Studying Shock Events Using Survey Research: Ukraine in 2014

The capacity of shock events to transform international politics has long been appreciated (Wark 1994). From the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914 to the terrorist attacks of 11th September 2001, violent spectacles that shock the conscience of the international community have often proved to be critical turning points in global politics (Sewell 2005). Shocking events, of course, can also fail to have much long-term impact while some truly shocking events – Stalinist terror, Soviet famines, the Holocaust – may not be widely known until much later. Furthermore, the production of incidents as eventful media spectacles is dependent upon access and freedom to report, the technological capacities of communication networks, and prevailing power structures across global media ecologies. What people believe, in processing shocking events, also varies greatly.

At the present moment, the tumultuous events within Ukraine in 2014 appear as a critical conjuncture in European and global affairs (Sakwa 2017). Four eventful processes, three of which involved considerable losses of human lives, are particularly salient: the Euromaidan protests that began on 21st November 2013, descended in violence, and climaxed with the toppling of Ukraine’s elected president Viktor Yanukovych on 22 February; the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation, a move triumphantly proclaimed by Vladimir Putin on 18 March; the simultaneous de-stabilization of southeast Ukraine, an eventful process that triggered war in the Donbas and violent clashes elsewhere such as those in Odesa on 2 May that resulted in the deaths of 48 people; and the destruction of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 over eastern Ukraine in July 2014 by a BUK anti-aircraft missile system that killed 297 individuals, most from places far beyond Ukraine. Each of these events provided shocking images that circulated across the globe on television screens, newspapers and news magazines. Each event lives on in the form of documentaries, memoirs, memorials, anniversary events and trade books.

How social science studies shock events, and the affective economy of global politics more broadly, is an evolving field (Koschut 2017). In this special section of Geopolitics we present two research articles that use social scientific attitude surveys to investigate the contested meaning of the Odesa tragedy and the downing of MH17 in 2014. Both survey projects were funded by the US National Science Foundation but are different in conception and scale. Both were conducted in 2014 but emerged from different disciplinary contexts (Political Science and Geography). The project of Hale and his colleagues is part of a nationally representative panel survey. The project of O’Loughlin and Toal is a representative survey of attitudes in six different territories (Abkhazia, Crimea, 6 oblasts in southeast Ukraine, Crimea, South Ossetia and Transnistria). Both papers zero in on the question of blame attribution, the working theories respondents have about who is responsible for crucial events. In doing so, they address how people process contentious mediatized events using prevailing regimes of identity, authority, (dis)information and cultural habits of causal thinking.

These papers are followed by two commentaries from specialists who have written about the social media information war over Ukraine (Gaufman) and conspiracy theories in post-Soviet contexts (Radnitz). Their commentaries contextualize the research articles and point to emergent themes and questions. The twin shocks of 2016, the BREXIT vote and Trump’s 2016 election, have placed questions of truth and falsehood, manipulation and blame projection at the center of Western political life. Some have argued that Russian information operations, the subject of ongoing investigation, were decisive in each outcome (Snyder 2018). This special section presents research that can inform and refine this debate as well as future research on contentious shock events in global affairs. In the face of intensifying polarization, propaganda and polemic, considered social science research is needed more than ever.