Understanding the Success and Failure of Separatism in Ukraine during the 2014 “Russian Spring”
One of the most fascinating questions in the study of contemporary Ukraine is why the so-called “Russian spring” succeeded in parts of Donetsk and Luhansk regions but failed everywhere else in southeastern Ukraine. Scholarly research on this question has not reached definitive conclusions, with alternative accounts emphasizing the importance of factors such as popular grievances against the Maidan and the post-Maidan Kyiv government (Giuliano 2015, 2018; Kudelia 2016; Matveeva 2018; Matsuzato 2017), weakness of the Ukrainian state after the flight of Yanukovych and the resulting power vacuum in the south-east (Way 2015), the role of Russia and Russian operatives in fueling rebellion (Kuzio and D’Anieri 2018, Wilson 2016), specifics of the regional economy (Zhukov 2016), and the role of local political and economic elites (Buckholz 2017; Matsuzato 2018; Melnyk 2014; Popova and Shevel 2018).
This lack of consensus on sources of the Donbas separatism is similar to a corresponding lack of consensus in the literature on domestic separatist conflicts globally (Dixon 2009), and thus more precise evaluation of these competing hypotheses on the causes of Donbas can contribute to the broader literature on conflicts.
Oxana Shevel is an associate professor of political science at Tufts University. She holds a PhD in Government from Harvard University, an M.Phil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge in England, and a BA in English and French from Kyiv State University in Ukraine. She is an Associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University, a member of the EUDO Citizenship expert group as a country expert on Ukraine, and a member of the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS Eurasia) scholarly network.
Shevel's research and teaching focus on the post-Communist region surrounding Russia and issues such as nation- and state-building, the politics of citizenship and migration, memory politics, and the influence of international institutions on democratization. She is the author of Migration, Refugee Policy, and State Building in Postcommunist Europe (Cambridge 2011), which received the 2012 American Association of Ukrainian Studies (AAUS) book prize.