Submitted by:
Hayden Lutek
11671467
Photo: Alexander Prokopenko
The Woman in a White Dress
Understanding the Dynamics of Digital Activism in Ukraine
Through the Social Media Efforts of Yulia Tymoshenko
Under the supervision of:
Dr. Alex Gekker
University of Amsterdam
In partial fulfilment of:
Master of Arts in Media Studies
New Media and Digital Culture
Abstract
The Ukrainian geopolitical context, specifically in regards to the waves of digital activism which have empowered its civil society over the past two decades, is frequently misunderstood both within the country itself, and by scholars internationally. Ranging from overwhelmingly celebratory to outright polemical, countless academic accounts which try to comprehend the situation fail to produce a nuanced understanding which probes the actual dynamics of activism, co-optation and resistance within the political system.
Mobilising the twice-Prime Minister and three-times presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko as case study, this thesis represents a multi-method ethnographic study of the dynamics of digital activism in the Ukrainian context. Specifically, through qualitative interviews with the former Prime Minister herself, journalists and representatives of civil society, the thesis asks the core research question: how can an understanding of the traditional and online media efforts of Yulia
Tymoshenko (and her team) be used to better comprehend the complex dynamics of activism in Ukrainian civil society? A content analysis and Issue Crawler implementation complement the interviews, working to contextualise and explore further the claims and arguments of interviewees. Through this research, the thesis found that three specific themes emerge regarding the
co-optation of digital activism in Ukraine by Tymoshenko and her team: 1) ‘flying under (and above) the radar,’ 2) ‘using a future to support a past,’ and 3) ‘the narrative of a never-ending battle.’ Though Tymoshenko was the central organising focus of the thesis and the above themes, it was found throughout the research process that such methods of co-optation were not strictly limited to her and her team, but are representative of wider trends in Ukrainian politics more broadly. Consequently, this thesis hopes, by taking a fundamentally new and media studies-driven
perspective on the dynamics of activism in the Ukrainian context, to inspire future academic work which can shed further light on this notoriously complex geopolitical environment.
Index
Acknowledgements 7
1 | Populists and People’s Artists 9
Introduction: A Night in Kyiv 9
The Importance of Minutiae 10
2 | Understanding the Ukrainian Context 13 “The Only Man in Ukrainian Politics” 14
Terms for a Common Understanding 16
What Has (Not Yet) Been Written 21
3 | Approaching the Production of Knowledge 25 Making Meaning from Methods 25
The Concept of Co-optation 33
A Commentary on Subjectivity 34
4 | The Subtle Power of Political Co-optation 37
Flying Under (and Above) the Radar 40
Using a Future to Support a Past 48
The Narrative of a Never-Ending Battle 61
“It Takes a Village” 64
5 | Hope in Hopelessness 67 The Power(lessness) of Civil Society 67
Embracing an Oligarchic Reality 68
Conclusion: A Dawn in Kyiv 69
Works Cited 71
Appendix A: Master Question List 80
Acknowledgements
“Trust yourself,
Create the kind of self,
That you will be happy to live with, All your life.”
Golda Meir
For me personally, this thesis represents the latest stage in a journey I began nearly a decade ago. It has been an incredibly exciting ten years, that at some moments was remarkably beautiful, and at some moments was devastatingly painful, but at every single step, was always meaningful. It has been the process of embracing the cultural roots my family was forced to abandon so long ago, and it has given a meaning and weight to my life that I never could have imagined possible. First and foremost, I owe my thanks to my father: Carey, the person who has always supported me, one hundred percent of the time. There are remarkably few people you can count on to come through at every single moment. My father was, is, and will always be that person for me.
I have been lucky beyond words to have two more people who have become parents to me over the past ten years: Bep and Piet. Both of them changed my life, and gave me the space and support I needed to become the person I am today. They made Amsterdam home.
Bep, je bent mijn tweede moeder, maar als ik eerlijk ben, als ik zeg wat ik voel, dan moet ik
zeggen: dat je voor mij mijn echte moeder bent, de moeder die ik nooit heb gehad. Ik hou van jou.
To my partner Andrey, thank you for your constant support, both emotionally and practically, especially for, on more than one occasion, checking and confirming my Russian translations.
Андрюша, наш мир - это огромный туман, но я очень рад, что мы вместе, как два ежа.
A heartfelt thanks is owed to Alex Gekker, my thesis supervisor, whose support made me the best academic I could be during this process. Alex embodied the best of what an educator should be: constructive, kind and helpful. This thesis would not be what it is without him.
Chapter 1: Populists and People’s Artists
“I am not afraid to ask,
That we spend our time loving each other, Woman in a white dress,
You have managed to steal my heart.” 1
Nikolay Baskov singing to Yulia Tymoshenko 2
Introduction: A Night in Kyiv
In late December 2009, the brightest stars of Ukrainian and Russian celebrityhood gathered for a warm and festive concert, coming together in the Soviet-era Palace of Sports concert hall for the annually held “Christmas Meeting with Alla Pugacheva.” The yearly variety show united the most beloved singers in the Eastern European media space, and the internationally broadcast event was viewed by many in Ukraine as a welcome break from the tense political environment in the country, which had suffered immensely from the global financial crisis of the prior year
(“Ukrainians Blame Yushchenko”), and was now facing a bitterly fought presidential election. Yet the night of music and lyrics was creatively co-opted for political purposes in an unsuspecting manner: with a Russian love song. Halfway through the concert, Nikolay Baskov, a singer of near infinite fame in the former Soviet Union, proudly strode off the stage and plunged into the
audience, where he found Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko. He then eloquently sang to her a confession: “I am not afraid to ask, that we spend our time loving each other, woman in a white dress, you have managed to steal my heart” (“Tymoshenko Dances”).
The reaction from both traditional and social media was immediate and intense, and the geopolitical implications of a Russian national (Baskov) singing to a Ukrainian head of state (Tymoshenko) were not lost on digital civil society. Online news spared no details when reporting that “the lion’s share of performers were in shock at how the event was unfolding,” and how the musical venue so quickly and subtly became a political hotbed (“Baskov Called Tymoshenko”). The meaning of the lyrics of the Russian song, and the way it was sung, is underscored by the political situation at the time. Ukraine had just recently avoided a gas crisis solved by a
controversial offer by Tymoshenko to Putin (“Russia and Ukraine Agreed”), and the country was still in the midst of a never-ending societal debate regarding language: specifically, whether or not
Poetic translation. Original Russian: “Я не боюсь тебя просить, время любви со мной делить, женщина
1
в платье белом, ты сумела сердце покорить.”
