Exoticism, Erasure, and Complex Peripherality: Ukrainian IR in Global Disciplinary Space

Despite Ukraine’s heightened salience since 2022, its International Relations (IR) discipline remains largely absent from debates on “national IR.” This article asks why Ukrainian IR attracts so little attention and argues that self-reflexive IR structures visibility around the benchmark of cultural-civilizational exoticity, i.e., a criterion that marginalizes the Ukrainian case. To address the latter issue, the article develops the concept of “complex peripherality,” offering a more fine-grained account of how such marginalization is produced within self-reflexive discourse. Framing Ukrainian IR through this lens not only explains the scale of its neglect more fully but also identifies it as a critical case for advancing the “third-wave” sociology of IR. Finally, the article sketches a research agenda for engaging Ukrainian IR as a wartime discipline, focusing on communication practices, career trajectories, curricular adaptation, bibliometric shifts, and transnational scholarly exchanges under conditions of external shock.