Lecture of Valeria Korablyova: Non-Violent Protests and the Velvet Legacy

The recent calamities of the end of “the end of history” triggered a wave of non-violent protests engulfing both the West and “the Rest”. The core question arises hereby, whether they stand as an ultimate expression of politics or rather a substitute for it. And, even more importantly, what are the political outcomes of these “revolutionary moments,” or putting it differently, how to make antipolitics work politically. To tackle these issues, I will examine the case of the Ukrainian Maidan and trace the legacy of the Velvet Revolutions in it with a specific focus on the mechanics of what I call a “constructive revolution.”

Dr. Valeria Korablyova is Professor of Philosophy at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv and URIS Fellow at the University of Basel (Switzerland). Her research interests include post-Soviet transformations and nation-building in Ukraine and East Central Europe, which invoked a number of related projects in international institutions (Stanford University, IWM, and others). In 2017-18 she is teaching a course at the University of Basel titled “Untimely nation: Ukraine in East Central Europe”, while being also a Guest Professor at the Charles University. Her latest book “Social Meanings of Ideology” (Kyiv University, 2014) covers ideological transformations of European modernity, revealing the Maidan uprising as a peculiar case herewith.