The book offers new insights into how ethnicity, language and regional-local identity interact within the context of Ukrainian political reform, and indicates how these reforms affect social cohesion among ethno-cultural groups. While the individual chapters each focus on one or a few facets of the overall research question, together they draw a nuanced picture of the multifaceted challenges to creating and consolidating social cohesion in a nationalizing state. The concept integrates various disciplines, including political science, international relations, law, and sociology. Correspondingly, the contributions are based on various methodological approaches, ranging from legal analysis over media discourse analysis, individual and focus group interviews to analysis of data from a representative population survey. The findings of the in-depth study are discussed within the broader context of comparative research on diversity management and social cohesion in fragmented societies.

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Aadne Aasland is a senior researcher at the Norwegian Institute for Urban and Regional Research, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway. He has conducted research on local government reform in Ukraine since 2008 and is leader of the ARDU project: Accommodation of Regional Diversity in Ukraine. He has a large number of refereed publications on social and political developments in post-Soviet countries. His recent publications include the book Governance in Russian Regions (co-edited with S. Kropp et al., 2018).

Sabine Kropp is Professor of Political Science at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. Her research areas include comparative federalism, public administration, and parliamentary studies, with a focus on the political system of Germany and East European politics, particularly in the post-Soviet space. She has conducted several projects on Russian decentralization, Russian regional politics, and German federalism. She published extensively on these issues, including the book Governance in Russian Regions (co-edited with A. Aasland et al., 2018).

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