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Decolonizing Crimea

Bridge connecting Crimea to Russia (Shutterstock)

Decolonizing Crimea

Crimea has long been the object of Russian and Soviet colonialism. How can Crimea change that?
By | August 13, 2023

Episode 93: Decolonizing Crimea

with Masha Shynkarenko

In the first podcast in our Ukraine and the World series, Luke Cooper talks to Masha Shynkarenko, a Research Associate with the Ukraine in European Dialogue program at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna and an expert on the Russian colonization of Crimea and the Crimean Tartar national movement.

They discuss the long history of Russian and Soviet imperialism in the Crimean peninsula, life under Russian occupation, and the need for nuance and complexity in discussion of what decolonization of Crimea should look like in practice.

The Ukraine and the World series is an initiative taken in collaboration with Foreign Policy in Focus – Institute for Policy Studies in the United States and our longstanding partner, European Alternatives.

Luke Cooper is an Associate Professorial Research Fellow with the Conflict and Civicness Research Group and Director of PeaceRep’s Ukraine programme. He is a historical sociologist and political scientist, whose work studies processes of change and transformation within and between societies. He has written extensively on nationalism, authoritarianism and the theory of uneven and combined development, engaging both contemporary and historical case studies. His most recent book, Authoritarian Contagion; the Global Threat to Democracy, was published by Bristol University Press in 2021. Masha Shynkarenko will soon defend a dissertation about Crimean Tatar indigenous identity frames and activism, with extensive ethnographic research in Melitopol, Kherson, and occupied Crimea, among sites in Ukraine.