Rethinking the Concept of “Transition”: Reflections on the Possibility of Planned Transformation in Post-Soviet Drug and HIV Policy and Practice in Ukraine

Reflections on the Possibility of Planned Transformation in Post-Soviet Drug and HIV Policy and Practice in Ukraine

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, a dominant paradigm in political science and policy discourse—commonly termed “transitology”—assumed that former Soviet states were moving along a shared trajectory towards (neo)liberal democracy and market capitalism, with [Western] Europe, or simply “West”, as the implicit destination. Subsequent scholarship challenged this teleology on multiple grounds: many post-socialist states consolidated hybrid or authoritarian regimes rather than converging on a Western benchmark; and the very categories of “transition” and “Europeanisation” were shown to function as geopolitical narratives that organised moral-political worth along an East-West axis, producing what can be described as a “civilisational hierarchy” in which the post-Soviet/socialist subject is figured as perpetually in need of transformation.

This presentation examines Ukraine’s Global Fund “Transition Plan”. Introduced in 2016 as a condition of continued donor support, the Plan promised a “gradual” shift from zero state financing of prevention to 80% by 2020. While the assessments concluded that Ukraine met and even exceeded its budgetary commitments, substantially less funding reached frontline services. I argue that this gap was produced through performance-based spending, procurement rules, and audit procedures tied to pre-set coverage and service-volume targets that proved difficult to realise under punitive drug policy, repeated cycles of forced client mobility and disappearance, and broader precarity. I thus examine how “transition” operates as a governance narrative within a specific policy field. The Transition Plan, in this reading, is one instantiation of a broader “transitological” frame that positions Ukraine as perpetually in the process of becoming European—a process whose completion is always deferred and whose standards of achievement are always externally set.

Presentation co-authored by Vladimir Stepanov.

Bio

Alexandra is a research fellow at the School of Social and Political Science and associate editor at Contemporary Drug Problems. She is currently working on a co-authored book project. Drawing on nearly six years of extensive ethnographic research in medical facilities and prisons, and analysis of the legal and policy documents governing the fields of drug use, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis treatment in Ukraine, she examines the thirty-year development of these fields of care and punishment as a broader metaphor for post-Soviet transformation.

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