Learning from Ukrainian Local Communities’ Response to the Full-Scale Russian Invasion
Since February 24, 2022, the Russian full-scale invasion has subjected Ukraine and its population to overlapping crises: physical insecurity, internal displacement, and damage to critical infrastructure. Yet Ukraine’s decentralized government has shown an unexpected capacity to respond to all three challenges. This is puzzling, given the contradictory evidence about how decentralized states generally respond to such crises. This talk will illuminate the polycentric nature of Ukraine’s crisis response from 2022 to 2024 by focusing on how local authorities mobilize knowledge, resources and institutional innovations to address issues related to the war. It will draw three surveys of Ukrainian local self-government authorities and a qualitative case study conducted by the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe (in 2021 and 2022) and the Kyiv School of Economics (in 2022 and 2024).
Oleksandra Keudel is an Associate Professor at the Kyiv School of Economics and an Associate at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She researches democratic transformation and societal resilience, specializing in Ukraine’s local governance and sub-national politics. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Free University of Berlin and has been a visiting researcher at George Washington University, NYU, and Södertörn University. She authored “How Patronal Networks Shape Opportunities for Local Citizen Participation in a Hybrid Regime: A Comparative Analysis of Five Cities in Ukraine”, published with ibidem/Columbia University Press (2022). Her related paper received the 2021 Best Paper Award at the Association for the Study of Nationalities Annual Convention.