Taras Fedirko

Short Biography

Taras Fedirko is a senior research fellow at the IWM and a lecturer (assistant professor) at the University of Glasgow’s School of Social and Political Sciences. After completing a PhD in socio-cultural anthropology at Durham University, he held postdoctoral positions at the universities of Cambridge and St Andrews. He is a political and economic anthropologist whose research explores how social movements organize to transform war economies; states; and capitalist labor and value regimes. Fedirko has conducted long-term ethnographic research in Kyiv and London and since 2022 he has led an international research group studying how a decade of war has transformed Ukraine’s civic elites and power networks. He offers consultancy services to international organizations on organized crime, weapons proliferation, the political economy of war in Ukraine, and media in Ukraine. Fedirko’s research has been supported by the British Academy, the European Research Council, Horizon Europe, and international development agencies from the UK and Germany, among other funders.

Areas of Expertise: 

• political economy of war
• media and free speech
• oligarchy and corruption
• state-building
• historical sociology
• social anthropology

Selected Publications: 

“Martial Citizenship: Military Voluntarism and the Transformation of the Ukrainian Nation-State,” Humanitarianism from Below: Alter-Politics and Struggles for the Universal, ed. T. Mostowlanski and E. Muratova (UCL Press, 2026). 

“War and Dependent State Formation in Ukraine,” Focaal 102 (2025): 57–72, co-authored with Volodymyr Artiukh. 

“Modalities of Free Speech,” Annual Review of Anthropology vol. 54 (2025): 49–61, co-authored with Matei Candea and Paul Heywood. 

Freedoms of Speech: Anthropological Perspectives on Language, Ethics, and Power (University of Toronto Press, 2025), co-edited with Matei Candea, Paul Heywood, and F. Wright. 

“Failure and Moral Distinction in a Ukrainian Marketplace of Ideas,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 29, S1 (2023): 62–78. 

“In the Shadow of Power: Ethics and Material Interests in Ukrainian Parliamentary Reporting,” L’Homme 243–244 (2022): 61–94. 

“Suspicion and Expertise: Following the Money in an Offshore Investigation,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 27, no. 1 (2021): 70–89. 

“Grammars of Liberalism,” special issue of Social Anthropology 29, no. 2 (2021), co-edited with Farhan Samanani and Harry Williamson.