Nikolay Baskov is a People’s Artist of the Russian Federation (Народный Артист Российской
2
Russian should continue its Soviet-style dominance over Ukrainian in public life (Helbig et al.). The geopolitical importance of the romantic moment is only further emphasised by the fact that, though the interaction between Baskov and Tymoshenko was presented as a central part of the broadcast on the Ukrainian television channel Inter, it was completely edited out of the broadcast on the Russian television channel Rossiya 1 (“Christmas Meeting”). Analysing the Russian version shows that at nearly every moment, Tymoshenko is edited out, and only the most attentive viewer would be able to detect her presence (“Christmas Meeting”). Clearly, the interaction between the populist politician and People’s Artist was strictly meant for Ukrainian audiences only, and subsequent online reaction consequently demonstrates that Ukrainian viewers were certainly impacted by the unfolding spectacle (“Baskov Called Tymoshenko”).
This paper thus takes seriously the argument that seemingly trivial and entertaining media can be used as a sociological lens, through which a more detailed and nuanced understanding of society and politics can be reached. Consequently, the phenomenon under study in this work is the media efforts of Yulia Tymoshenko, and how analysing them can be used to better understand the notoriously complex geopolitical landscape that is post-Soviet Ukraine. This understanding can furthermore shed light on how and why the country has encountered so many political failures in its post-revolutionary period.
In making this argument, this thesis aims to challenge and complicate the popular meaning of digital activism as a “catch-all term” (Kaun and Uldam 6), thus attempting to dispel the prevalent assumption that digital media technologies directly gives democratic power to the people, and instead arguing that the online social landscape is indeed dominated by already established, hegemonic players who assert their position through subtle, meaning-making methods that allow them to influence, shape and determine the foundations of online and offline conversation. By taking former Prime Minister, and current presidential candidate, Yulia Tymoshenko as a central focal point, the goal is to thus mobilise her career as a case study which, though full of intricacies, showcases what is here argued to be a typical and consistent pattern of behaviour exhibited throughout the notoriously incestuous Ukrainian political elite (Eristavi, “Who Runs Ukraine”). Consequently, though the academic journey of this thesis encountered countless different questions, answers, understandings and perspectives, the core academic probe here is: how can an understanding of the traditional and online media efforts of Yulia Tymoshenko (and her team) be used to better comprehend the complex dynamics of activism in Ukrainian civil society?
The Importance of Minutiae
In mobilising this research question, this thesis is informed significantly by the historical academic legacy of authors such as Foucault and Deleuze, whereby institutions, such as the media, are viewed as a “productive force” whose influence is “greater than the sum of its component
forces” (Deleuze 3). Though Deleuze never wrote about the political dynamics of the Ukrainian media landscape, his notion of a “progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination” (7), implemented through subtle and rapidly changing methods of institutional control in society, is particularly useful in informing the theoretical underpinnings upon which this work is based. That is, Foucault’s worldview, refined and modernised through the work of Deleuze, in many ways accurately predicted and describes the prevailing logic which is enacted by Ukraine’s media elites in its post-Soviet, postmodern era.
In the Deleuzian school of thought, control is exercised through institutions influencing “how we define ourselves and others” (Cheney-Lippold 177), and within this worldview, “the minutiae” of daily life is understood as influencing “philosophical and aesthetic thinking” in society more broadly (Rae 194), thus allowing smaller details to have larger-scale impacts. Consequently, the minutiae influences, and lays the groundwork for, the macro, and even the smallest aesthetic details exhibited by core institutions, such as the media and political parties, cannot be ignored. Rather, gaining a proper understanding of how power, influence and control is exercised in society requires comprehending the importance of minutiae, and taking seriously the claim that its subtle impact echoes in ways that are not instantly obvious (Deleuze).
This note on the micro influencing the macro is included not only to foreground the Deleuzian thinking which informed this thesis, but also to defend the approach taken throughout this paper that takes seriously the seemingly trivial. That this entire academic work is named after a single song, one which lasted a brief five minutes at a 2009 concert in Kyiv, is a testament to this school of thinking. Thus, it is within the supposedly insignificant details of daily media life, this thesis argues, that the pieces of the most significant geopolitical behaviour patterns can be discovered and illuminated.
In this way, the paper accepts and promotes Deleuzian theory, insisting that the current Ukrainian geopolitical reality is most accurately viewed, at least partially, as a “technologically-mediated and culturally-situated consequence” (Cheney-Lippold 167) of many smaller phenomenons that
frequently fly under the academic and sociological radar, unnoticed and unscrutinised. In taking Tymoshenko’s media campaign as object of study, this work aims at taking the first steps towards changing this reality, and in the process, using the shedding of academic light to provide a
Chapter 2: Understanding the Ukrainian Context
“There are many of us, I am not the only one, Who wants to hop on a train, And find somewhere better.” 3
Andriy Kuzmenko
While the anecdote that began the previous chapter gave a brief glimpse into modern Ukraine, a much deeper understanding of both the Ukrainian context broadly, and Yulia Tymoshenko in particular, is necessary in order to comprehend the issues analysed and probed by this thesis. Ukraine as a country, and Tymoshenko as a political figure and cultural phenomenon, are uniquely divisive topics in their own right: conversations both at home and abroad regarding Ukraine are typically heated between those who identify with the pro-European, Ukrainian-speaking western regions of the country, and the pro-Soviet, Russian speaking eastern Donbas and southern Crimea (Åslund). Similarly, discourse surrounding Tymoshenko, widely understood to be one of the most polarising politicians in Eastern Europe, is ferociously marked by burst of praise from her ardent supporters, and lashes of criticism from her detractors, who, in complete seriousness, label her as potentially catastrophic as “nuclear energy” (Ioffe).
What follows in this chapter, while not free from bias, is also not an attempt to endorse any one viewpoint regarding either Ukraine or Tymoshenko, but rather to lay the groundwork for
understanding them for those unfamiliar with this context. As such, this chapter, as much as possible, attempts to refrain from commentary regarding the phenomena it presents, instead simply giving an account of what is worth knowing for the purposes of understanding. For those completely unfamiliar with Ukraine, the lyrics above from a song by legendary poet Andriy Kuzmenko, who died tragically in 2015, helps demonstrate succinctly the attitude many have towards life in the country in the post-Soviet era. As Taras, an interviewee who identifies himself as pro-Ukrainian and claims to take great pride in his country, explained: “people in Ukraine do not live, they survive.”
Decades of economic crisis, political instability (Åslund), language conflict and violent war (Kuzio, “Ukraine - Crimea - Russia”) have made Ukraine, even to those who argue to love it the most, an exceptionally tumultuous place to live and understand. This chapter is a modest attempt at examining its core tensions, beginning first with an introduction to Tymoshenko herself, proceeding with an explanation of key terms used throughout the the remaining chapters, and ending with a brief academic literature review of what has, and what has not yet, been written.
