When It Is a Matter of Life and Death, Survival Instinct Is More Important than Some “Mentalité Differences”
3/2014
Forum AI
Ukraine and the Crisis of “Russian Studies”:
Participant Observation of History in the Making
SUMMARY:
Andriy Portnov interviews Nataliya Gumenyuk – a Ukrainian journalist and cofounder of Public TV (Hromadske.tv), which played a prominent role in covering the Euromaidan. Her views are informed by her double position as a participant in the events and a journalist in describing and analyzing them. Gumenyuk strongly opposes the politics of essentializing groupness and ascribing a single political motivation (and hence, common responsibility) to any part of the population – including the inhabitants of the troubled Donbass region. She questions seemingly self-evident explanations of conflict through references to the influence of historical legacies or ethnic solidarity. Nataliya Gumenyuk insists on the priority of individual civil rights and multiculturalism as foundations of the new Ukrainian nation.