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

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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