely understood as a pivotal moment of change in both Ukraine’s national politics and in European geopolitics, including as the antecedent for the ongoing war between Ukraine, supported by the US and EU, and Russia. However, conventional explanations for the dynamics, trajectories, and outcomes of the ‘Euromaidan’ moment are limited by reliance on analytical frameworks that tend to privilege some forms of power over others in emphasising, variously, specific actors, interests, values, structures, discourses, etc., over others; by contrast, this dissertation argues that a fuller account of the non-linear changes and continuities in transnational politics represented as the Euromaidan moment requires attention to the workings of multiple forms of power that co-constituted interwoven global elite networks with these outcomes.