Poetic translation. Original Ukrainian: “Нас таких багато, не тільки я один, посідаєм в поїзд, і втікнем
3
“The Only Man in Ukrainian Politics”
Throughout her two decades in politics, Yulia Tymoshenko has been called many things: ranging from the condescending label of “Gas Princess,” to the more flattering “Ukrainian Joan of Arc,” to the seemingly misogynistic moniker that she is “the only man in Ukrainian politics” (“The
Woman"). Yet, and much to my own admitted surprise, in an interview conducted for this thesis, Tymoshenko actually embraced this last title, gracefully eschewing its offensive properties and matching the meaning to her personal story:
“I think when a woman in the country is ‘the only man in Ukrainian politics,’ it means that the situation with men in politics is far from great. Of course, this is a compliment. In Ukraine, there are courageous and heroic men, those men who today protect their native land from the enemy in the east of Ukraine, and women are the same. We are a
courageous nation, and I'm just trying to keep a level of courage in politics.”
While she has indeed been described many ways by both the post-Soviet and Western media, a shockingly small amount of concrete academic attention, from either geographical sphere of influence, has been paid to the various methods by which she and her team have managed to create a robust and durable political personality. Throughout the past twenty years, Tymoshenko has established for herself an enduring political, social and cultural image which has survived two revolutions, two prison terms, one war, and countless electoral cycles. She is, in every sense of the word, a “survivor” who has been able to stay relevant in the geopolitical context of Ukraine, a political environment which is notably famous, both internally and abroad, for its instability and propensity for seemingly never-ending turmoil and rapid change (Francis). Interviewee, and legendary Ukrainian journalist, Oksana Grytsenko echoed this sentiment:
“Yulia Tymoshenko, I really, I do not support her as a politician, but I really admire her ability… to be down… in the lowest possible way, and then get to the top really quickly. I think Tymoshenko is one of the most experienced and most talented politicians which we
have in Ukraine.”
Despite the extraordinary and exceptionally long career of Yulia Tymoshenko, the first woman to ever be elected Prime Minister of a state in Eastern Europe, finding thoroughly vetted academic work on her political path is in many ways an exercise in futility, especially if one is looking for literature in English. Many accounts, such as the Italian-language book by Ulderico Rinaldini, are outright polemic and carry the same type of “deeply dubious quality” that has been ascribed to countless other books regarding Ukrainian politicians (Solonyna). It should be noted here, however, that one outstanding exception is a Central European University master’s thesis authored by Iuliia Shulga, which delivers a comprehensive and critical analysis of Tymoshenko’s
political history with a specific focus on gender and cultural meaning. Nevertheless, the significant lack of nuanced academic work surrounding the former Prime Minister in general is impossible to ignore, and when the scope is narrowed to academic analysis of her specific efforts to prosper within the Ukrainian media space, there is almost nothing of critical substance in English to be found whatsoever.
Even when the search criteria is broadened to include non-academic accounts, the findings are still largely dismal, outdated and heavily partisan. Sexist language, including claims that she has “angelic beauty” and is a dollar “billionaire” (Lucas) dominates one side of the discourse, while eerily positive articles, often written by friendly journalists or political supporters of the ex-Prime Minister, dominate the other (Francis). Little or no effort is made in the popular media to actually understand what she concretely stands for, and even less attention is paid to how her political positions have evolved over the decades. Journalist Julia Ioffe comes the closest to reaching a more nuanced understanding in a profile done for the New Republic in 2010, though this work is now largely outdated, completely missing the Euromaidan revolution-era of the past five years. While an exhaustive account of the historical facts of her career, and her political orientation for the past two decades, is deserving of a thesis in and of itself, the following, and extremely brief, paragraphs help provide a skeleton understanding of who she is and what she has done:
Yulia Volodymyrivna Tymoshenko (Юлія Володимирівна Тимошенко)
The Prime Minister of Ukraine from January 2005 until September 2005, and again from December 2007 until March 2010 (“Leader”). Regarded by many as a permanent fixture of Ukrainian political life (Francis), she was imprisoned twice, first from February until March 2001, and again from August 2011 until February 2014, on charges that the international community has largely recognised as a politically motivated repression of the political opposition (“Leader”). She was an active member of the Orange Revolution, and has largely associated herself with groups supporting Ukraine’s integration into the European Union (Åslund). Though born in the Russian-speaking Dnipropetrovsk (today named Dnipro), Tymoshenko has largely eschewed identification with her native Russian language since the beginning of her political life, and positions herself as promoting the popular and professional use of the Ukrainian language in civil society (Åslund). As she explained to me in her own words:
“We have a great and brilliant poet, Lina Kostenko. She once said: ‘A nation does not die from a heart attack. First, they take your language.’ Language is the main and fundamental value for a country, for a people. This is part of our DNA and we must protect and defend it at all costs. I was born and grew up in an entirely Russian-speaking environment, and studied Ukrainian at a rather mature age. But this is my language, I am Ukrainian!”
In 2005, she placed third on the Forbes “100 Most Powerful Women” list, though this sunk to position 47 in 2009, and she has subsequently failed to rank on the same list since. She currently holds the position of Member of Parliament (Народний Депутат України, sometimes translated as People’s Deputy or People’s Deputy of Ukraine), and leads a small faction of 20 Members of Parliament in the currently 422 seat Verkhovna Rada (Верховна Рада). While she has
unsuccessfully run twice for the Ukrainian presidency (losing narrowly to Viktor Yanukovych in 2010, and more decisively to Petro Poroshenko in 2014), she has announced that she will run again in planned elections in 2019, for which she is now the highest polling candidate (Yakutenko). Having established this brief description of Tymoshenko, the chapter will next move to a succinct overview of Ukraine itself. Again, due to the constraints of time and space and necessity for clarity, the description will only highlight what is absolutely necessary to comprehend for the topic of the thesis.
Terms for a Common Understanding
The geopolitical context of Ukraine is notorious for its instability and inability to be easily fathomed by insiders and outsiders alike: the universal electoral hero of one month is
subsequently the indisputable political villain of the next, and alliances are formed and broken on a daily basis (Eristavi, “Who Runs Ukraine”). Such a reality is confirmed by interview subject and analyst Yaroslava, who comments on the failures of two revolutions to produce meaningful
change, and how the politicians of the past continually make surprise reappearances as important players in public life:
“To be honest, I would love to know why [the failure of the revolutions] happened, because, in this regard, knowing why, we would know how to change, and what to do with it.
Tymoshenko is not the only one case that shows Ukrainians have an extremely [short] political memory, like really, it takes two years and you can start over again, and so the only thing Ukrainian politicians need [to be successful] is patience, through the stormy years… The same case with Poroshenko… after the Orange Revolution… he was one of the most hated and disliked politicians, and then nine or ten years later, he wins the Presidential election in the first round, which shows Ukrainians have a very low political culture… they do not want to see the politician, they just want to listen to some honey-
words.”
Though providing an exhaustive account of an independent Ukraine’s political history is here impossible, it is necessary to establish a foundational context by explaining and clarifying some of the most salient facets of modern Ukrainian political and governmental life.
