Synthetic media are everywhere. Digital images and objects that appear to index something in the world but do nothing of the sort have their roots in video games and online worlds like Second Life.

When I was a little girl, I was taught a song about a ball of white string, in which the white string could fix everything — tie a bow on a gift, fly a kite, mend things.

The war between Russia and Ukraine is not an ordinary conflict between two states. The men (and women) across the trenches speak the same language, share the same traditions, and their faces also look very similar.

The Kremlin has been burning for an anti-western global project for decades. Before coming to the current and relatively strong concept of a multipolar world order, the Russian state actively experimented with different ideas and brands....

Around the world in 2022 and 2023, I have met a broad range of Westerners absolutely committed to the cause of standing with Ukraine against Putin ‘for as long as it takes’. This includes a remarkable spectrum, from extreme-left anti-fas...

When I co-wrote and edited a book of essays during my university days in 1994, called Security of Eastern Europe: The Case of Ukraine, I could not possibly have imagined that the individual around whom the democratic world would ultimate...

Every technology comes to be used to meet the needs of its time. Those needs interact with the often hidden-from-view affordances that reside in the tech to radically skew the intentions with which it might have been conceived and develo...

During the Delta wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, an octogenarian emeritus professor at the University of Georgia abruptly quit in the middle of a class he was teaching because a student refused to don a hygienic mask.

There is an achingly fragile nuance at the heart of the American Republic. The U.S. Constitution has been described as a Machine That Would Go of Itself – a complex of calibrated forces set against each other – crafted to mitigate agains...

Living in Norway, the oil-rich social democracy and producing a documentary on related subjects has been an eye opening experience. Not only is it significantly further left of the United States politically, but it is also representative...

The last few days have been emotional. On Wednesday Nadia Savchenko arrived in Kyiv to a hero’s welcome, and a plethora of speculation as to her impact on Ukraine’s political scene.

This week the world mourns the victims of the IS (“Islamic State”) attacks on Paris. Meanwhile, seemingly as proof of the degree to which Ukraine is peripheral to global public opinion, the resurgent conflict in Ukraine’s Donbas goes unn...

While western analysts call the country’s spectacular growth “the rise of China,” the Chinese themselves perceive it as a returning to the forfeited status of the “Middle Empire.”

March 16 was a turning point. On this day, Putin came out of hiding – both literally and figuratively. In the literal sense, Putin’s 11 day absence from public view ended during a press conference with the President of Kyrgyzstan. Althou...

Geopolitics is not chess, but the analogy works. Vladimir Putin has been playing this game with his closest neighbours (Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan) for many years, but recently it seems, the West has finally engaged (much to t...

The problem with revolutionary times (and in case anyone was in doubt – Ukraine’s revolution continues) is that so many things happen simultaneously that it sometimes can be extremely difficult to keep track. Normally, to understan...

Social networks and the global media are buzzing: what’s the plan? Are the Europeans about to decide Ukraine’s fate over the heads of the Ukrainians? And most importantly, why now? Yesterday and today Ukrainian public opinion is split be...

The victim claims — to the denials of police — that he was “dumped in a forest, called an animal and left without shoes.“

My last post on the current situation in Ukraine was exactly two months ago. On October 3rd I predicted that an all-out invasion of Ukraine (including use of air power by Russia against targets in Kyiv and Dnipropetrovsk) was to occur be...

Putin needs to establish a land link between the Russian Federation and Crimea before the onset of winter. If he chooses not to create such a link, the population of Crimea will surely starve and freeze; this will cause Putin major probl...

Given that no one anywhere (including in Russia) seems to still believe the fairytale of Russia’s “non-involvement” in Ukraine, Putin may just decide to drop the pretense, and engage “the fascist evil” (as the Russian media refers to Ukr...

“Thank God, I think no one is thinking of unleashing a large-scale conflict with Russia. I want to remind you that Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers.” – Putin [dropcap size=big]L[/dropcap]ast Saturday Putin is...

After the tragic downing of MH17 the phrase of the day in the western media became “game-changer”. Was this really such an earth-shattering event? Certainly it represented a turning point for politicians and policy-makers in western coun...

