How do separatist conflicts arise and spread? When does separatism become cover for foreign aggression? How do local communities respond when state institutions collapse, and militants take over? The armed conflict in eastern Ukraine, which started eight years before Russia's full-scale invasion, contains unique evidence to address each of these questions.

In Seize the City, Undo the State, Serhiy Kudelia offers an authoritative study of the conflict at its initial stage--2013-14--based on a meticulous comparison of mobilization dynamics in over a dozen Donbas towns as well as in two major cities outside of it: Kharkiv and Odesa. Through his extensive travels and numerous interviews with conflict witnesses and participants, Kudelia explains how a small group of Russian agents and local militants succeeded in eliminating state control over the largest and most densely urbanized region of Ukraine but failed to do it elsewhere. Kudelia challenges conventional accounts of the armed conflict in Donbas, which portray it either as an interstate conflict entirely manufactured by Moscow or as a civil war that broke out without any external influence. Instead, he argues that local actors prepared ideological and organizational basis for the uprising, but the successful spread of separatist control resulted from the covert intervention of Russian agents and widespread collaboration with them of town administrators and community activists. His findings also show that when enough members of local communities organized to resist militant takeovers, the separatist challenges there quickly dissipated.

A fine-grained and highly original on-the-ground analysis of the origins of the wider Russian-Ukrainian war that broke out in 2022, this book offers broader insights into the conditions under which external intervention may trigger the rise of an armed insurgency in a society torn apart by political and ideological disagreements.

Speaker:

Dr. Serhiy Kudelia is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Baylor University. His research has focused on three sub-fields of comparative politics: (1) the onset and dynamics of insurgencies and civil wars; (2) political regimes and regime change; (3) political institutions and institutional design. He published extensively on various aspects of the armed conflict in Donbas and analyzed both its causes and available conflict-resolution strategies. His articles appeared in over a dozen academic journals and edited volumes as well as in international media outlets. 

Moderator:

Dr. Henry Hale is the Director of the Petrach Program on Ukraine and Director of George Washington University’s Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES). He is a Professor of Political Science and International Affairs and his most recent books are The Zelensky Effect (Hurst/Oxford University Press 2022, co-authored with Olga Onuch) and Patronal Politics: Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, 2015). Prominent themes in his research include ethnic politics, political regimes, voting behavior, the public opinion dimension of international relations, and politics in post-Soviet countries, where he has conducted extensive field research.