In an effort to make this often laborious process of learning less of an academic chore for the reader, this section will take the form of a bullet list of key terms and phenomenons. In this way, it both: 1) sets the expectation that the reader does not need to instantly absorb and retain every facet of the dense information presented, and 2) provides an easily accessible resource that the reader can turn back to at anytime throughout the thesis, should they forget or need clarification. To aid the learning process, the bullet points are divided by type (‘Protest Movements’ and
‘Political Players’) and sorted chronologically (based on the time they took place, or in the case of political parties and people, based on the time of their popular emergence in civil society).
Protest Movements
2004-2005: Orange Revolution (Помаранчева Революція)
Occurring from November 2004 until January 2005, the Orange Revolution is largely regarded as the first democratic revolution in an independent Ukraine, leading to the invalidation of the
election of pro-Russian presidential candidate Viktor Yanukovych, and fresh presidential elections that saw the victory of the pro-European Union Viktor Yushchenko (Karatnycky). Popularly
considered one of the leaders of the revolution, Yulia Tymoshenko rose to power as Prime Minister of Ukraine shortly following Yushchenko’s election as President (Karatnycky).
Seemingly constant infighting between Yushchenko and Tymoshenko, however, was blamed for the failure of the revolution to produce meaningful change (Slivka). When Yanukovych, who the protest movement was organised against, won the presidential election of 2010, the so-called era of the Orange Revolution was felt to have ended (Harding). Largely considered a failure by
politicians and civil society alike, Yulia Tymoshenko rhetorically refers to the event as “a revolution of lost opportunities” (Elder).
2013-2014: Euromaidan (Євромайдан)
Occurring from November 2013 until February 2014, Euromaidan has been called “Ukraine’s self-organising revolution” in Western academia (Diuk). The mass protest movement, largely based in Kyiv’s Independence Square (Майдан Незалежності), today popularly known as Maidan
(Майдан), was fuelled by the decision of pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych to abandon Ukraine’s European Union integration strategy (Diuk). The revolution ended with the murder of over one hundred protestors (Bershidsky), which then prompted the fleeing of Yanukovych to exile in Russia, the freeing from prison of opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, and the announcement of fresh presidential elections for May of that year (Polityuk and Robinson). Journalist Oksana Grytsenko explains that the emotional legacy of the protest movement is a popular rhetorical device still today:
“Obviously, of course [politicians] are, they are stealing this image [of Euromaidan],
that is the least they can do, is call the people who were killed on Maidan heroes, and give support to their families. It is [this] kind of emotional stuff that they are using all the time. It is the same with the war in Donbas, the government is trying to say how much they are supporting soldiers who fought and died. This is the emotional thing they use to cover the problems we really have, and this notorious corruption we still have.”
2013-2014: Revolution of Dignity (Революції Гідності)
The name sometimes given to the Euromaidan protest movement by activists and participants, as well as by politicians (“Ukraine Reflects”), who have mobilised the term largely as a rhetorical device, as Grytsenko explains above.
2014: Heavenly Hundred (Небесна Сотня)
The over 100 individuals killed during the course of the Euromaidan revolution, the majority of which were shot to death during the final days of the revolution in 2014 (Bershidsky). The
Heavenly Hundred carry a deeply symbolic status in contemporary Ukraine, being constantly used rhetorically by politicians and activists, including currently in 2018. The murdered protestors have also officially being awarded hero-status by the current Ukrainian government (“President
Awarded Heroes”).
Political Players
1990s: Oligarchy (Олігархія)
Emerging during the mass privatisation that occurred in Ukraine during the country’s shift to independence in the 1990s, the oligarchy is popularly imagined as a powerful group that owns a large share of Ukraine’s economic resources and media, and consequently exercises a significant amount of political influence (Åslund).
The oligarchy is thus made up of individual oligarchs, who often compete with each other, with major players including Rinat Akhmetov, Ihor Kolomoiskiy, and Victor Pinchuk (Eristavi, “Who Runs Ukraine”). Åslund has defined an oligarch as “a very wealthy and politically well-connected [businessperson], a dollar billionaire, or nearly so, who was the main owner of a conglomerate of enterprises and had close ties to the president” (107).
For the purposes of this thesis, it is particularly important to make explicit the absolute media ownership which the oligarchy maintains. As Grytsenko explains, this is a major obstacle to progressive development in Ukrainian civl society, especially when taking into account the dominance of traditional television for news in the Ukrainian context:
television mostly, and it is just a news source, and most of the big television stations are owned by oligarchs, which is true… we have [the] very small and not very popular
Hromadske TV, which survives on grants and is totally independent media, we have several small TV channels which are more or less free, but major channels, they are all owned by oligarchs. [Some] smaller channels, they are also owned by small oligarchs… [smaller channel] 112, there was an investigation that linked it to a former Yanukovych-ally… financially. Speaking about [larger channel] 1+1, it is openly owned by Kolomoisky, who does not deny it. Speaking about Fifth Channel, it is hard to say if it is big or small, it is somewhere in the middle, it is owned by oligarch, and President, Petro Poroshenko.
1999: VO Batkivshchyna (ВО Батьківщина)
Led by Yulia Tymoshenko, VO Batkivshchyna is historically one of the largest political parties in Ukraine, reaching its electoral peak in 2007, when it garnered 156 seats in the (then) 450 seat Ukrainian parliament (Maksymiuk). Though it currently holds 20 seats in parliament, as of Spring 2018 it is the highest polling political party in Ukraine (Civic Opinion). Batkivshchyna regards itself as pro-European integration, and is currently the only Ukrainian party that both holds seats in parliament and is an observer member of the liberal European People’s Party (Bader).
2001: The Party of Regions (Партія Регіонів)
The Party of Regions was the party of exiled former President Viktor Yanukovych, and was mainly seen as pro-Russian from both a linguistic and geopolitical standpoint (Kuzio, “Ukraine - Crimea - Russia”). The party openly espoused support for Russian as the state language of Ukraine, and in the past was closely linked to, and compared with, Putin’s United Russia (Единая Россия)
(Leshchenko). The party largely collapsed following the Euromaidan revolution of 2013-2014, though it still ran a presidential candidate in the 2014 election, after Yanukovych fled to Russia and was dismissed as leader (“PoR”).
Though the party no longer has any formal representation in Ukrainian politics, its legacy has meant it is still a prominent fixture of discourse within civil society, and a large share of its membership has subsequently continued political life in newer parties, including the Opposition Bloc (Опозиційний Блок), Ukraine - Forward! (Україна - Вперед!), Our Land (Наш Край), and Renaissance/Revival (Відродження). As Mikhail, a journalist from one of Ukraine’s largest television stations, commented in an interview:
“Recent polls show that the Opposition Bloc leader Yuriy Boyko has third or fourth place in presidential ratings, so unfortunately of course, very, very unfortunately… those people from the former Party of Regions, they do have their electorate, obviously in the Eastern and Southern parts of Ukraine.”
