FACULTY OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY | Lecture
Jade McGlynn: Sovereignty without Territory
Tuesday 17 March, 17:30 - 19:00
Zoom
Niagara, NI:C0E11, Nordenskiöldsgatan 1
Welcome to a lecture in the RUCARR Distinguished Speaker Series on March 17!
Title
“Sovereignty without Territory: the Puzzle of Resistance in Occupied Ukraine”
Speaker
Jade McGlynn is an author and Research Fellow at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Her research focusses on Russia’s war against Ukraine since 2014, propaganda, memory politics, and state-society relations in Russia.
Her first book, Russia’s War, was released on 17th March 2023. It explains why Russians support the war on Ukraine. Her second book, Memory Makers, came out on 1st June 2023 and shows how the Kremlin rebuilt a mythical past to justify a militant present. Both books are based on over a decade of research into Russian politics of memory and propaganda, including Jade’s DPhil research, which she completed at the University of Oxford.
You can find Jade’s journalism and expert commentary in a wide variety of international media outlets, from CNN to The Times. This is in addition to her academic work at King’s College London and her policy work with New Diplomacy Project and CSIS.
She recently participated on the Swedish Radio program Konflikt about the current situation in Ukraine:
Approximately one-fifth of Ukraine's territory remains under Russian military occupation, yet the conditions for exercising sovereignty over this population persist, sustained through relationships, knowledge, and trust rather than territorial administration. This talk examines how those conditions are maintained and what this reveals about the nature of sovereignty itself. Drawing on original fieldwork in eastern Ukraine and collaboration with resistance practitioners, it traces the transformation of Ukrainian civilian resistance from 2022 to 2025.
The collapse of Ukraine's pre-war NATO-modelled cell structures under Russian surveillance and filtration gave rise to what practitioners call the "Puzzle model": a decentralised architecture in which independent civilian agents supply intelligence to coordinators outside the occupied zone without knowledge of one another.
Survivability is achieved through anonymity and modularity rather than command. The talk situates this against classical sovereignty theory, which assumes territorial control as a precondition for authority, and asks what it means for sovereignty to persist without the capacity to govern. It concludes by reframing sovereignty as a relational phenomenon sustained through reciprocal commitments between a state and citizens who enact their political agency under extraordinary pressure.
