Maryna Shevtsova, University of Ljubljana

Maryna Shevtsova, PhD

Maryna Shevtsova is a EUTOPIA Postdoctoral fellow at Faculty of arts, the University of Ljubljana. She is also a Senior FWO Fellow (2021/2026, start postponed due to EUTOPIA fellowship).

Maryna was a Swedish Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at the Gender Studies Department at the University of Lund in 2020 and a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Florida, USA 2018/19.

Maryna Shevtsova is actively involved with LGBTQ and gender equality activism in Ukraine. For four years she coordinated projects with TERGO, a Kyiv-based NGO working towards creating safe and healthy school environment for LGBTQ students in Ukraine. In 2021 she co-founded Equal Opportunities Platform, a  non-profit organization in Dnipro, Ukraine, working on the topics of equality, diversity and non-discrimination.

Maryna also worked as a diversity and inclusion consultant for such organizations as Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH and Luminate Group.

• Recent publications

"Edited volumes LGBTQ+ Activism in Central and Eastern Europe. Resistance, Representation, and Identity" (with Radzhana Buyantueva, Palgrave Macmillan 2019),

"LGBTI Asylum Seekers and Refugees from a Legal and Political Perspective: Persecution, Asylum, and Integration" (with Arzu Guler and Deniz Venturi, Springer, 2019).

​​​​​​​"LGBTI Politics and Value Change in Ukraine and Turkey: Exporting Europe?" (Routledge 2021),

The European Union has a strong commitment to promoting and protecting human rights at the heart of its relations with other countries. Georgia and Ukraine are among those states where, mainly thanks to association agreement and visa liberalization dialogue, the laws to prevent and eliminate discrimination, protect women from domestic violence, and promote LGBT people’s rights were adopted in 2010-2017. At the same time, recent years have witnessed far-right groups across Europe growing in prominence and sophistication against the background of democratic and liberalizing reforms in post-socialist countries. 

In Central-Eastern Europe, parties as Law and Justice (PiS) in Poland and Fidesz in Hungary already have established a firm ruling position in politics, reflecting a deep popular discontent. In the EU neighbourhood, in countries like Ukraine and Georgia, the far right is getting highly professionalized and gaining momentum facing few obstacles to high-speed development. For several years already, a widespread opposition against gender and sexual equality caused by right-wing groups has been undermining support for the European Union and non-discrimination and equal rights as its core values in Eastern Partnership countries.

The proposed project addresses the implications of growing right-wing populism for gender and sexual equality in the Eastern Partnership (EaP) countries during the last decade (2010-2020). Focusing on two EaP states, Georgia and Ukraine, the project seeks to examine how geopolitical and cultural context shapes political practices of right-wing populist parties to meet the following Research Aims:

1. To understand how spatiality (geopolitics) and national imaginaries are shaping local political and social practices, and
2. To evaluate what the political, legal, and social implications of right-wing mobilization for Europeanization of national gender and sexual equality policies in Georgia and Ukraine are, and to what extent these new movements may result in building a new far-right paradigm in the region.