"Without the State" by Emily Channell-Justice Wins 2023 AAUS Book Prize

On May 20, 2023, the American Association of Ukrainian Studies (AAUS) recognized Dr. Emily Channell-Justice, Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program, as co-winner of the 2023 AAUS Book Prize for Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine (University of Toronto Press, 2022).The award committee commended the book’s scholarship on state-society relations, activism, and decommunization, stating, “This study is an invaluable contribution to all who research revolution, activism, and post-Euromaidan transformation of Ukrainian society. Knowledge of Ukraine’s recent history will become essential in the processes of the postwar rebuilding of the country.”

The award committee’s citation recognized that “[t]he first-hand sources in the book provide compelling and critical evidence of the anticipation of the Revolution of Dignity in 2013-2014. Particularly invaluable are the original ways in which the book reworks the field of civil society studies, bringing to the forefront the notions of intergenerational, local versus global, and state-society relations to understand the left-right politics and the concept of self-determination as a unique point of cohesion and as a defining characteristic of Ukraine’s historical and ideological movement towards a political nation. In achieving this difficult and critical task, the book also advances Ukrainian Studies by centering students, student-led activism, and education reform in the story of the Euromaidan in 2013-2014.” The committee also recognized Channell-Justice’s care and commitment to her interlocutors and to the quality of her ethnographic methods.

Book Description

Without the State: Self-Organization and Political Activism in Ukraine explores the 2013–14 Euromaidan protests through in-depth ethnographic research with leftist, feminist, and student activists in Kyiv. The book discusses the concept of "self-organization" and the notion that if something needs to be done and a person has the competence to do it, then they should simply do it.

Channell-Justice reveals how self-organization in Ukraine came out of leftist practices but actors from across the spectrum of political views also adopted self-organization over the course of Euromaidan, including far-right groups. The widespread adoption of self-organization encouraged Ukrainians to rethink their expectations of the relationship between citizens and their state. The book explains how self-organized practices have changed people’s views on what they think they can contribute to their own communities, and in the wake of Russia’s renewed invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it has also motivated new networks of mutual aid within Ukraine and beyond. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, including the author’s first-hand experience of the entirety of the Euromaidan protests, Without the State provides a unique analytical account of this crucial moment in Ukraine’s post-Soviet history.

AAUS awards annual prizes in four categories: Best Book, Best Article, Best Translation, and the Lubomyr Hajda Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper. These awards were presented in New York City at the 2023 Association for the Study of Nationalities Convention. Channell-Justice shares the 2023 award with Dr. Rory Finnin, for his book Blood of Others: Stalin’s Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity (2022, University of Toronto Press). Learn more about Without the State by reading a Q&A with Channell-Justice or watching her book presentation at HURI.