Personal Epistemology on the Conflict in Eastern Ukraine in 2021: constructing and deconstructing Knowledge

I enact the personal epistemology standpoint to illustrate how my ontology and personal experience transformed my knowledge about the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. Guiding the reader through my visual and bodily interaction with the conflict zone, I illustrate my perception construction and deconstruction about the object of knowledge – the conflict – and the knowledge itself. The researcher is placed at the heart of this study. In my work, I stipulate the value of the world-mind monism stance in knowledge production and legitimises the self as a source of knowledge in international relations research. Eye-witnessing the humanitarian crisis in the conflict zone, Russian biopoltics in Ukraine, and the Ukrainian willingness to defend their country, and experiencing the death fear at the contact line, I conclude the following. Rather than the degree of critical examination of the objective reality, it has been how I am “hooked up” to the world and the pathways I have taken that determined my knowledge formation. In such a way, from an abstract geopolitical situation, for me, the conflict transformed into a standoff between authorities, military, and civilians of Ukraine and Russia with devastating humanitarian and human suffering effects on the conflict zone inhabitants, which takes place within a border clash of the “Russian world” and the Western civilisations, where the former claims the superiority over the latter to the extent of death, therefore bearing war risks for other countries on the border, particularly those with common historical periods with Russia, including in Latvia.