Recent economic and geopolitical crises have forced contemporary global debates regarding the role of the state and the future of society. In light of the Eurozone Crisis, continued eastward enlargement of the EU, the EuroMaidan mass-mobilization, the annexation of Crimea, the Russian sponsored war in Donbas, and the ongoing tensions between Russia and the West, these debates have been especially pertinent in Central and Eastern Europe, and more specifically in Ukraine. More than ever, there is a need for sound, scientific knowledge of Ukrainian society, politics, and economy. Recent debates on Ukraine have engaged intellectuals in far-flung places across the globe. Our discussions have been sped up by new information communication technologies, which have in turn seemingly made knowledge production, dissemination and consumption more equal. Yet, before we define the current era as the Information Age, the Age of Knowledge, or the existence of a global Knowledge Society (David and Foray 2002; Drucker 2001; Rodrigues 2003) we need to acknowledge that this process has been far from equal. Instead, as Strange (1998) has pointed out, information is in fact still distributed and utilized unequally around the world, and this is particularly true in the former Soviet space. Moreover, access to information has become a form of structural power that has created hierarchies between and within academic networks in different societies.

In 2008 four young Ukrainians named Anna Hutsol, Inna Shevchenko, Oksana Sashko, and Roman Zviazsky living in the city of Khmelnytskyi formed a feminist protest group. Femen has since gained notoriety worldwide for their controversial topless protests that once featured mostly street theatre, but now primarily consist of flash-mob performances circulated online. Members are mostly women in their twenties and thirties, the group lists twelve active members, and over four hundred non-active members on their website.