Mariia Shynkarenko: ‘Translating Resistance: Crimean Tatars Between Occupation and Displacement’

Following Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, Crimean Tatars faced a fundamental choice: leave or stay. This lecture examines how that choice produced two distinct forms of resistance operating under radically different conditions. On mainland Ukraine, displaced Crimean Tatars strategically embraced Ukrainian national identity — securing genocide recognition for the 1944 deportation and Indigenous status in 2021 — making their cause legible to the Ukrainian state and international audiences. In occupied Crimea, where pro-Ukrainian expression invites criminal charges, resistance operates within a cultural realm that seeks to protect Crimean Tatar cultural identity against Russian narratives of extremism. This lecture argues that misreading these activities as collaboration or passivity has damaged solidarity between the two communities, and calls for a more expansive understanding of resistance under occupation.

Mariia Shynkarenko is a political scientist specializing in resistance, nationalism, and identity. She received her PhD from the New School for Social Research in New York in 2023. She previously worked as a Research Associate and Research Director in Ukraine in European Dialogue program at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) in Vienna. Currently she is an Assistant Professor and Principal Investigator at the Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences. She is also a co-founder and board member of the Institute for Documentation and Exchange (INDEX) in Lviv. Her book Identity as Weapon: Crimean Tatars and their Quest for Indigenous Self-Determination is forthcoming with the University of Toronto Press in Fall 2026.