Infamously, the current and supposedly pro-European President of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko, is widely regarded as a founding member of the Party of Regions, though he has largely distanced himself from this fact since the Euromaidan revolution (Kuzio, “Ukraine - Crimea - Russia”).
2014: The Petro Poroshenko Bloc (Блок Петра Порошенка)
Emerging in its current form after the Euromaidan revolution, the Petro Poroshenko Bloc is the main political force of the current President and Prime Minister of Ukraine, Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Groysman. The political union was virtually an unknown player in Ukrainian politics until the 2014 parliamentary elections, when it suddenly became the most popular party among polls, and subsequently won the largest amount of seats in parliament (Khomenko). Somewhat ironically, the party forbids politicians with links to the former ruling Party of Regions from joining its ranks, though there are numerous cases where ex-Party of Regions members have joined, including, most notably, Poroshenko himself (Vuyets).
2014: Nadiya Savchenko (Надія Савченко)
A former military Lieutenant, Savchenko gained notoriety when, according to Ukrainian sources, she was captured by pro-Russian forces in Eastern Ukraine in 2014. Instantly, she became “a national symbol of Ukrainian defiance” (Morello Birnbaum). She was eventually taken to Moscow and charged with being complacent in the murder of two Russian journalists. Later in 2014, she was placed first on the electoral list of VO Batkivshchyna, with her story being heavily promoted by the party during the election campaign (Bateson). Running on the idea that “two women at [the] top will propel [the VO Batkivshchyna] party into parliament,” Tymoshenko used the rhetoric of an “unbroken” woman extensively in her speeches, advertisements and social media material (Bateson).
In 2016, nearly two years after being elected to parliament with VO Batkivshchyna, Savchenko was freed from prison in Russia as part of a prisoner exchange (“Nadiya Savchenko Freed”). The celebration was short lived: Savchenko quickly fell from popularity as it became clear she was uncomfortable with, and uninformed about, the political realities Ukraine was facing (Zimmerman). She was eventually expelled from the VO Batkivshchyna party after allegedly illegally negotiating with pro-Russian separatists in the disputed regions of Eastern Ukraine, breaking the
internationally recognised and agreed upon format for negotiations. On March 28, 2018, she was stripped of her parliamentary immunity (which gives Ukrainian lawmakers freedom from
prosecution) when evidence emerged that she was “planning a military-style coup” (Zimmerman). Now disgraced and deeply unpopular, Savchenko has consequently lost her hero status in
Ukraine, and if fully prosecuted, may serve a sentence in a Ukrainian prison for her alleged coup plans (Zimmerman). Though interesting in its own right, the figure of Savchenko is particularly important for this thesis, serving as an indicative example of how Tymoshenko has mobilised newcomers in politics for her own promotional purposes (see Chapter 4).
What Has (Not Yet) Been Written
The literature review for this thesis is, more than anything, a commentary on what has not yet been written regarding the media environment in post-Soviet Ukraine. While the variety of English-language academic writing surrounding Tymoshenko is largely dismal, the situation is not much more developed when it comes to Ukraine itself, with a few notable exceptions.
Concrete academic research regarding the media landscape (both traditional and digital) in Ukraine begins to emerge in significant numbers around 2004, the year of the Orange Revolution. This reality is not surprising as, in the words of interviewee and journalist Mikhail, this is the era when freedom of speech slowly began to prosper in the Ukrainian context:
“…none of the [television] channels [in Ukraine] are absolutely clear in maintaining journalistic standards. So none of the channels are like 100% unbiased and maintaining journalism standards, as for example, the BBC, or something like this. At the same time, we can still say that there is freedom of speech in Ukraine, and actually it began not after the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, but even earlier, in 2004, after the Orange Revolution.”
Thus, while the broadcast media remained, and still remains now, firmly in the hands of oligarchs, the popular protest movement of 2004 gave Western academics a reason to turn the sociological microscope to the Ukrainian context. During this time, a number of Western studies attempted to shed light on what was happening in the post-Soviet space. Authors such as Goldstein as well as Kyj lauded the popular use of (what was then called) “internet technologies” for (what is now popularly called) digital activism, with “online citizen journalists” seen as challenging the popular traditional-news narrative promoted by television (Goldstein 1). In this worldview, “savvy activists and journalists” were celebrated for their ability to resist the dominant, Soviet-style media
narratives that had controlled their society for so long (Goldstein 1).
Other authors, such as political scientists Beissinger as well as Wilson, critiqued the revolution for excessive backing of one candidate in particular, and argued that old cultural divisions mobilised the populous to come out and protest more than any significant use of digital technology. Yet, regardless of the side one takes in this scholarly scuffle, one truth is clear: academic studies of the Orange Revolution either celebrated it as a digital breakthrough (Goldstein) or degraded it as a simple continuation of already existing trends in Ukrainian civil society, that were being
exacerbated by the use of technology to more easily gather protestors (Beissinger).
Though this celebratory/polemical attitude towards the Orange Revolution was far from perfect, what is perhaps most troubling is how it continued during the Euromaidan revolution of
functioning of the mass media, digital media and civil society in Ukraine, and it was only with the breakout of this second protest movement that Western scholars again began to feign interest. Unfortunately, with few notable exceptions, this literature continued the dialectic of praise/ condemnation.
Accounts from observers like Onuch placed an immense amount of credit on social media for revolutionising Ukrainian society, celebrating platforms like Facebook as allowing the populous to break down Soviet power structures with the smartphone in their pocket. Authors like Diuk
continue this trend, labelling the movement “Ukraine’s Self-Organising Revolution,” exhibiting the kind of positivist thinking that ignores what Kaun and Uldam call the “increasing polarisation within digital activism” (6). Thus, as Kaun and Uldam argue, digital activism is far from being a simplistic process of harmonious revolutions amongst unified societies, and actually involves much contention and contestation from various players, including “radical politics” on one side of the spectrum, and “NGO corporatization” on the other (6). Positivist arguments like Diuk’s glaze over this problematisation, replacing academic critical reflection with a sometimes too
enthusiastic celebration of the more exciting aspects of the movement.
Yet, other understandings of Euromaidan completely dismiss the positive aspects entirely, instead focusing on the presence of unsavoury nationalists on the extreme right to define the overall meaning of the event in its entirety (Luhn). These accounts often focus excessively on statements of fringe groups, using their extremist demands as a organising framework, which then causes Euromaidan to be viewed in terms of “competing nationalisms” (Kuzio, “Competing
Nationalisms”), thus in a way dismissing many of those who simply stood on the square for
European Union integration and democratic values. Such one-sided, reductionist accounts ignore, as NGO employee Bogdan explains, the fact that not everyone in Ukraine holds a nationalist viewpoint: “Ukrainian society is not homogenous. There are people who find that it was fine under Yanukovych, and that the Euromaidan revolution was a huge mistake.”
