Daniel Thomas, a senior double major in history and international studies, recently wrote a piece about his research on separatism in Eastern Ukraine for the blog of the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory. Thomas is a 2019-’20 Fox Center Humanities Honors Fellow, completing his honors thesis with a regional focus on the Donbas in Eastern Ukraine. The thesis draws on archival research and interviews that Thomas conducted in Kyiv in 2019. Associate Professor Matthew Payne is Thomas’ adviser. Read an excerpt from the post on the Fox Center’s blog below along with the full piece: “Neighbors against Neighbors: A historical study of separatist groups and rhetoric in Eastern Ukraine.”

The Fox Center’s generous grant has afforded me both the privilege of working in a tightly-knit epistemic community and the ability to conduct further research into my topic. The lump sum that I received as a part of my fellowship helped fund my interview-collecting over the Winter Break in Kyiv. Hearing the lived experiences of the Donbas’ denizens contributed a great deal to this project. I spoke with refugees and former separatist affiliates who dealt first-hand with the destructive repercussions of Donbasian separatism. Their accounts and lives illustrated that identity is more of a practice in subjectivity than it is an objective truth. Although my interviewees admitted that the separatist cause was rooted in a real problem (the callousness many politicians, both in Eastern and Western Ukraine, had towards the poor), they also admit that the separatists’ cause did little to ameliorate the Donbas’ desperate situation. Instead, it amplified it, displacing millions upon millions of Donbasians from their homeland. Without their insight, this thesis would have been at best a clueless meditation on a “forgotten” conflict…