Associate Fellow 2025

Project: It is our war: Analysing artefacts of German public discourse on Ukraine, Russia, and Russia’s war against Ukraine as epistemic violence

Zehnalová's research project departs from the slogan “Das ist nicht unser Krieg” (“It is not our war”) as proclaimed in the form of graffiti at multiple locations in Berlin in late 2022 and employed elsewhere by various actors partaking in the German public discourse on Ukraine, Russia, and Russia’s war against Ukraine. Zehnalová traces how various ideological groups across the political spectrum construe their position from within their own ideological framework, centring their own perspectives and agendas, and examines how the collision of various narratives in the catchphrase “not our war” allows ideologically fringe groups to collude in argumentative alliances—and hereby mutually enhance and mainstream their talking points. 

Although the failure to account for the systematic, intentional character of Russia’s war against Ukraine is hardly endemic to Germany, the project considers the German public discourse in its particular historical and political context as a case in point of epistemic violence, broadly in line with the pervasive misperception of the regions impacted by the continuation of Tsarist, Soviet, and Russian imperialism in the core West.