Discussion

This article investigates the ongoing transformation of the 7Km Market in Odesa—Eastern Europe’s largest wholesale and retail hub—through the frameworks of crisis and liminality. Established in the 1990s after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the market has long been a key site for trade, multicultural interaction, and economic resilience. Since 2014, however, geopolitical tensions, inflation, taxation, and the Market Administration’s (MA) reconstruction plans have driven its decline, turning it from a “field of wonders” into a “container graveyard.” The MA’s push to replace vendors’ privately owned containers with expensive pavilions, justified as modernization in line with national and EU standards, has sparked resistance. Entrepreneurs view the changes as exclusionary and financially untenable, prompting the formation of the Entrepreneurs against Reconstruction (EaR), which opposes forced evictions, rising fees, and exclusion from decision-making. The article critiques dominant uses of “liminality,” arguing that the concept often romanticizes transition while ignoring the structural violence and power asymmetries embedded within it. At 7Km, liminality is not a space of renewal but a condition of prolonged uncertainty and contested authority. Similarly, “crisis” is reframed not as a temporary disruption but as a chronic, politically mobilized condition used to legitimize top-down interventions and suppress dissent. Drawing on months of fieldwork at the 7Km Market, the article shows how entrepreneurs negotiate these narratives, and, at times resist them through everyday practices and informal solidarities. It calls for a power-attuned theorization of crisis and liminality—one that specifies who and what is in crisis, and how these states are produced, experienced, and contested within broader political economies.