Global Forces, Local Contexts: Facets of Police Work in Ukraine

• Author / Creator

  Shmatko, Ivan

• This thesis, broadly speaking, deals with ontological security and the ways it is managed through multiple local Ukrainian enchantments with the “Western” and the “normal.” Starting with an analysis of media representations of police reform in Ukraine, I then follow hegemonic discourses on their journey to the everyday working life-world of police officers. While “thinking what others have thought before,” I argue that officers adapt existing concepts and ideas to talk about their everyday experiences, anxieties, and discontents, effectively creating a no-place inscribed with desirable qualities of material abundance, respect, authority, and state protection. I continue by contrasting what was imagined (by the public and the officers) to the daily realities of police work, particularly highlighting the patterns of authority functioning in two Ukrainian cities. Last but not least, I investigate the performative dimensions of police work, claiming that symbolic of the Ukrainian police reform, could be well explained as a particular local response to the paradoxes of formal policing created by modernity.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Police
  • Performance
  • Modernity
  • Informality
  • Authority
  • Security

• Graduation date

  Fall 2019

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Arts

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-5vn3-y611

• License

  Permission is hereby granted to the University of Alberta Libraries to reproduce single copies of this thesis and to lend or sell such copies for private, scholarly or scientific research purposes only. Where the thesis is converted to, or otherwise made available in digital form, the University of Alberta will advise potential users of the thesis of these terms. The author reserves all other publication and other rights in association with the copyright in the thesis and, except as herein before provided, neither the thesis nor any substantial portion thereof may be printed or otherwise reproduced in any material form whatsoever without the author's prior written permission.