From 1914 to 1920, thousands of men who had immigrated to Canada from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire were unjustly imprisoned as “enemy aliens,” some with their families. Many communities in Canada where internees originated do not know these stories of Ukrainians, Germans, Bulgarians, Croatians, Czechs, Hungarians, Italians, Jews, Alevi Kurds, Armenians, Ottoman Turks, Poles, Romanians, Russians, Serbians, Slovaks, and Slovenes, amongst others. While most internees were Ukrainians, almost all were civilians. The Stories Were Not Told presents this largely unrecognized event through photography, cultural theory, and personal testimony, including stories told at last by internees and their descendants. Semchuk describes how lives and society have been shaped by acts of legislated discrimination and how to move toward greater reconciliation, remembrance, and healing. This is necessary reading for anyone seeking to understand the cross-cultural and intergenerational consequences of Canada’s first national internment operations.

Ukrainian Erotomaniac Fictions explores the aggressive sexualization of the Ukrainian cultural mainstream after the collapse of the USSR as a counter-reaction to the Soviet state's totalitarian, repressive politics of the body. While the book's introduction includes concise sections on such pornified cultural forms as advertising, mass media, visual art, and film, its major focus is on textual production that has contributed significantly to the literary explosion in Ukraine, which began in the 1990s. Drawing on cultural, postcolonial, feminist, and gender theories, the book examines transgressive potentials of the erotic under postcolonial, postcommunist, and post-totalitarian conditions. It offers insight into the convoluted dialectics between the imported conventions of Western "porno-chic" and the received oppressive Soviet gender and sexual ideologies. Within a broad historical and cultural framework, the study considers writers' engagements in dialogues with their own tradition and colonial legacy, as well as with a variety of transcultural flows. By bringing together diverse erotomaniac fictions, Maryna Romanets charts the ways in which they are embedded in the processes of Ukraine's cultural decolonization.

The conflict in Ukraine has deep domestic roots. A third of the population, primarily in the East and South, regards its own Russian cultural identity as entirely compatible with a Ukrainian civic identity. The state’s reluctance to recognize this ethnos as a legitimate part of the modern Ukrainian nation, has created a tragic cycle that entangles Ukrainian politics. The Tragedy of Ukraine argues that in order to untangle the conflict within the Ukraine, it must be addressed on an emotional, as well as institutional level. It draws on Richard Ned Lebow’s ‘tragic vision of politics’ and on classical Greek tragedy to assist in understanding the persistence of this conflict. Classical Greek tragedy once served as a mechanism in Athenian society to heal deep social trauma and create more just institutions. The Tragedy of Ukraine reflects on the ways in which ancient Greek tragedy can help us rethink civic conflict and polarization, as well as model ways of healing deep social divisions.

This study provides a solid background for understanding nineteenth-century Galicia as the historic Piedmont of the Ukrainian national revival.

A New York Times bestseller, this definitive history of Ukraine is “an exemplary account of Europe’s least-known large country” (Wall Street Journal). As Ukraine is embroiled in an ongoing struggle with Russia to preserve its territorial integrity and political independence, celebrated historian Serhii Plokhy explains that today’s crisis is a case of history repeating itself: the Ukrainian conflict is only the latest in a long history of turmoil over Ukraine’s sovereignty. Situated between Central Europe, Russia, and the Middle East, Ukraine has been shaped by empires that exploited the nation as a strategic gateway between East and West—from the Romans and Ottomans to the Third Reich and the Soviet Union. In The Gates of Europe, Plokhy examines Ukraine’s search for its identity through the lives of major Ukrainian historical figures, from its heroes to its conquerors. This revised edition includes new material that brings this definitive history up to the present. As Ukraine once again finds itself at the center of global attention, Plokhy brings its history to vivid life as he connects the nation’s past with its present and future.

From one of the finest journalists of our time comes a definitive, boots-on-the-ground dispatch from the front lines of the conflict in Ukraine. “Essential for anyone who wants to understand events in Ukraine and what they portend for the West.”—The Wall Street Journal Ever since Ukraine’s violent 2014 revolution, followed by Russia’s annexation of Crimea, the country has been at war. Misinformation reigns, more than two million people have been displaced, and Ukrainians fight one another on a second front—the crucial war against corruption. With In Wartime, Tim Judah lays bare the events that have turned neighbors against one another and mired Europe’s second-largest country in a conflict seemingly without end. In Lviv, Ukraine’s western cultural capital, mothers tend the graves of sons killed on the other side of the country. On the Maidan, the square where the protests that deposed President Yanukovych began, pamphleteers, recruiters, buskers, and mascots compete for attention. In Donetsk, civilians who cheered Russia’s President Vladimir Putin find their hopes crushed as they realize they have been trapped in the twilight zone of a frozen conflict. Judah talks to everyone from politicians to poets, pensioners, and historians. Listening to their clashing explanations, he interweaves their stories to create a sweeping, tragic portrait of a country fighting a war of independence from Russia—twenty-five years after the collapse of the USSR.

Foreign Fighters in Ukraine is the first comprehensive academic study taking an in-depth look at foreigners who have chosen to fight in the conflict in Ukraine. While there has been considerable focus in policy, security and academic circles on the threat from returning jihadists – so-called returnee foreign terrorist fighters – the same danger from right-wing, but not essentially terrorist, extremists and others has been largely overlooked. As Westerners rushed to join the nascent Caliphate in Syria/Iraq, others simultaneously traveled to another foreign war on what many would call Europe’s doorstep: the Russo-Ukrainian war. This book unmasks this largely unknown group of fighters as the author dives into the fighters’ ideological and social backgrounds, their motivations for joining the conflict, their travails on the way there and their battle record in Eastern Ukraine. To a large extent based on interviews with the fighters themselves, it is a study on how and why men risk their lives while fighting a foreign war – and attract the attention of security services at home upon their return. Particularly, given the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the growing interest in far-right violence worldwide, the book evaluates whether these returnees constitute another security threat to the West. This volume will be of interest to all those researching small wars, terrorism, peace and conflict studies and right-wing extremism.