Surviving the 2014 legislative reform: new management challenges for Ukraine’s universities [dropcap size=big]O[/dropcap]n 1 July 2014 the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine adopted Bill 1187-2 – a new law “On Higher Education” for Ukraine. The b...

What does an aggressive animal backed into a corner do? Now we’re into nightmare scenario. [dropcap size=big]I[/dropcap]’ve spent the past week in Canada visiting my elderly parents. Other than having to deal with jet lag, I’ve also expe...

“Apparently, comparisons between Putin and Hitler are not well received in western intellectual circles these days, but the fact that during the run-up to the EU Parliamentary elections, every single European extreme right party pr...

“Local protests in Moscow are nowhere near as threatening as tens of thousands of Russian troops massing along a border less than 500 km away.” [dropcap size=big]D[/dropcap]uring the past few weeks I have relaxed somewhat. Th...

 “It seems Putin missed the adage of Marx according to which “history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce.” [dropcap size=big]I[/dropcap]n case there was still any doubt about the true nature of the war in Ukraine’s eas...

[dropcap size=big]I[/dropcap]  want to live in Kyiv, and I want to watch the evening news without crying! I want to spend the day without news of casualties and deaths due to automatic weapon and rocket fire less than 500 km away from wh...

[dropcap size=big]M[/dropcap]ay 21 was a notable date: 3 months after Yanukovych’s flight from Kyiv, exactly 90 days after the massacre of the Heaven’s Hundred, and 6 months since the first Euromaidan protest. It should have been a day t...

[dropcap size=big]I[/dropcap]t would seem that President Putin may have blinked in the face of pressure from the West today. After meeting with OSCE Chairman and Swiss President Didier Burkhalter, Putin suddenly announced that he was “as...

[dropcap size=big]L[/dropcap]ast weekend we celebrated Easter – a time for reflection and rebirth. Several months ago, Dominique Arel (Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Ottawa), called my writings a “Maidan Diary”. Diaries ...

According to Eastern Rite tradition, the dead are mourned for 40 days. Although deaths are commemorated annually thereafter, after forty days, the lives of survivors are expected to continue. Sunday 31 March happened to be the 40th day a...

Is an invasion of eastern Ukraine by Russian troops imminent? This seems to be the question on everyone’s mind tonight. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper alluded to such a possibility during his press conference with Ukrainian PM Ya...

Today is a noteworthy day. Exactly 120 days ago a few hundred people set up a tiny protest camp on Kyiv’s Independence Square. On November 21, this small group of people was outraged at the sudden about-face of the Azarov government, and...

Today, Crimeans “voted”. Given the barrage of media coverage of this event, I hardly feel it’s worthwhile to comment on it further: the “referendum” was illegal and will not be recognized by any country other than Russia; the result is a...

The Russian invasion of Crimea has put the entire global security system at risk: states can no longer count on the validity of guarantees endorsed through international agreements (e.g. the Budapest Memorandum); the principle of inviola...

President Putin’s press conference seems to have taken some of the heat off Ukraine today. Although Russian troops continue to face off with Ukrainian military personnel in Crimea, tonight it seems unlikely that Putin’s invasion of Ukrai...

Today, Sunday, I went to Maidan. Several hundred thousand Kyiv residents went there also. We came together to commiserate; to pay our respects to those who died last week as Kyiv rid itself of a tyrant; to deal with our shock at having o...

The conflict in Ukraine offers unexpected insight into a military construct which has previously been mostly theoretical. The scenario of Ukrainian ground forces fighting beneath an information domain dominated almost exclusively by Amer...

Launched in 2007, this one device now makes it possible to record events, find work, manage teams, locate ourselves on the planet, upload our experiences to social media, get a mortgage, read the newspaper, order a taxi, rent a holiday h...

Key to unlocking these opportunities is solving or mitigating both the ethical and practical challenges associating with using such systems.

Almost a decade has rolled by since I was asked to pen an open-source scenario on the future of law enforcement, which I titled ‘Welcome to the Jungle’. It was well-loved, and praised, albeit treated in the same manner as the fiction tha...

The world changed in 2007. It’s hard to imagine now, but there was a time before smartphones. The breakthrough device, of course, was the iPhone. We’d had constant availability, whether through Blackberries, HTC devices or Nokias befor...