The LSE Ukraine programme works with a range of global partners and institutions, including the Kyiv School of Economics, and a network of researchers in Ukraine and the wider region to develop cutting-edge research, grounded in evidence collection on the ground that seeks to contribute directly to the protection of Ukrainian sovereignty and democracy.
We see the Russo-Ukrainian War as an ‘axial event’ in twenty-first century history, in which the agency of Ukrainians will have, one way or another, a tremendous impact on the future of global security. Whatever the outcome of the war will be, this conflict has already raised deeply troubling questions for the security of the international order. The central objectives of our project are to develop approaches that assist in preventing the fragmentation and disintegration of Ukraine and bring about a politically just and sustainable peace.
The Programme
The outcome to the Russian war against Ukraine will be resolved by the contingencies of history. While a Ukrainian defeat is one of these possibilities and outcomes, the inherent openness of history also provides the point at which agency enters in. How Ukrainians and their allies respond will shape the contours of the changes that lie ahead.
Our project seeks to open up these potentials by supporting Ukrainians to seize the opportunities presented by this ‘axial event’ in world history to challenge authoritarianism, oligarchy and kleptocracy. Ukraine’s fate will shape the terms of the contest between democracy and authoritarianism globally, and whether societies based on human rights and the rule of law can rise to the acute challenges of the twenty-first century.
Through our transnational network of research, scholarship, policy and impact we support democratic actors in facing up to this historic task.
Until March 2026, the programme was primarily funded by the Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform (PeaceRep), the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office's flagship conflict research programme, led by the University of Edinburgh Law School. As the Ukraine team lead, the LSE worked with our partners the Kyiv School of Economics, Jagiellonian University, the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM, Vienna), the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS), and Ukrainian Industry Expertise to deliver evidence and research to support policy-making for the wider public good. We have also developed a broader range of partnerships on an ad hoc basis with a number of Ukrainian researchers and the following partner institutions: Clingendael Institute, Friedrich Ebert Stiftung - Kyiv Office, the Centre for Civil Liberties (Kyiv) and the People First advocacy coalition.
We have provided several
years of advice and research support for the Ukraine Recovery Conference (URC)
processes and its associated business and civil society ecosystems, working
particularly closely with the UK FCDO Early Recovery and Reconstruction team.
Our involvement has included preparatory events, fringe events, numerous policy
memos and research reports, and discussions with high levels policymakers from
a range of major institutions including the EU, the IMF, the World Bank, the
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the governments of
Ukraine, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. At the centre
of this activity, are the events we have organised in partnership with the
Clingendael Institute, the Kyiv School of Economics and the Friedrich Ebert
Stiftung. This saw us organise an official invite onlyside event immediately prior to the London 2023
URC, a major public international conference in Berlin 2024 and a preparatory eventfor Rome 2025. This activity contributed to the
research-policy-practice information space mobilising to support Ukraine,
developing an international dialogue to support evidence-based policymaking.
The research networks we have built have been underpinned by on-the-ground evidence collection and analysis around Ukraine’s resilience and development needs.
This includes:
Creation of a network of civic activists feeding in data on security, economic and governance conditions in their localities. This evidence base allows us to identify issues of social tension (e.g., such as religion, language, conscription and IDPs) that need to be addressed in critical priority areas as part of an inclusive development agenda.
Supporting policymakers in Kyiv to develop industrial policy and localisation frameworks, from the Made in Ukraine initiative to the latest military procurement localisation law, that calibrates Ukraine’s policymaking to its key strengths.
Through an interdisciplinary research programme providing ‘joining the dots’ analysis and advice, linking for example macroeconomic assessment with analysis of geopolitics and post-conflict inclusive development strategies.
Our Projects
PeaceRep’s Ukraine team has comprised 10 projects across 3 thematic areas.
Project (i): Mapping Ukraine’s democratic space through local geographies: security and governance, economic wellbeing, social infrastructure and civicness.
Project (ii): Economic aspects of the conflict and the needs of the Ukrainian war-economy.
Project (iii): The gender cleavage and the war in Ukraine: women, civicness and conflict.
Project (iv): Ukrainian civicness abroad: the refugee population and their relationship to the war in Ukraine.
Project (v): Study group on ‘intellectual sovereignty’ and its potential for policy responses to war and violence, including comparative analysis vis-à-vis other sites of conflict.
Project (vii): Pursuing a just end to the conflict: agency, legitimacy and accountability.
Project (viii): The "Frontline states": perspectives on the war from Nato’s Eastern flank.
Project (ix): A new age of disorder? Global and regional security, defence policy and international governance after the Russian war on Ukraine
Project (x): Russia-Ukraine Dialogues event series
Key Concepts
The term ‘civicness’ has been developed by the LSE Conflict and Civicness Research Group based on an analysis of the ‘logics of public authority’ in sites of intractable conflict. By public authority we mean a legitimacy structure beyond the immediate family that commands voluntary compliance (e.g., municipalities). Civicness has been identified as a logic based on an implicit social contract in which revenue and votes may be exchanged for rights and the provision of public services (rather than, for example, on the basis of distributional rents linked to ethnic identity). It is a form of collective action that takes place at the mediation point between society and institutions and establishes some form of stability in societal relations. Civicness as an empirical phenomenon is ubiquitous in conflict zones, which exists alongside (and may be intermingled with) the dominant (violent) logics.
The Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s full-scale invasion has been deeply rooted in the logic of civicness, as the democratic legitimacy of Ukraine’s institutions means that the state enjoys high levels of voluntary compliance in the population. Our argument is that it is crucial for the international community to provide support that assists Ukraine in maintaining its social infrastructure and, since 2014, emerging democratic public authority, in order to avoid a situation in which the state fragments and starts to break down. This goal implies also that maintaining, as far as possible, key social infrastructures – like healthcare, education, and so on – during wartime should not be seen as separate or secondary to the war-effort, but a key component of it which is vital to sustaining the underlying democratic fabric of Ukraine.
PeaceRep’s Ukraine team also seek to develop the concept of ‘intellectual sovereignty’. At the outbreak of the war, Ukraine’s educational and research institutions appealed for international supporters and academic partners to help the country protect what they called its ‘intellectual sovereignty’. Building on this call, we use intellectual sovereignty to refer to how the provision of public goods on a non-territorial or semi-territorial basis can be mobilised to support the territorial integrity of Ukraine as a democratic space under attack by Russia. For example, creating the means for Ukrainian refugees to interact and engage with citizens and institutions at home can both support the national war effort and address the fear that refugees, especially children, will lose access to their Ukrainian culture and identity. Central to the notion of intellectual sovereignty is the assumption that people living through conflict know more about that conflict that anyone else – and that these resources needed to be dawn on to build effective, robust analyses. Intellectual sovereignty is essential to enable on the ground analyses of what is happening and to preserve localised expertise. It is about giving priority to Ukrainian research and information as the basis for the formulation of policy outcomes.
Existing work by PeaceRep for the Global Transitions series looks at fragmentations in the global order and how these impact peace and transition settlements. In the context of a global order transition from a unipolar to multipolar world, peace and conflict processes have witnessed a ‘fragmentation of international actors’ with a ‘diversification of styles of engagement’. Building on and developing this argument, PeaceRep’s Ukraine team seeks to situate and analyse the war against Ukraine as part of a global fragmentation.While the Russian war against Ukraine aims at an outright annexation and colonisation it follows in respects a pattern built up of Russian approach presented as ‘mediation’ in past conflicts. By being underpinned by direct use of force, however, it clearly and dramatically contributes to the disruption and further fragmentation of the global normative order. We suggest that rather than a simple ‘return of geo-politics’ the situation in Ukraine marks a new political and economic fragmentation of geopolitical cooperation.
Rather than a simple resuscitation of classical frameworks based on inter-state dynamics and ‘great power’ competition we start from the assumption that such categories are poorly suited to account there is a need to better understand the crosscutting relations and constellations that shape contemporary global security challenges. And rather than a hierarchy of relations between global, national, local structures of political authority, we propose that research needs to focus in on the empirically observable disruption of these distinctions. Conceptualising the ‘new global fragmentation’ involves of grouping key features of the global conflict environment, such as: the systemic (e.g., political-economic) drivers of conflict and associated forms of authoritarianisation and sectarianism that transverse regime ‘types’ (democratic, non-democratic, etc.); the lowering of technological and geopolitical ‘barriers to entry’ for intervention; the subsequent proliferation of ‘new players’; the role of non-state actors operating across geopolitical boundaries; and the variegated, multi-layered features of even seemingly centralised states at war.
The Ukraine Invasion in an Age of ‘New Wars’ with Mary Kaldor - 4th March 2022: An interview with Mary Kaldor for the New Lines magazine podcast.
The War in Ukraine with Luke Cooper - 10th March 2022: A brief interview with Luke Cooper on the Compass podcast.
NATO, Human Security, the Changing Face of Global War and the Effectiveness of Sanctions and Debt Cancellation with Mary Kaldor - 17th August 2022 : An interview with Mary Kaldor for the Democracy in Question podcast.
Avoiding a Forever War in Ukraine with Luke Cooper - 24th October 2022: An interview with Luke Cooper for the Visegrad Insight podcast.
Russia - Ukraine Dialouges - From the 1st of November 2022, the LSE IDEAS Russia-Ukraine Dialogues is part-funded by PeaceRep’s Ukraine programme. For a full list of past and upcoming events click here.
Yuliya Markuts is the
Head of the Center of Public Finance and Governance at KSE and Associate
Professor at the Kyiv National University of Trade and Economics.
Andrii Darkovichis a researcher at the
Researcher of the Center for Sociological Research, Decentralization and
Regional Development at the KSE Institute.
Valentyn Hatsko is a
Data Analyst at the Center for Sociological Research on Decentralization and
Regional Development at the KSE Institute.
Roksolana Nesterenko is a researcher at the Kyiv School of Economics.
Volodymyr Vlasiuk is Director of Ukrainian Industry Expertise.
Sergii Povazhniuk is Deputy Director of Ukrainian Industry Expertise.
Vadym Yemets is a macroeconomics expert, researcher and advisor on economic growth, public policy and structural reforms.
Taras Fedirko is a
Senior Research Fellow at the IWM and a lecturer at Glasgow University (see
below).
Professor Timothy Snyder is the Richard C. Levin Professor of History at Yale University and a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna.
Karolina Czerska-Shaw is Assistant Professor and Programme Coordinator for the MA in Euroculture at the Jagiellonian University.
Wojciech Michnik is Assistant Professor of International Relations and Security Studies at Jagiellonian University and contributing editor for New Eastern Europe.
Agata Mazurkiewiczis Assistant Professor at Jagiellonian University’s Department of National Security.
Dr Cindy Wittke is Head of Political Science Research Group at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies (IOS).
Dr Taras Fedirko is Lecturer in Organised Crime and Corruption, Central and Eastern European Studies.
