The Russian war against Ukraine marks a major turning point in 21st century history. It concentrates in a single cataclysm some of the most reactionary forces threatening the future survival of the human species: crony capitalism, authoritarianism, extractivism, patriarchy, ethnonationalism, imperialism and the polluting industries destroying planet earth.
Ukraine’s tremendous resistance to the Russian invasion is first and foremost about the protection of the country’s democracy, territorial integrity, political freedom and human rights. But in the context of a ‘century of cascading crises’, it raises issues and challenges that go far beyond Ukraine – indeed, that are truly global.
In the international solidarity and civil society movements which have emerged in solidarity with Ukraine there is a need to develop spaces that are able to connect these dots. Ukraine’s struggle for survival needs to become intertwined with campaigns and movements for socioeconomic and environmental justice.
By resisting the Russian invasion and asserting its political agency, Ukraine has moved into the centre of not only European but global politics. As a result of their resistance, Ukrainians have an opportunity – in dialogue with global civil society movements – to ‘make another world possible’. By bringing Ukrainian activists and academics into dialogue with other global civil society movements and creating a space for discussion and action, the Solidarity with Ukraine conference seeks to make a small contribution to taking this forward.
Selected speaker biographies
Oleksandra Matviichuk is the head of the Center for Civil Liberties and coordinator of Euromaidan SOS. She has been at the forefront of documenting human rights violations and war crimes since the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and is the author of a number of alternative reports to various UN bodies, the Council of Europe, the European Union, the OSCE and the International Criminal Court. In 2022, the Centre for Civil Liberties was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Mary Kaldor is Professor Emeritus of Global Governance and Director of the Conflict and Civicness Research Group at LSE. Mary’s pathbreaking research has transformed contemporary understandings of conflict in the 21st century. She is the author of many books and articles including New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era (3rd edition, 2012), International Law and New Wars (with Christine Chinkin, 2017) and Global Security Cultures (2018).
Anna Ackermann is a professional in the field of energy and environment with experience in NGO, energy design and research sectors in Eastern and Central Europe. Her main areas of expertise include energy efficiency in buildings, renewable energy, climate change mitigation and policy advocacy. Between 2016 and 2018 she managed the expert "Energy Policy Reform" group of Ukraine's largest civil society platform Reanimation Package of Reforms. She is one of the co-founding members of Ukraine's key environmental NGO Centre for Environmental Initiatives "Ecoaction".
Selected chair biographies
Luke Cooper is the Director of PeaceRep’s Ukraine programme and Senior Research Fellow with the Conflict and Civicness Research Group based at LSE IDEAS, the LSE’s in-house foreign policy think tank. He has written extensively on nationalism, authoritarianism and the theory of uneven and combined development and is the author of Authoritarian Contagion (Bristol University Press, 2021).
Dina Gusejnova is Associate Professor in International History at LSE. Her research interests include modern European political, intellectual and cultural history of transitional periods, especially the revolutions of 1918-20 and the two World Wars. She is the author of European Elites and Ideas of Empire, 1917-1957 (Cambridge University Press, 2016, pbk 2018) and an editor of the volume Cosmopolitanism in Conflict: Imperial Encounters from the Seven Years' War to the Cold War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She is currently working on a cultural and intellectual history of forced displacement and internment in the Second World War.
The full conference programme is available here.