On October 28, at 5:00 PM (Tbilisi time), the Anthropology Research Center and the Doctoral Program in Anthropology at Ilia State University will host an online lecture by Taras Fedirko, Assistant Professor at the University of Glasgow, titled – “The gifts of war: enmity and violence in the making of Ukraine’s war economy”.

Drones, cans of Red Bull, and hand grenades: beginning with three emblematic war gifts circulating on Ukraine’s frontlines, this talk examines how a war economy emerges through acts of valuation and commensuration in the trenches. Drawing on research with Ukrainian combatants and military crowdfunding activists who channel various goods to the frontline, I explore how people in the orbit of war understand the transfers and sacrifices that sustain soldiers’ violent labour. Thinking with the Ukrainian gifts of war, I argue, helps us understand how enmity, violence, and destruction transform who and what is valuable, and what people owe each other, in moments of conflict and existential threat.

Taras Fedirko is a lecturer (assistant professor) at the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna. He received his PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from Durham University and held postdoctoral positions at the Universities of Cambridge and St Andrews. He is a political and economic anthropologist whose research explores how social movements organise to transform war economies; states; and capitalist labour and value regimes. He has conducted long-term ethnographic research in Kyiv and London and has most recently led a collective project exploring civic and military networks underpinning Ukraine’s war effort.

Working Language: English

Date and Time: October 28, 5:00 PM (Tbilisi time)

Format: Online via Zoom https://shorturl.at/oKhe4

Attendance: Free and open to the public

2025