Archive for February 2022

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[Commlist] New book: Democracy, Populism and Neolibealism in Ukraine

Wed Feb 02 19:56:22 GMT 2022





Olga Baysha is pleased to announce the publication of her new book, "Democracy, Populism, and Neoliberalism in Ukraine: On the Fringes of the Virtual and the Rea" (Routledge, 2022).

This book is about Ukraine’s latest round of neoliberal transformations, which started in 2019 after the comedian Volodymyr Zelensky scored a landslide victory in the presidential election with his “Servant of the People” party obtaining an absolute majority of parliamentary seats, empowering him to launch neoliberal reforms without regard to public opinion or the political opposition.

The argument presented in this book is that the astonishing victory of the comedian and his party, later transformed into a parliamentary machine to churn out and rubber-stamp neoliberal reforms, cannot be explained apart from the success of his television series "Servant of the People," which, as many observers believe, served as Zelensky’s informal election platform.

Taking a discourse analysis approach, the book draws on two main arguments of critical scholarship: the “populist explosion” of the recent decade came as a reaction to the inequalities and injustices of the global neoliberal order, and the success of neoliberalism can be explained by its ability to mask itself under attractive progressive covers. Developing these lines of argument, the book demonstrates not only how the “populist explosion” can lead to further neoliberalization, but also that the euphemizing effect can be achieved by mixing the virtual and the real, as in the case of Zelensky.



More details are available at:


https://www.routledge.com/Democracy-Populism-and-Neoliberalism-in-Ukraine-On-the-Fringes-of-the/Baysha/p/book/9781032132310

The table of content is as follows:



Chapter 1. The Populist Explosion as a Reaction to the Neoliberal Order


Chapter 2. Euphemizing the Neoliberal Promise


Chapter 3. The People vs. The Elites


Chapter 4. On the Fringes of the Virtual and the Real: Simulating the Political


Chapter 5 “Do not Sell Our Motherland!”: Zelensky’s Land Reform


Chapter 6. “To bury communism”: A Failure of Modernization Rhetoric of “Servants”


Chapter 7. The Post-Political Tyranny of the Integral


Chapter 8. Democracy-to-Come: A Perpetual Promise



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