On 31 October Cambridge Ukrainian Studies, an academic centre in the Department of Slavonic Studies, hosted a major international conference, ‘Ukraine and the Global Information War’, at King’s College. Nearly 200 attended the event, which explored the dynamics between the politics of representation and international security through the lens of the 2013-14 geopolitical tumult in Ukraine, or what might be termed ‘MCD’ (Maidan-Crimea-Donbas). It advanced the claim that MCD marks a critical and instructive juncture in the evolution of modern journalistic practice, featuring, among other things, a burgeoning social ‘media-ization’ of the news and an extraordinary collision between state propaganda and public ignorance of a country in crisis. The conference sought to examine the civic, Internet-based and crowd-sourced media initiatives that have accordingly emerged as alternatives to state and corporate media outlets in Ukraine and beyond. 

The speakers were a diverse mix of renowned scholars, journalists and practitioners: Anne Applebaum, Sabra Ayres, Yevhen Fedchenko, Rory Finnin, Margo Gontar, Victoria Ivleva-Yorke, James Marson, Vasyl Myroshnychenko, Tetyana Ogarkova, Simon Ostrovsky, Rachel Polonsky, Peter Pomerantsev, Natalia Popovych, Andriy Portnov, Vsevolod Samokhvalov, Alya Shandra, Anton Shekhovtsov, Olga Tokariuk, Michael Weiss, Tanya Zaharchenko.  

Photos of the event can be seen here. A podcast of its panel ‘Ukraine as an Object of Western Journalism’ can be found here.