Webinar: Justice, Genocide, and Society: Human Costs of Russia's War in Ukraine
Please join us for this webinar during which three cutting edge researchers will examine and reflect on existential, but less explored ethical violations during the Russian-Ukrainian War. Their work is innovative and truly authentic. It speaks of and to the deep wounds war, especially if it is waged without even attempting to be guided by ethical principles that are aimed at protecting and preserving some humanity, inflicts on humans directly or through the destruction of their physical and cultural reference points.
Date: 4 March 2025, 18h00-19h30 CET.
Chair: Dr Andrea Ellner, King’s College London and EuroISME Board of Directors
Zoom meeting link: will be provided in due time
Speakers and presentation titles
Viktoriia Grivina: Urbicide, and Russian Warfare against Urban Civilian Population of Kharkiv, Ukraine
Sophia Anastazievsky: Can there be justice for victims of genocidal war rape?
Hanna Dosenko: Autopsy of War: Dead Ukrainian Soldiers, Grief, and Expertise
Abstracts see below
More Details
Viktoriia Grivina: Urbicide, and Russian Warfare against Urban Civilian Population of Kharkiv, Ukraine
Abstract: Having failed to occupy Kharkiv in early 2022, and then again in May 2024, the Russian military have been active in the destruction of the infrastructure, cultural, and social spaces of the city. Indiscriminate attacks on households and hospitals, residential areas, educational establishments, hotels, religious and historical landmarks have impacted both the physical and psychological well-being of just over 1.1 million inhabitants who continue to live in the city, including approximately 200.000 internally displaced persons from the towns already destroyed. The lack of air defence systems, the prohibition to strike Russian military airports from where the attacks are launched, as well as a shrinking coverage of damage to human lives and architecture in the world media allow for the continued intensification of warfare against civilians. Recent attempts to destroy the main landmark of Kharkiv, the first modernist skyscraper in Europe, Derzhprom, add to the tactics of psychological terror. In this presentation I will look at the impact of warfare on the civilian population, the ethical aspects of the destruction of human and natural habitats in urban areas, and the strategies of resilience local communities adopt to preserve their lives, jobs, physical and psychological health, as well as human dignity in response.
Bio: Viktoriia Grivina is a writer and cultural anthropologist from Kharkiv, Ukraine. She holds a Master’s degree in linguistics of Kharkiv National University, and MA in Cultural Studies via Erasmus Mundus Master’s Scholarship (at Tübingen, Bergamo and St Andrews Universities). In 2020-21 she was an early career researcher at “(Un)Archiving (Post)Industry” Project, digitizing photographic legacy of Donbas, Ukraine. Her current PhD research at the University of St Andrews is dedicated to the transformation of cultural and aesthetic landscapes of Ukrainian cities in times of war.
Sophia Anastazievsky: Can there be justice for victims of genocidal war rape?
Abstract: This presentation will examine which features make war rape and sexual violence genocidal and argue that Russia’s use of rape as a weapon of war against men, women, and children in Ukraine meets these criteria. Then, it will explore and problematize different possibilities for justice for Ukrainian victims of war rape, emphasizing the distinctive harms of rape and the ways in which the contexts of war and genocide exacerbate these harms. Despite difficulties in achieving justice for these victims inherent in the nature of the harm, failing to pursue it fully would constitute an additional, compounding injustice.
Bio: Sophia is a doctoral student in the Department of Government at Harvard University. She specializes in moral, political, and legal philosophy, and works primarily on the ethics of war. Sophia has also conducted and presented research on moral and legal dimensions of Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine. She holds a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Chicago, and a M.A. in Bioethics from New York University.
Hanna Dosenko: Autopsy of War: Dead Ukrainian Soldiers, Grief, and Expertise
Abstract: While the human toll of the Russian-Ukrainian war remains partially obscured, death has become a visible part of everyday life for those who are still alive. Knowledge about dead bodies does not just involve an individual expert measuring the size of a wound, for instance, but sets of social meanings and practices that emerge between experts as they collectively work to identify dead soldiers. From forensic identification to the mourning of kin, efforts are made, successful or not, to see the bodies of those killed in war rejoin the nation. This is a matter of autopsies; like the living, it involves legal recognition and a kind of cultural citizenship after death. What forms does this journey take? How are these autopsies of war carried out, contested, made to succeed or fail? What can this tell us about national belonging in Ukraine, a nation under siege by a powerful, colonizing neighbour? What can it tell us about emerging global dynamics of life, death, and violence as they articulate with citizenship, expertise, and imagined futures of sovereignty?
Bio: Hanna Dosenko is a PhD student in the Anthropology department at UC Irvine, with an interest in the questions of forensic expertise amidst the ongoing war, burial practices, and networks of those who care for the dead.