Moderated by Emily Channell-Justice, Director of the Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program at HURI. Attendees are invited to enjoy an informal lunch.
This event is organized by HURI as part of the Ukraine Study Group public event series.
Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, analysts and observers around the world were shocked and surprised that Ukraine did not fall in a matter of days or weeks. Instead, people across the country resisted with both military and civilian means, halting the Russian advance. Surveys indicate that over 80% of the Ukrainian population contributed to the war effort in some way (e.g. Onuch et al 2022, 2023), suggesting that Ukrainian civilians have made a crucial, if hard-to-quantify, contribution to Ukraine’s continued resistance. However, scholarship on civilian wartime engagement more broadly tends to focus on decisions to join the military or to flee following the onset of conflict – meaning that our understanding of how and why civilians mobilize in non-combatant roles is limited.
Drawing on recently published original survey analysis (Onuch and Mateo 2026) and fieldwork conducted in Ukraine, this talk discusses the diverse roles Ukrainian civilians are playing in the war effort and what motivates this engagement, particularly in parts of Ukraine most acutely impacted by the war.
Dr. Emma Mateo is a social scientist who studies protest, civil society, and political behavior, with regional expertise in Eastern Europe, particularly Ukraine and Belarus. Emma’s postdoctoral work currently examines civilian responses to conflict in the case of the Russo-Ukrainian war. This research builds upon methods, knowledge, and theoretical approaches cultivated during Emma’s doctoral work at the University of Oxford, which explored subnational mobilization and repression during mass protests in Ukraine and Belarus. Emma’s interest in the intersection of protest, civil society, media, and technology has led her to make innovative use of social media data, such as Telegram Messenger. Her work has been published in Post-Soviet Affairs and Social Media + Society, and featured at major conferences and expert workshops in the US, Canada, UK, and EU. Emma was previously a Petro Jacyk Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University’s Harriman Institute (2022-2024), and Postdoctoral Researcher at New York University’s Jordan Center (2024-2025). She has also designed and taught courses at Columbia University and Kyiv School of Economics. Emma holds a PhD in Sociology (2022) and MPhil in Russian and East European Studies (2018) from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Modern Languages from the University of Cambridge. Emma is originally from the UK and speaks Ukrainian, French, and Russian.