Further, missing entirely from many of these accounts is also any emphasis on the political economy of the event, and how, far from being completely anti-oligarch in nature, many aspects of the revolution actually received tacit approval, through major funding, from Ukraine’s elite:
“Euromaidan, of course it was receiving finances from oligarchs… it was supported by people, people who donated as much as anybody could, but the oligarchs also invested in Maidan, and Kolomoisky also said that he invested a couple of million dollars in
Euromaidan, I mean like bringing some stuff, some equipment, some food, anything. So just like any other Ukrainians, they were very involved in this.” (Oksana Grytsenko, Journalist)
What this lack of nuanced, media studies-focused attention on the Ukrainian context leaves is a scholarly void which this thesis attempts to take the first steps toward filling. Thus, though this work alone cannot completely make up for the lack of literature described above, by proposing a fundamentally new comprehension of the topic through the mobilisation of Yulia Tymoshenko as case study, it hopes to ignite a new interest which can fuel further academic attention moving forward.
Chapter 3: Approaching the Production of Knowledge
“You see how it is, my dear friends,
There’s no pleasing everyone, it’s hopeless to even try, And the more you play the peacemaker,
The less peaceful things become.” Sholom Aleichem
Making Meaning from Methods
The opening quote of this paper, taken from legendary Ukraine-born, Yiddish-language author Sholom Aleichem, artfully highlights the mentality embraced for the methodology of this thesis: mainly, that there is no methodological approach that will appease every scholar in every academic institution, and so, when it comes to methodology, there is no such thing as a successful peacemaker. Embracing this as a necessary reality, rather than a constricting limitation, this work aims to establish a methodological approach which is informed, adaptable and productive, but that will, admittedly and openly, not please or meet approval from every single reader.
The thesis takes inspiration from Crang and Cook’s masterful work, Doing Ethnographies, which takes a fundamentally different approach than that typically found with what they have called “the read-then-do-then-write model” (17) of academic research. Specifically, this work attempts to mitigate the presence of mid-process surprises that cause delays, force rewrites and lead to less rigorously vetted findings. Instead, it attempts to implement a constant learning process which simultaneously embraces reading, doing and writing at one and the same time, whereby one step is constantly informed and is shaped by the others. While, as Crang and Cook themselves admit, this approach by no means eliminates the presence of theoretical and practical surprises entirely from the research process, it does work to ensure that, when found, “they’re often much smaller, easier to respond to and should help to shape research that’s simultaneously interesting, relevant and doable” (17).
In skirting what is perceived by many as established academic convention, the structure that informed the writing process of this thesis thus significantly diverts from convention by, first and foremost, foregrounding the methodological underpinnings on which its theoretical and
ethnographic framework is based. By doing so, it embraces the idea put forward by Crang and Crook that the methodological instruments employed in academic writing can actually inform the specific types of literature used in said work, and that the actual research being undertaken can in fact precede a formal literature review (67). Thus, while a literature review is indeed necessary and is included in the prior chapter, in this thesis, it was chronologically written after the
methodological underpinnings were already determined, and not before, as is the usual academic tradition (Crang and Crook).
Thus, here there is a heartfelt embracement of grounded theory, defined succinctly by Glaser and Strauss as “the discovery of theory from data” (1-2). Such an approach has become increasingly popular in academic circles that seek to avoid the deterministic constraints of theoretical rigidity, and instead mobilise proven methods in new ways to foster an environment wherein the data analysed is given its own voice through active interpretation (Glaser and Strauss). Thus, in this school of thought, theory is given space to “emerge organically” from “textual analysis” (Gekker 98-99). Consequently, in qualitative ethnographic work, such an approach enables the voice of the interviewed to have increased weight and prominence, as the interviewees personal truths are no longer constrained by the limits of author’s predefined view of the world (Glaser and Strauss). Such an embracement of grounded theory in this thesis is clearly evident in Chapter 4, whereby the entire structure of the chapter is derived from themes which emerged during the analysis of qualitative interviews. Here, the “data” quite literally structured the “theory” (Glaser and Strauss 1-2), producing a worldview shaped by those who live within it, rather than strictly myself as an academic observer and interviewer. In adopting such a process, there is also an absolute stated agreement with the powerfully accurate claim that “‘raw data’ is both an oxymoron and a bad idea” (Gitelman and Jackson 1). Thus, “the interpretive structures” (Gitelman and Jackson 4) which transformed the data collected (the interview audio/text, content analysis snippets, and Issue Crawler output) into findings (the three core themes in Chapter 4) was not an objective conversion process based on data input, and result output. Rather, it involved a constant and subjective engagement with the data presented, whereby I as author sought out themes and trends which shed light on, and helped explain, the phenomena under study.
Here, it is important to note that while this mobilisation of grounded theory represents a
fundamentally different school of thought than “the read-then-do-then-write model” (Crang and Crook 17), it is still a respected and rigorous academic approach in its own right, and its
usefulness and merits have been well documented and demonstrated (Glaser and Strauss; Gekker). Thus, while this thesis prides itself on embracing the more unconventional approach of grounded theory, it still took concerted effort to stay within the realm of proven academic practice. Having explained and justified this departure from more traditional methodological logic, the remainder of this section will thus outline the specific detail of the interweaving of literature and methodology that informed this work, including a description of the ethnographic and digital methods undertaken, as well as remarks on how and why such an approach was mobilised.
As Canadian academics Ted Palys and Chris Atchison have so eloquently explained in their highly recommendable work entitled Research Decisions, in the humanities and social sciences, “no royal roads to truth exist” (2). Put differently, there is no single method, approach or school of
thought that will uniformly produce findings which speak to an objective, concrete and
unchallengeable truth. Hence, why this thesis immediately takes Aleichem’s advice in abandoning any notions of (methodological) peacemaker.
Quite the opposite of the “royal roads” mentality, Palys and Atchison argue that any blind faith in such a misguided and uncompromising methodological certainty will indeed produce findings that, inadvertently or purposefully, simply work to confirm the authors already predefined view of how the social world works (2). Heeding this call, this work seeks to take a mixed methods approach which places no confidence in any one worldview, and instead works to combine a number of seemingly opposing approaches to produce a societal understanding whereby difference is complementary.
Taking such an approach in many ways echoes the concept of methodological “triangulation,” whereby a researcher combines “different kinds of material or methods” in order to gain a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon at hand (Saukko 23). Yet, as Paula Saukko explains, this approach is often associated with positivism, and specifically the school of thought that society is “an observable entity that stays put,” where triangulation can thus facilitate a more concrete understanding of an objective “truth” (Saukko 24).
Consequently, while the combination of three specific methods in this thesis can be argued to take some inspiration from the triangulation approach, it does so with an extremely important qualifier: the results of this methodologically multifaceted approach must not be seen as representing a more statistically valid or empirically sound reality, but rather, and similar to the prism metaphor described by Saukko, be understood as attempting to shine a light on more than one source or type of knowledge (25).
