Another surprising miscalculation. I often see that Ukrainians (officials, media, scholars, NGO) are often perceived and treated exclusively as eye witnesses, a biased part of the conflict. This, their data, ideas and narratives are immediately disregard...1/15
Which is weird, because this underlying assumption is only a part of the story. People working in social science know it very well. We all are biases and not neutral, but we have protocols and tools to address these biases and control for them. The biggest problem here is... 2/15
That Ukrainians have a significant expertise, and people throw it away because they don't know how to identify and control biases. This is not efficient. Examples of expertise are: 3/15
This is not the first Russian invasion to Ukraine, there are many diplomats (under 2 different presidents) who participated in negotiasions with Russians. Local journalists covered it, local think-tanks worked on strategies etc. 4/15
Dozens of NGO have worked with displaced people. They also worked with people who were imprisoned and tortured in Luhansk and Donetsk, they collected data on people who disappeared or died. 5/15
Ukraine developed formal democratic institutions that do not exist in many post-soviet countries. Perhaps we know a thing or two about democratic development 6/15
Ukraine was a testing ground for Russian cyber and information warfare since 2015. We know their playbook and have developed some strategies. 7/15
We have a normal war economy. With many challenges of course, but the parliament is able to vote, central bank is working, trains are running, local governments function, groceries are open etc. 8/15
Our military has expertise of dealing with Russians. They saw a "safe corridor" in Ilovaisk in 2014. They know the mentality and playbooks of Russian soldiers. 9/15
Most importantly, Ukrainians have developed a fine tuned bullshit detector to see Russia for what it is. We don't take their words at face value and have many tools to verify their true intentions. We know their language, we know their informal institutions 10/15
For us, words like "common Russians" or "not all Russians are the same" have very tangible meaning. Our survival depends on our ability to read signals and identify honest intentions. We have developed many informal rules and "red flags" . That is why ukrainians were 11/15
cautious about that "brave Russian journalist". The thing is she also recorded a message, which was just a compilation of imperialistic cliches about "brethren nations". For us this is a very strong "red flag", while western partners do not even look there 12/15
Everyday I hear patronizing words "you just have to start talking, you have to see that not all Russians are the same, Dostoevsky! Tolstoy!" But they are preaching to the choir. We now this. We talked, and we developed strategies to analyze their words. The point is 13/15
Western partners must realize that they don't have expertise in many domains where they patronize. Instead they have to update their priors and take our protocols seriously. We are open to teach a workshop or run a summer school 14/15
Ukr voices cannot be dismissed on the premise that they are biased. Democratic institutions have many formal rules to accommodate people with different opinions. It is 100% possible to include non-neutral voices. Especially if they have expertise which others don't 15/15
Typos typos typos...sorry about that.
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A few more words about "surprising" unity of Ukrainians ("surprise" to many, but common knowledge for sociology folks). I will break it down in "culture", "identify", and "attitudes". I use parentheses because these concepts are debates in sociology and must be clarified... 🧵
Since early 1990, there were many studies of high level concepts like culture and values. E.g. a paper by Michael Kohn with Ukr and Pol sociologists who use terms like "social structure and personality" (essentially they use this terms very close to what we call values now).
There was a special project executed by Lviv sociologists (Chernysh and co) who compared values of Lviv and Donetsk regions. They did it for many years.
When I lived in Utrecht, I saw this Dutch movie about two sisters who were separated by the WW2. They had husbands: dutch Jew who died in the concentration camp, and a German officer who died in a war. Basically, the movie is about how the first was not able to forgive, but...
But the second tried very hard. She made a lot of efforts to contact and apologize, and finally they saw each other when they were very old, and they had some powerful conversations just before one of them died. Powerful movie.
The first was able to forgive in the end...but the tragedy of ukr and rus is that Russians do not even try to say sorry: some support Putin, others support "both sides are wrong", some are in denial, some left and care about their wellbeing.