Making Hydropower from Below in Wartime Ukraine since 2014 as a Lens for Analyzing Wartime Society

• Applicant: Dr. Sophie Lambroschini
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 543294515

The project explores the societal consequences of Russia’s war against Ukraine from the perspective of hydroenergy governance from the bottom-up. At the intersection of sociology and geography it employs a situated and multi-scalar perspective taking as a starting point the everyday operations and governance of interdependent infrastructures of water and energy (dams, reservoirs, hydropower plants) in Ukraine since 2014 and their postwar implications. It argues that the technical and socio-political actors engaged in work to sustain and adapt hydropower systems in conditions of wartime uncertainty reconfigure socio-political and economic relationships and governance. Using ethnographic and other qualitative empirical methods the research the project analyses microsocial, economic and geopolitical entanglements through three case studies of differently affected hydropower systems (Donbas, Dnipro and Dniestr). It also asks how war is influencing strategies of state intervention in ensuring critical maintenance and ecological modernization both during and after the war, between welfare, grassroots and market-dominated models.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5856: Energy Entanglements. Actors, Spaces and Narratives in Eastern Europe