Talking to ... Volodymyr Ishchenko

Since Putin invaded Ukraine in February 2022, the country has
been at war, with the rest of the world having registered this
state of exception in horror, as one of the post-war foundations
of order has started to slip. Wherever events come rushing in,
it's not uncommon for the soberly detached, skeptical view of the
social analyst to fall by the wayside. But this is precisely what
drew our attention to Volodymyr Ishchenko, who, in his book
Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War, links the events
in Ukraine with the post-Soviet phenomenon of disintegration and
decomposition. A point of reference he makes is Antonio Gramsci's
conception of an Interregnum as that never-ending in-between
spatiality in which ‘the old will not die and the new will not be
born’ - an interim period in which those in power lack
legitimacy, representing precisely an ideal breeding ground for
Authoritarianism, Caesarism and even acts of aggression and
violence of all kinds. What's so striking about his
interpretation is that, gifted with this perspective, events in
Ukraine are no longer seen as a special case but as a magnifying
glass through which the crisis of representation that also
afflicts the West is given a surprisingly new interpretation.


Volodymyr Ishchenko is a sociologist and research associate at
the Institute for East European Studies at Freie Universität
Berlin. He writes for The Guardian, Al Jazeera, New Left Review,
and Jacobin, among others. Verso Books published his book Towards
the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War in 2024.


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