Overview

How do separatist conflicts arise and spread? When does separatism become a cover for a foreign aggression? How do local communities respond when state institutions collapse, and militants take over? The armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine, which started eight years before Russia's full-scale invasion, contains unique evidence to address each of these questions. In Seize the City, Undo the State, Serhiy Kudelia offers an authoritative study of the conflict at its initial stage--2013-14--based on a meticulous comparison of mobilization dynamics in over dozen towns of Donbas as well as in two major cities outside of it: Kharkiv and Odesa. Kudelia explains how a small group of Russian agents and local militants succeeded in eliminating state control over the largest and most densely urbanized region of Ukraine but failed to do it elsewhere. His findings also show that when enough members of local communities organized to resist militant takeovers, the separatist challenges there quickly dissipated. A fine-grained and highly original on-the-ground analysis of the origins of the wider Russian-Ukrainian war that broke out in 2022, this book offers broader insights into the conditions under which external intervention may trigger the rise of an armed insurgency in a society torn apart by political and ideological disagreements.

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Serhiy Kudelia is associate professor of political science at Baylor University where he teaches courses on political regimes, state-building, and political violence as well as Ukrainian and Russian politics. His research has focused on the study of political institutions in Ukraine and the armed conflict in Donbas. Earlier he held teaching and research positions at the University of St. Andrews, University of Basel, George Washington University, Johns Hopkins University, and National University ""Kyiv-Mohyla Academy"" (Ukraine). Rich Miller has been a storyteller since he was a kid. When he was around ten, he turned the tables on the parents that had instilled a love of books in him: He started reading to his family after dinner every night (his favorites were The Lemonade Trick and The Big Joke Game, by Scott Corbett, but Encyclopedia Brown stories were a big hit as well). Later in life, he found out that people liked having stories acted out for them. He's performed onstage in everything from Shakespeare to Damn Yankees to August: Osage County, and starred in the indie feature Ocatilla Flat. And now he's acting out stories in front of a microphone. Except for when he's dodging Tucson drivers on his bicycle, or finding the next great Happy Hour locale.

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