Thus, while “the classical aim of triangulation” is to use multiple methods which “corroborate” each other empirically, enabling the discovery of a definitive truth, the more constructivist goal of this work is to mobilise a varied and diverse methodological strategy to avoid “one-dimensional judgements” (Saukko 23-32). As a result, the three methods used are thus not necessarily employed in perfect harmony and, much to the contrary, often have produced findings which contradict and challenge each other.
Yet, rather than be denounced or avoided, such methodological incongruity must be celebrated and embraced, as it allows the research to be engaged with “dialogically” (Saukko 25-33). This worldview permits no space for the acknowledgment of a definitive truth or unquestionable reality, but rather is premised on the idea that research takes the form of a dialogical exchange between an academic and what they study, whereby both ends of the spectrum play an active role in shaping the knowledge produced. In this way, this thesis aims to implement triangulation in a nuanced and subjective manner, doing so not to cast light on a single objective truth, but rather to shine many lights (Saukko 25) in order to establish a diversified understanding of the questions
under consideration. Though the rational limits of time and space do not permit an implementation of every methodological practice imaginable, three specific and differing approaches are embraced throughout this research in contentious unison:
1) Qualitative Interviews: Specifically conducted with members of Ukrainian civil society,
including current Member of Parliament and former Prime Minister of Ukraine Yulia Tymoshenko, leaders and members of Non-Governmental Organizations (including Reanimation Packet of Reforms, Detector Media and Ukraine Crisis Media Centre), and regular citizens and diaspora members who both did and did not participate in the Euromaidan movement. Each interviewee, as well as the aliases they were assigned during the process, is listed below in alphabetical order: - Bogdan, an NGO employee and activist.
- Harm, a former journalist.
- Ihor, an NGO employee and activist.
- Mikhail, a journalist.
- Oleksandra, an NGO employee and activist.
- Petro, an NGO employee and activist.
- Ruslan, an NGO employee and activist.
- Taras, an activist.
- Viktor, a former journalist and activist.
- Yaroslava, an NGO employee and analyst.
In addition, interviews were also conducted with three journalists/activists who agreed to use their full names and speak ‘on the record.’ All three carry varying degrees of notoriety both inside and outside of Ukraine:
- Maxim Eristavi, a Poynter Scholar at Yale University who has written for Foreign Policy, Politico and the Washington Post. Eristavi is also a co-founder of Hromadske International, the English-language version of the online, activist-driven television station founded during the time of Euromaidan revolution.
(Dutch national television), as well as acted in films and nationally televised sitcoms in both the Netherlands (including Goede Tijden, Slechte Tijden on RTL) as well as in Russia (including Girls Do Not Surrender [Девочки не Сдаются] on STS [СТС]).
- Oksana Grytsenko, a staff writer for the Kyiv Post who has also written for the Guardian and AFP, including from the war zone areas of Donetsk and Luhansk.
2) Qualitative Content Analysis: Specifically of the social media presence of the party of Yulia
Tymoshenko (facebook.com/batkivshchyna, twitter.com/batkivshchyna, youtube.com/ batkivshchyna), as well as supposedly nonpartisan social media sites which are linked to members and activists from her party (facebook.com/igor.lutsenko, facebook.com/alyxrum).
3) Issue Crawler Implementation: Specifically to determine whether or not the multiple official
websites run by Tymoshenko’s team actually carry any noteworthy reputation as important
sources of news and discussion online. Developed by the Govcom.org Foundation in Amsterdam, the Issue Crawler is an internationally recognised digital method that has proven extremely useful in undertaking hyperlink analysis research that reveals how and where issue networks are formed throughout the web (Rogers; Marres; Sánchez-Querubín). Through this method, the thesis worked to gain a broader understanding of whether the co-optation of activism by Tymoshenko’s team is strictly relevant on social media, or if it occurs on external web spaces as well.
In conducting such an analysis, the thesis attempts “to reveal a state of affairs whose presence was hitherto hidden” (Latour 29), using the Issue Crawler as a tool to uncover what lies below the surface of the content itself. In this way, it investigates whether or not the multiple external
websites run by Tymoshenko’s team actually carry any noteworthy reputation as valorised online communities, or whether they are simply partisan pages that receive little attention from larger Ukrainian civil society online. By bringing the hidden into view, this use of the Issue Crawler works to make blatantly obvious a reality that can easily go unnoticed in the mesh of technology and politics (Latour).
The specific reason each method was chosen, and the process by which it was implemented, is discussed below.
Qualitative Interviews
Turning now to the practical wisdom of Crang and Cook, it is possible to locate the remarkably simple, yet notably accurate, rationale for conducting qualitative interviews: “to get at the ‘long stories’ of events, decisions and so on” (69). The justification for interviews here was thus that it allowed for the development of what anthropologist Clifford Geertz famously termed a culturally “thick description,” one which contains a level of nuance and detail which only in-depth
ethnography can truly deliver (10). In this academic worldview, as Geertz himself so eloquently explained, knowledge is found not in “conventionalised graphs” or standardised data, but rather “in transient examples of shaped behaviour” that can only be discovered through discussion. Yet, while answering the ‘why’ was remarkably easy, implementing the ‘how' was significantly more challenging, specifically because it required making decisions where no one answer provided a universally better outcome than the other, once again echoing the claim of Palys and Atchison that there is no one correct path to knowledge. Nevertheless, the following was decided at an early stage, so that the practical process of conducting interviews could begin:
- Interviews followed a semi-structured format. Though a master list of questions was prepared in advance, the variation of these questions changed depending on the specific interview, as
interviewees were selected from different facets of society (organs of power, nongovernmental organisations, media outlets, etc.) and thus no one precise number or selection of questions would suffice for every person. Opting for this format thus allowed for participants to speak in their own words, and allowed the interviews to adjust to the unique realities and experiences of interviewees. Though one drawback to such a decision is that the interviews were not as easily comparable (as questions were not completely standardised), such a non-quantitative approach was justified by the goal of arriving at a culturally thick (Geertz) understanding of the
phenomenons at hand. The master question list, from which questions were taken from, is viewable in Appendix A.
