SUMMARY:

The article takes as its point of departure the famous dictum of the French political thinker, Alexis de Tocqueville: “A new science of politics is needed for a new world.” What new, if any, political science do new post-Soviet societies have? Vadim Osin answers this question using the case of Ukraine, focusing on three aspects of the genesis of Ukrainian political science and relying on a series of in-depth interviews conducted with political scientists in several regions of Ukraine. First, the author analyzes the motivations of those who have joined the profession in the wake of perestroika. Second, he reconstructs the dominant gender regime in the profession of political science and its perception and interpretation by female and male practitioners. Third, he places the local academic tradition within the broader international context of knowledge production and dissemination, and characterizes the status of Ukrainian scholarship as colonial. Osin asserts that Ukrainian social scientists experience double colonial pressure, from the American and Russian academic traditions, and are exploited by the domestic neopatrimonial political regime.