Svitlana Biedarieva’s book is a theoretically rich and polemically-oriented attempt to rethink Ukrainian-Russian relations beyond the established models of postcolonial and decolonial analysis. The main contribution of the monograph is the development of the concept of ambicoloniality (68), designed to describe the asymmetrical but interdependent colonial entanglement of Ukraine and Russia, in which aggression and dependence, domination and affective attachment, appropriation and vulnerability coexist in a single epistemological field. Unlike much of the literature on the post-Soviet space (Elena Pyatovskaya and Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager, “To Russia with(out) Love: Ukrainian War Refugees Migrating to the Land of the Aggressor”; Oxana Shevel, “Some Lessons from the Post-Soviet Era and the Russo-Ukrainian War for the Study of Nationalism”), Biedarieva does not view the war as a sharp break with the previous order but insists on its roots in a long history of cultural and symbolic violence. However, the war, especially after 2022, is interpreted as a moment of qualitative transition: from postcolonial ambivalence and hybridity to decolonial rupture and the production of new knowledge, which allows the author to combine the analysis of violence, culture, and epistemology into a single theoretical framework.
One of the strongest aspects of the book is its systematic critique of the “blind spots” of both postcolonial and decolonial theory. Biedarieva convincingly shows that classic postcolonial binaries such as “centre–periphery,” “metropolis–colony,” and “West–non-West” poorly describe the Ukrainian-Russian case, where colonization took place in conditions of geographical proximity, partial cultural commonality, and long-term symbolic exchange. Equally important is the critique of Latin American decolonial thought, within which Russia often retains the status of a “secondary” or even “anti-imperialist” subject, leading to the systematic denial of Ukrainian agency. It is in this context that the concept of ambicolonialism claims the role of a theoretical mediator between competing paradigms. In Biedarieva’s interpretation, Russia acts not only as a colonizer, but also as a subject structurally dependent on Ukrainian cultural and historical resources. Colonial violence is paradoxically accompanied by symbolic dependence, which allows Biedarieva to explain the obsessive nature of Russian “appropriation” policy and its destructive consequences for Russia itself.
At the same time, the concept of ambicoloniality raises the most analytical questions, since ambicoloniality turns out to be an extremely broad category, encompassing political ideology, cultural memory, artistic practices, and affective structures simultaneously. However, its boundaries are not always clearly defined: at times it functions as an explanatory principle, at times as a metaphor, and sometimes as a diagnosis of a condition. As a result, there is a risk of conceptual inflation (Giovanni Sartori, “Concept Misformation in Comparative Politics”), in which ambicoloniality explains too much and therefore loses its analytical sharpness, a methodological problem well known in critical theory and vividly described in discussions around theoretically overloaded analytical categories (Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper, “Beyond ‘Identity’”).
Methodologically, the book relies primarily on an analysis of cultural production: contemporary art, performative practices, visual and documentary forms. This choice is consistent and productive: artistic cases are considered not as illustrations, but as autonomous forms of knowledge that respond to war more quickly and radically than academic discourse. Nevertheless, this focus inevitably shifts the center of gravity of the research towards the symbolic and epistemological, leaving the socio-economic dimensions of coloniality in the shadows. Issues of institutional power, material inequality, and the political economy of war are only touched upon fragmentarily, although they could significantly enrich the analysis of ambicolonial intertwining.
At the same time, the polemical nature of the book deserves special attention, as Biedarieva openly enters dialogue, and often into conflict, with influential theorists whose interpretations of the war in Ukraine, in her opinion, reproduce neocolonial and reductionist patterns. This criticism makes the book an important intervention in the field of global humanities, but at the same time gives it a distinctly normative dimension, which, on the one hand enhances the book’s interventionist potential, but on the other at times blurs the analytical distance.
Nevertheless, this book is a significant contribution to Slavic studies, Ukrainian studies, and the broader debate on coloniality in the twenty-first century. It offers not only a new term, but also a new way of framing questions: about the limits of the theory’s applicability, about the role of war in the production of knowledge, and about the need to rethink the very foundations of decolonial thinking. Biedarieva’s work captures a historical moment in which Ukrainian culture is emerging from a state of postcolonial uncertainty and asserting itself as a space of independent epistemological initiative. It is in this capacity that the book will be of interest not only to specialists in eastern Europe, but also to researchers engaged in comparative and global theories of coloniality.
