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Articles by Uffe Østergaard

1. The Russian environmental movement and its potential for broader political change

   Despite the repressions against civil society in Russia, the independent environmental movement has managed to adapt and survive. The environmental agenda in Russia remains important for the people, for local politicians, and for authorities. These factors lay the groundwork for a potential mobilization, politicization, and demand for system change. To enact this transformation, however, the author argues that professional environmentalists need to combine forces with grassroots protestors and embrace a broader socio-economic and intersectional agenda.

2. ”And this is not a spy novel” Researching activism in Russia after 2022

   This essay examines the methodological, ethical, and safety challenges of researching civil society and activism in Russia after 2022. Drawing on recent fieldwork experience, we discuss the growing importance of ethnographic engagement, heightened risks for researchers and interlocutors, challenges of trust-building, anonymization, and blurred boundaries between analysis and advocacy. We argue that these conditions reshape both fieldwork practices and knowledge production, raising broader questions about the future of qualitative research in authoritarian contexts.

3. Afterword. Russian civil society under authoritarianism and war

   Baltic Worlds’ Special issue “Civic Activism in Russia” offers a unique glimpse into the Russian civil society shortly before and after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. As the authors of the issue observe, the impact of the war has made civil society extremely complex and transnational. To my knowledge, it is one of the first attempts to examine Russian civil society from within.

4. Introduction Chornobyl in the fog of war 40 years after the disaster

   The following essays in this theme-issue aim to capture a snapshot of that 40th anniversary amidst the ongoing war. These essays were written by researchers in life sciences, humanities and social sciences, as well as practitioners of the arts, many of whom have worked on Chornobyl issues in Ukraine, in Eastern and Western Europe and in North America for some time. They engage the effort to understand the impact of the ongoing violence unleashed by Russian troops on the legacy and memory of Chornobyl writ large. These impressions have been laid out in multiple, layered visions and memories of Chornobyl: Chornobyl as a symbol of technological failure, a reminder of local and national tragedy and resilience, and a place for international technoscientific and humanitarian cooperation and collective reflection about nuclear and other technogenic risks.

5. CHORNOBYL IN THE WAR ZONE

   The first news from Chornobyl was about gunfire near the Buriakivka radioactive waste storage facility. By noon there were images: Russian tanks near the Administrative Building No. 1 of the plant. Denys Vyshnevskyi, the Head of Department at Chornobyl Radiation and Ecological Biosphere Reserve writes here about the occupation and how life changed in the Exclusion Zone. For many research groups, 2022 became the year of accepting a bitter truth – Chornobyl research was being suspended indefinitely.

6. What we wouldn’t know without Chornobyl The important work of scientists in the Exclusion Zone

   From the moment of its establishment, the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone (CEZ) became a territory separated from the rest of the country: governed by different rules and a distinct internal logic. The isolation of the CEZ and the urgency of its tasks have shaped – and continue to shape – specific demands on the scientists who work there. Chornobyl science is also influenced by crises that have repeatedly redefined its priorities.

7. ATOMS FOR PEACE AND ATOMS FOR WAR IN UKRAINE’S NUCLEAR HISTORY

   Forty years after the Chornobyl disaster, the essay reflects on the impact of peaceful and weaponized nuclear energy in Ukraine’s history. One of the leading nuclear energy operators in the world, Ukraine suffered the worst nuclear accident in history, which had wide-ranging geopolitical consequences. One of them was to influence Ukraine’s decision to surrender the nuclear weapons inherited from the USSR, a decision that ultimately exposed. Ukraine to Russian predation. After its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Moscow proceeded to create and manipulate unprecedented nuclear dangers for Ukraine’s civilian nuclear infrastructure, blurring – as it once did in Chornobyl – the distinction between atoms for peace and atoms for war.

8. The zone of memory

   This article explores the transformation of the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone into a contemporary “zone of memory” shaped by physical inaccessibility and digital mediation. Drawing on memory studies and cultural heritage research, it analyzes how virtual tourism, social media, and virtual reality (VR) technologies influence the ways in which the catastrophe is remembered and experienced. Special attention is given to the role of immersive media, particularly VR applications, in producing affective and experiential forms of memory that differ from traditional narrative remembrance. The study argues that digital environments reorganize temporal perception and enable users to encounter the past as a sensory and emotional event, generating what may be described as immersive memory.

9. Remembering Vilcha A twice abandoned village

   This essay examines the fate of Vilcha, a village that was forcibly abandoned twice within a single generation. Originally located in Polissia, the village was evacuated after the Chornobyl disaster. Its inhabitants were resettled to a newly built village in the Kharkiv region. This second village of Vilcha was occupied and subsequently destroyed during the Russian-Ukrainian war. Based on three waves of oral interviews conducted between 2016 and 2025, this essay explores the experiences of forced displacement, memory, and loss. Vilcha emerges as a poignant example of repeated forced migration caused by both technological disaster and war.

10. “This is how I dreamed of the fourth reactor” Maria Prymachenko and (not) naive images of Chornobyl

    Art in the Soviet Union was the mirror of the official communist party policy. However, Maria Prymachenko was successfully hiding the critique of the system behind “naive” pictures. She was one of the few artists who truly depicted the consequences of the Chornobyl catastrophe: from environmental issues to commemorating the dead, from illnesses to corruption surrounding liquidator certificates.

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