Authors

Oleksandra Iwaniuk¹;  ¹ University of Warsaw, Poland

Discussion

This paper explores how the Russian invasion of Ukraine has transformed the symbolic and cultural structures underpinning Ukraine's political field. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of capital, habitus, and field, it argues that the war has reconfigured the hierarchies of symbolic power that previously defined political legitimacy and elite reproduction. The analysis traces how pre-war symbolic capital, rooted in Soviet legacies, linguistic hierarchies, and postcolonial dependencies, has been displaced by new forms of wartime legitimacy grounded in moral authority, sacrifice, and epistemic sovereignty. Through interviews with Ukrainian political elites and analysis of public discourse, the paper shows how actors mobilize symbolic and cultural capital to redefine sovereignty not merely as territorial control but as the autonomy of knowledge and meaning-making. The war, thus, operates as both a cultural watershed and a process of epistemic decolonization, forcing elites to renegotiate their relation to the West, to Russia, and to the domestic public. In this reconfigured field, symbolic resistance becomes a form of postcolonial struggle, transforming the foundations of political power in contemporary Ukraine.