About
Bohdana Kurylo is an International Relations scholar and Fellow in Qualitative Methodology at LSE. Her research focuses on security in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, particularly civil society and non-state security actors, critical infrastructure and societal resilience, and the politics of knowledge production about war and peace. She earned her PhD in International Relations and East European Studies from University College London in 2025.
Bohdana’s research brings together critical security studies, East European studies and qualitative methodology. A central strand of her work examines civil society as a security actor and the role of collective actors beyond the state in the politics of security. Her book project develops this research through the cases of Poland and Ukraine, building on her work on vernacular security, feminist resistance and Ukrainian civil society in wartime. Her current research focuses on critical infrastructure, ontological security and wartime resilience in Eastern Europe. Supported by a BISA Early Career Small Research Grant, this work examines infrastructure across Ukraine, Poland and Lithuania. A further strand of Bohdana’s research examines the politics and ethics of knowledge production about Ukraine and Eastern Europe, including decolonial understandings of war and peace, reflexivity and research ethics. Methodologically, she specialises in interpretive qualitative research, interviewing, ethnographic and autoethnographic approaches, multimodal methods, and qualitative text and discourse analysis.
Bohdana has published in journals including International Affairs, Security Dialogue, International Studies Review, Review of International Studies, International Relations, European Journal of International Security and Journal of International Relations and Development. Her research has received three prizes from the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies and the Association for the Study of Nationalities.
She is Co-convenor of BISA’s East European and Eurasian Security Working Group, serves on the Advisory Board of the Society, War & Recovery Research Centre, and participated in the Paris Defence Young Leaders Programme. She also received an LSE Excellence in Education Award in 2025 and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.
Research Interests
International Relations; critical security studies; post-Soviet politics; interpretive methodology; hermeneutics; contextualism; politics of knowledge production; civil society; gender; populism.
Research
Expertise:
International Relations; International security; Critical security studies; Ukraine; Poland; Lithuania; Eastern Europe; Civil society; Non-state security actors; Critical infrastructure; Ontological security; Wartime resilience; War and peace; Politics of knowledge production; Qualitative methods; Interpretive methodology; Multimodal methods; Text and discourse analysis; Research ethics.
Publications:
Kurylo, B., Oksamytna, K. and Ioffe, Y. (forthcoming) Colonial and Anti-Colonial Imaginaries of Peace in the Russo-Ukrainian War, International Affairs.
Kurylo, B. (2026) The Iron Road Home: Ukrainian Railways and Ontological Security Under Russian Terror, European Journal of International Security, FirstView, pp. 1-23.
Kurylo, B. (2025) From individual to collective: Vernacular security and Ukrainian civil society in wartime, Security Dialogue, 56(5), pp. 575-592
Rhamey, Patrick et al. (2025) Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: Accounting for the domestic alongside the international, International Studies Review, 27(4), pp. 1-29
Kurylo, B. (2025) Populism and the aesthetics of security: The case of Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in D. Cadier, A. Chryssogelos & S. Destradi, eds. Routledge Handbook of Populism and Foreign Policy. London: Routledge, pp. 572-588.
Howlett, M. and Kurylo, B. (2025) Reframing reflexivity: Collaborative ethics, collective responsibility and learnings from researching Russia’s war on Ukraine, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, pp. 1-14.
Gaufman, L. and Kurylo, B. (2024) Editorial: Ukraine in popular culture, Czech Journal of International Relations, 59(1), pp. 7-22.
Kurylo, B. (2023) The Ukrainian subject, hierarchies of knowledge production and the everyday: An autoethnographic narrative, Journal of International Relations and Development, 26(4), pp. 685-697.
Kurylo, B. (2022) Emergency: A vernacular contextual approach, International Studies Review, 24(3), pp. 1-23.
Kurylo, B. (2022) Counter-populist performances of (in)security: Feminist resistance in the face of right-wing populism in Poland, Review of International Studies, 48(2), pp. 262-281.
Kurylo, B. (2022) The discourse and aesthetics of populism as securitisation style, International Relations, 36(1), pp. 127-147.
Kurylo, B. (2020) Technologised consumer culture: The Adorno-Benjamin debate and the reverse side of politicisation, Journal of Consumer Culture, 20(4), pp. 619-636.
Kurylo, B. (2017) Pornography and power in Michel Foucault's thought, Journal of Political Power, 10(1), pp. 71-84.
Kurylo, B. (2016) Russia and Carl Schmitt: The hybridity of resistance in the globalised world, Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, 2(16096), pp. 1-9.