- Interviewees would not be put into any specific categories. Though there was an early desire by me to categorise different individuals as a) representatives of political power, b) representatives of nongovernmental organisations, and c) representatives of broader civil society, it became
apparent that there is simply too much overlap between these groups to make such artificial barriers. A representative of a nongovernmental organisation, for example, is not separate from broader civil society as a whole, just as countless politicians are in many cases impossible to remove from the select nongovernmental organisations they fund, support or participate with. - Interview subjects would be anonymous, unless they specifically expressed a desire/
contentedness with being ‘on the record.’ This not only complies with prevailing ethnographic ethical logic (Crang and Cook 29), but it also protected my interviewees and myself in the often toxic, sometimes violent, world of Ukrainian politics. In total, four out of fourteen participants (Yulia Tymoshenko, Maxim Eristavi, Viktoria Koblenko and Oksana Grytsenko) did not use aliases. - Research participants were gathered using traditional snowball sampling techniques, aided by the use of Facebook to streamline the process of collecting, contacting and coordinating with individual contacts (the benefits of social media for such a sampling technique is well
- Interviews were conducted in English, with the notable exception of Tymoshenko herself, who only speaks the Russian and Ukrainian languages. My justification for this decision was twofold: 1) the simple reason that in English I am able to more eloquently and tactfully communicate with my interviewee, and 2) the fact that an immense amount of meaning is lost in between two languages, much of which simply cannot be accurately translated in a way that properly conveys the original intent. As this thesis is aimed at being one of the few works regarding its subject that is published in English, and because the bulk of the interviewees had a working proficiency in English, this language choice was possible. In the event that a phrase, sentence or expression was said in either the Russian or Ukrainian languages by the interviewee, I included an English translation which aimed to best convey the meaning of the phrase, while also including the original Russian/Ukrainian text.
Qualitative Content Analysis
Though it appears second in the order of this chapter, chronologically the qualitative content analysis actually preceded the interview stage, as it helped provide a platform for conversation that could be introduced during interviews themselves. Specifically drawing on the work of Mel Stanfill, this method mobilised a “discursive interface analysis” of the social media presences explicitly owned and operated by Tymoshenko’s party, and those which less conspicuously promote the agenda of her political force by being owned and operated by individuals and/or organisations linked to her politically. Specifically, the following were analysed:
- The official social media presence of Tymoshenko herself: facebook.com/yuliatymoshenko, instagram.com/yulia_tymoshenko, youtube.com/tymoshenkoua.
- The official social media presence of Tymoshenko’s party (VO Batkivshchyna): facebook.com/ batkivshchyna, twitter.com/batkivshchyna, youtube.com/batkivshchyna.
- Supposedly independent social media pages which are operated by individuals and/or organisations that are linked to Tymoshenko politically: facebook.com/igor.lutsenko, facebook.com/alyxrum and facebook.com/spravedlyvistua.
By undertaking this specific analysis, this thesis closely mirrored the logic and method presented by Stanfill, embracing the idea that the capabilities and options presented to users on online platforms can function “as productive power,” with cognitive and functional affordances thus shaping user behaviour and moulding exactly how the user comprehends, understands and interacts with the subject matter at hand (1059-1068). Yet, it is important to note here that while such an analysis is inspired by Stanfill, its focus is slightly different from such work, insofar as the main point of concern is the content and context within which information is provided, and not necessarily the specific affordances of the platform itself.
Thus, while at times during this survey of social media properties, the specific affordances and uses of a medium like Facebook or Twitter were put under the microscope, the bulk of time and analysis was dedicated to understanding how these platforms are mobilised in order to
comprehend how certain topics are “framed” by Tymoshenko in her team “in public discourse” (Scheufele and Iyengar 3-7). Here, the main academic goal is to uncover the way in which
information presented online influences “the meaning that people,” and specifically the Ukrainian electorate, “construct around political issues” (Scheufele and Iyengar 3-7). By undertaking such an approach, this thesis works to reveal the subtleties of co-optation, which exist not in blatantly propagandistic content, but rather in the careful framing of societal issues of supposed concern (Scheufele and Iyengar).
Additionally, the findings of this content analysis were then collected and 1) included throughout this thesis itself, to expand and reinforce core findings, but also 2) used to inspire and guide conversations with interviewees, where the concrete themes extracted from the analysis could be used as a probe to facilitate a deeper and more empirically grounded conversation. Consequently, analysing how Tymoshenko’s social media presence “incites” or “encourages” (Stanfill 1060-1061) particular articulations of activism thus allowed one method (the qualitative content analysis) to shape and inform another (the qualitative interviews), demonstrating how the fluid learning and research process that Crang and Cook advocated was embraced in the methodology of this thesis (17).
Issue Crawler Implementation
The implementation of the Issue Crawler represents a largely different logic than the previous two methods, as it does not analyse Tymoshenko’s social media presence, but rather seeks to
understand how she and her party are discussed on the wider internet. In doing so, it aimed at conceptualising the larger “issue network” (Sánchez-Querubín 95) surrounding Tymoshenko’s co-optation of digital activism online, specifically outside the realm of social media.
An admitted limitation of this thesis its that, while initially the Issue Crawler implementation was meant to comprise an equal third of the overall methodology undertaken, this reality had to change during the research and writing process. This is mainly because the limits and space of time meant that, if the prior two methodological components (qualitative interviews and content analysis) were to be implemented in a complete and academically rigorous way, there was simply not enough room left for as comprehensive of an Issue Crawler section as had been initially planned.
This is especially true given the increasingly dominant role played by qualitative interviews in my research, whereby, through the power of social media combined with the snowball method mentioned above (Baltar and Brunet), a number of incredibly interesting interview subjects came
forward who were able to provide the exact type of “thick description” (Geert 10) the methodology of this thesis had sought to find. Again, using Crang and Crook as methodological moral
compass, such a reality is not necessarily universally negative, and rather just a necessary sacrifice inherent in eschewing “the read-then-do-then-write model” (17).
As a result, the Issue Crawler implementation here was mainly limited to determine whether or not the multiple official websites run by Tymoshenko’s team actually carry any noteworthy reputation as valorised online communities, or whether they are simply partisan pages that receive little attention from larger Ukrainian civil society online, and thus carry no real concrete weight as hubs of knowledge. This small implementation nevertheless aided and supported the integrity of the overall findings presented in this research, and thus the Issue Crawler still maintains a needed and necessary place within the overall methodology upon which this work is built.
The Concept of Co-optation
Key to comprehending how knowledge was produced in this thesis also requires understanding how co-optation, a central theme throughout this work, and the concept on which Chapter 4 was built, was defined for the purposes of the research here undertaken. This is to say, that how a concept is defined is indeed part and parcel of the methodology of an academic work, as a definition necessarily carries with it a deterministic capacity, which shapes the philosophical terrain on which discussion takes place. Consequently, this influential linguistic power mandates that any definition chosen must not only be thoroughly understood by the author, but must also be fully disclosed to the reader, so that they can understand how a concept was mobilised. Following this logic, this paper has embraced a definition of co-optation as defined by Coy and Hedeen. As they explain, the term has a “multifaceted nature” and is best understood not simply as a discreet and easily isolatable phenomenon, but rather as a “process” which has unique and varying sets of dynamics in its “path” (409). This thesis mobilizes their definition of “a four-stage model” of co-optation, which, to briefly paraphrase in order to remain succinct, includes the following steps:
1) Inception: A phenomenon, such as an idea or movement, is produced by a group seeking to enact social change (Coy and Hedeen 410-411).
2) Appropriation: The language and technique of the idea or movement is adopted by groups holding power in the geopolitical context. Often, the original group is included in this stage, being invited under the guise of participation (Coy and Hedeen 411-421).
