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Taras Fedirko is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Social Anthropology at the University of Glasgow. After obtaining his PhD in Socio-Cultural Anthropology from the University of Durham in 2017, he has held postdoctoral positions at Cambridge, St Andrews, and the LSE, and recently was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. He is working on a monograph about liberalism, oligarchy, and journalistic labour in Ukraine, and leads a research group investigating informality in Ukraine鈥檚 war economy.

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The post-Cold War moment saw global experiments in liberating the world through capitalist markets and liberal democracy. How have they shaped understandings of freedom in the former Soviet 鈥榚mpire of justice鈥�? I address this question by focusing on Ukrainian journalists鈥� struggles against the power of oligarchs and other media patrons between 2001-2021. I build on fieldwork in Kyiv since 2017 to trace the transformation of what had begun as a solidarity movement against media censorship, into a divisive, moralised struggle over who counts as 鈥榬eal鈥�, 鈥榟onest鈥櫶� journalist in Ukraine. This transformation reveals that the idea of freedom as non-domination has been central to the way Ukrainian journalists have navigated the (geo)political and economic conjuncture of the pre-invasion decades, and the moral conclusions they made from it. Ultimately, to understand the origins, dynamics, and ethical stakes of these journalists鈥� emancipatory struggles, we need to critically revise anthropology鈥檚 own Cold-War liberal heritage: the centrality of the idea of freedom from interference to the rise of the anthropology of ethics and its rejection of political economy.听