This episode features a conversation on civil society groups and their capacity of grassroots involvement in the policy-making and security processes, with examples derived from Poland and Ukraine.

Bohdana Kurylo is a PhD candidate at University College London, the School of Slavonic and East European Studies. She is a recipient of the Victor and Rita Swoboda Memorial Scholarship, the Overseas Research Scholarship and the School of Slavonic and East European Studies Excellence Scholarship. Her research interests include security theory, international political sociology, social movements, populism and Eastern Europe.
Contributing to Security Studies, Bohdana’s research investigates how civil society can become empowered as a security actor in the context of perceived emergency. It draws on a vernacular contextual approach in combination with semi-structured interviews and social media research to study the meanings of security, emergency and power that guide the action of local agents. On the one hand, her dissertation examines the discourses and practices of Ukrainian civil society groups against the backdrop of the Russian-Ukrainian war (2014-). On the other, it explores the mobilisation of Polish civil society around the issue of reproductive rights in the lead-up to the 2021 near-total ban on abortion.
Alongside her PhD project, Bohdana has been conducting research on the populist politics of security, focusing on the discursive and aesthetic ways through which populists enact (in)security in various contexts.
UCL Profile: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ssees/bohdana-kurylo