Caring Not Aiding: Nationalist and Decolonial Knowledge-Practices among Ukrainian Grassroots Activists

This article examines how Ukrainian grassroots activists interpret two contested discourses of liberation: nationalism and decolonisation. Grounded in feminist care ethics, it argues that Ukrainian volunteering is not apolitical aid but a historically embedded and politically conscious practice of care. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Ukrainian volunteers conducted between 2022 and 2024, the article advances two arguments. First, activists do not treat nationalism as a fixed ideology; rather, they contest and reinterpret it from within, approaching it as a floating signifier whose meanings shift across political and temporal contexts. Second, activists mobilise decolonial language to make sense of the war, recover erased histories, and fuel collective resistance. Rather than opposing one another, nationalism and decolonisation emerge as paradoxical yet mutually reinforcing knowledge-practices: the former promising liberation from external domination, the latter charting a path toward the critical internal rebuilding of identity and social relations.