Addiction Imaginaries: Drugs, Sovereignty and Nine Years of Russian Military Occupation in Ukraine

Jennifer Carroll will speak about how in the last few years, Ukraine has borne witness to the major geopolitical crises of our decade: revolution, state-sponsored killings, foreign invasion, forceful occupation by a major world power, and ongoing war.

Based on more than a decade of fieldwork in cities and villages across Ukraine, Carroll’s ethnographic research on substance use and treatment in the context of these crises asks us to consider how the social values of “addiction” and “treatment” in Ukraine are entangled with broader discourses of policy, identity and war.

Demonstrating that drug policy is a key tool of statecraft, Carroll will discuss how social imaginations of people who use drugs facilitate their use (and abuse) in leveraging political authority, demonstrating how global health para-infrastructures, state biopolitics, citizenship and sovereignty are always enmeshed.