Olga Kutsenko, Doctor of Sociological Sciences. A few Warsaw notes after the 17th conference of the European Sociological Association, held in Warsaw on 25–28 August 2026

A few days after conferences like this are needed simply to let everything settle a little.

The 17th conference of the European Sociological Association (ESA) in Warsaw was genuinely impressive in scale: 3892 abstracts submitted, 3285 registered participants, 729 sessions. The programme included 2 plenary, 12 semi-plenary and 9 special sessions, 588 research network sessions, 53 joint sessions and 88 Research Stream sessions.

This year’s theme — “Strengthening Democracies: Social Action, Solidarity, and Sustainable Futures” — turned out to be anything but a decorative umbrella over the programme. Democracy, war, inequalities, solidarity, migration, climate change, the new authoritarianisms: all of it kept returning the discussions to a simple and at the same time far from simple question: what can sociology do today in a world that is becoming ever less predictable?

And it was especially pleasing to meet at least 10 Ukrainian presenters at this enormous European forum. To see Ukrainian colleagues in various research networks and discussions, to hear Ukrainian research not merely as a case of war but as a full participant in the European sociological conversation, was for me one of the warmest moments of Warsaw.

The conference had another important component: the election of the new ESA leadership for 2026–2028. Ana Cristina Santos (University of Coimbra, Portugal) was elected the new President of the ESA. Dilek Cindoğlu (Yaşar University, Türkiye) became chair of the Council of National Associations, and Michela Franceschelli (University College London, UK) chair of the Council of Research Networks.

The competition for the new Executive Committee was considerable: 25 candidates for 14 seats. And here begins the part of this Warsaw story that is already a very personal one for me. Two candidates were nominated from Ukraine. I am very grateful to Viktor Stepanenko for agreeing to take part in the elections and to represent Ukrainian sociology. And I am sincerely grateful to all the colleagues from various countries who supported my candidacy. According to the results of the vote I was elected to the new ESA Executive Committee — and I received the largest number of votes of all the candidates. For me this is of course a great honour. But even more I would like to see this result as trust in Ukrainian sociology and as an opportunity to make its voice and its experience more strongly represented where the European sociological agenda is formed.

The new Executive Committee will be made up of colleagues from Finland, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Portugal, Spain, Italy and Türkiye. I look forward to an interesting partnership and fruitful joint work for the development of European sociology.

And now about what was for me the most interesting part intellectually.

In different parts of the conference three large themes kept intersecting: academic freedom, open knowledge and the sociology of war. And in the end all of them lead to one fundamental question: how do structures of power shape what can be known, expressed and defended?

A strong tone was set already by the first plenary, “Democracy under Transformation: Social Change and the Role of Sociology”, moderated by ESA President Kaja Gadowska. It brought together Grzegorz Ekiert, Geoffrey Pleyers and Anna Giza.

This was a conversation not simply about yet another “crisis of democracy” but about far deeper social transformations. Grzegorz Ekiert raised the question of whether the current democratic retreat and the strengthening of authoritarianism are manifestations of a second Great Transformation. Geoffrey Pleyers turned the question back to sociology itself — and, in particular, to the experience of Ukrainian sociology: how far is our discipline capable of renewing its own optics and of including knowledge produced not only in the familiar centres but also in the Global South and East, especially under conditions of war, authoritarianism and the narrowing of academic freedom. Anna Giza, continuing Polanyi’s line, spoke about the marketisation not only of the economy but of sociality, communication and even thinking — and about political radicalisation as a kind of social countermovement.

For me the main question of this plenary sounded roughly like this: is sociology capable not only of diagnosing democratic discontent but also of seeing the new forms of solidarity and collective action out of which democratic resilience may grow?

Another event especially close to me was the presentation of the newly published collective monograph War Frames: Insights from Eastern Europe and East Asia, co-edited by Paul Jobin, Horng-luen Wang and Olga Kutsenko. What matters to me is the very idea of this book: to return war to the centre of sociological analysis, but to look at it not only from the familiar Western theoretical centre but through the experience of the societies of Eastern Europe and East Asia. The session was moderated by Silke Roth, editor of The Sociological Review monograph series and professor at the University of Southampton, to whom I am very grateful for the excellent coordination of all the work on the book.

I presented the chapter written jointly with Tetiana Kostiuchenko, “War Frames and Societal Transformation in Ukraine: Reframing a Wartime Nation”. In the briefest form, three theses.

The first: Ukrainians did not simply “adapt” to the war — they learned to act inside it. Even on the eve of 24 February only about a third of Ukrainians expected a large-scale invasion, but the readiness to resist was considerably higher. After the invasion the latent repertoire of resistance very quickly turned into mass social action.

The second: the surge became a system. The extraordinary mobilisation of the first months did not disappear — it gradually became built into volunteer organisations, local communities, logistical networks, cooperation between citizens and municipalities, transnational Ukrainian networks. Resilience became infrastructural: resilience became not only a property of individual people but part of the social infrastructure.

The third is perhaps the most interesting one for me. A long war gives rise to fatigue and to a dangerous habituation to suffering — callousness. But dense networks of help, volunteering and care can work in the opposite direction. We called this counter-callousness: the suffering of another again and again ceases to be a statistic and acquires a face, and practices of care become not only a moral but also a democratic infrastructure.

Until 22 September our chapter is available in open access — I will add the link in the comments.

And finally, one of the most important discussions of the conference for me: Semi-Plenary 9 “Sociology at War: Understanding Violence, Survival, and Social Change in a New Era of Conflict”, organised and moderated by Kaja Gadowska.

Around one table met Horng-luen Wang and Chih-Jou Jay Chen, Nazanin Shahrokni, Abeer Musleh, Rima Majed and myself — that is, the research experiences of East Asia, Ukraine, Iran, Palestine and Lebanon. War was considered here not as a temporary “deviation from normality” but as a force that rebuilds institutions, identities, memory and everyday life — and at the same time poses to sociology questions about survival, civic agency and democratic accountability.