Decentralization, Regional Diversity, and Conflict

Hanna Shelest is Member of the Board at the Foreign Policy Council “Ukrainian Prism” and Editor-in-chief of UA: Ukraine Analytica. Prior to this, she had served for more than 10 years as Senior Researcher at the National Institute for Strategic Studies under the President of Ukraine. Maryna Rabinovych is a researcher at the Faculty of Law, University of Hamburg, Germany. She will join the Leibniz Science Campus “Eastern Europe as a Global Area” as Post-Doc Fellow.

• 1. Introduction: Regional Diversity, Decentralization and Conflict in Ukraine (Maryna Rabinovych and Hanna Shelest).- Part I. Regional Diversity in Ukraine and its Accommodation in Government Policies.- 2. Regionalism in Ukraine: Historic Evolution, Regional Claim-Making and Center-Periphery Conflict Resolution (Oksana Myshlovska).- 3. Navigating Ethnopolitical Disputes: Ukraine’s Constitutional Court in the Tug-of-War over Language (Andrii Nekoliak and Vello Pettai).- 4. Crimean Tatars and the Question of National and Ethnic Belonging in Ukraine (Alina Zubkovych).- Part II. The “Crisis In and Around Ukraine”, Occupied Territories and their Reintegration: the Legal Dimension.- 5. The Reintegration of Donbas into Ukraine Exercised Through the Means of Post-Violence Reconstruction and Accountability. An International Law Perspective (Tomasz Lachowski).- 6. The Domestic Dimension of Defining Occupied Territories and its Value for Conflict Transformation in Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine (Maryna Rabinovych).- Part III. Federalization/Decentralization as a Means of Conflict Resolution. Discursive and Foreign Policy Perspectives.- 7. Three Faces of Federalism in Foreign Policy. Russian and German Approaches to the “Ukraine Crisis” (Nadiia Koval).- 8. The Dark Side of the Decentralization Reform in Ukraine: Deterring or Facilitating Russia-Sponsored Federalism (Jaroslava Barbieri).- Part IV. Decentralization, its Perceptions and the Linkage to Democratization, Modernization and European Integration of Ukraine.- 9. Signs of Progress: Local Democracy Developments in Ukrainian Cities (Aadne Aasland and Oleksii Lyska).- 10. Decentralization and a Risk of Local Elite Capture in Ukraine (Max Bader).- 11. Decentralization Reform: An Effective Vehicle for Modernization and Democratization in Ukraine? (Olga Oleinikova).- 12. Decentralization in Ukraine and “Bottom Up” European Integration (Anne Pintsch).- 13. Conclusion (Maryna Rabinovych and Hanna Shelest).

“The text is most informative … . It is recommended to those who what to know what the decentralization reform in Ukraine is about, as well as to those who want to go deeper into problems and risks of decentralization in general.” (Simo Mannila, Eurasian Geography and Economics, June 11, 2021)