Olesya Khromeychuk: The Death of a Soldier Told by His Sister: Monoray: London, 2022, 207 pages, 978-1-80096-121-0.
Abstract
Míla O’Sullivan reviews Olesya Khromeychuk’s timely memoir. According to O’Sullivan, the book is most valuable for portraying Russia’s war in Ukraine from the everyday human perspective against the background of Ukraine’s hierarchical position between the West and Russia. By providing this perspective, it is a vital contribution to the scholarship on epistemic imperialism that highlights the harmful knowledge and misunderstandings permeating the Western debates that get most things wrong about this ten-year war. The book also provides a way that allows the readers – scholars or otherwise – to make sense of their own personal perspectives and positions in this knowledge production and reception. O’Sullivan concludes that Khromeychuk’s memoir is thus both a challenge to the persistent structural inequalities in explaining Ukraine’s fate and a helpful guide to structural change that would allow for understanding Ukraine and emancipating its agency in our scholarly or public debates.
Author Biography
Míla O'Sullivan
Míla O’Sullivan is a Researcher at the Centre for Global Political Economy of the Institute of International Relations in Prague. Her research interest straddles feminist international relations, feminist security studies and feminist political economy. Through her focus on gender and war, the UN Women, Peace and Security agenda, gender and diplomacy and feminist foreign policy, she explores institutions of security governance (NATO, the OSCE), foreign policies of Central European countries and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, including through field research. Her research also addresses decolonial issues, the politics of knowledge production and the East-West feminist dialogue. She is a lecturer in Feminist International Relations at Charles University in Prague.