Dr. Taras Fedirko

Biography

Taras Fedirko is a political economic anthropologist studying social movements that organize and transform war economies, states, and capitalist labor value regimes. He has conducted long-term ethnographic research in Kyiv and London, and led a collective project exploring civic-military networks underpinning Ukraine’s war effort. His research is supported by the British Academy, European Research Council, Horizon Europe, and international development agencies in the UK and Germany. Currently, his project focuses on the political economy of war in Ukraine since 2014, with a particular interest in the transformative effects of war, including the emergence of new elites and political alliances during the conflict in Donbas. Taras is writing a book on the transformation of conflicts in the Ukrainian journalistic profession during the Maidan revolution (2013-2014). He previously completed a PhD dissertation that involved an ethnographic study within the British central government, analyzing how global oil, gas, and mining corporations resist government regulation and manipulate political arenas. He joined the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Glasgow as a Lecturer in Organised Crime and Corruption in January 2023. Taras also has experience working in sociology and anthropology at various institutions, including the University of St Andrews and the University of Cambridge, and holds a BSc in Geography from Ivan Franko Lviv National University and an MA in East European Studies from the University of Bologna. His research interests include the political economy of war, media, oligarchy, corruption, state building, historical sociology, and social anthropology, with a focus on Ukraine.

Research Interests

Experience