Interwar Poland has a less than stellar reputation for its treatment of minority ethnic groups, which was cause for concern, considering that nearly one-third of Poland’s population comprised minorities—particularly Ukrainians, Belarusians, Jews, and Germans. While most historical literature focuses on group-level policies pursued by Warsaw to create an ethnically homogenous Poland, in this seminar I will disaggregate the level of analysis to focus on the dynamics between the Polish government and political organizations that claim to represent minority ethnic groups. 

Using the case of the Ukrainian minority, I explore how the Polish government pursued a divide and rule strategy to manage Ukrainian opposition. This was done through the promotion and exploitation of inter- and intra-organizational conflicts, the creation of loyalist Ukrainian organizations, the activation of sub-ethnic group cleavages, and the banning of organizations that could credibly unite the Ukrainian opposition. I reconstruct the intentions of policy makers using process-tracing analysis and extensive archival research of the main organ responsible for formulating minority policies, the Ministry of Interior (Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnętrznych). 

Daniel Fedorowycz
Eugene and Daymel Shklar Research Fellow, HURI

Read a Q&A with Daniel here: http://huri.harvard.edu/news/news-from-huri/298-daniel-fedorowycz.html

Daniel Fedorowycz completed his doctorate in Politics at the University of Oxford. His dissertation examines ethnic politics in multinational states and focuses on the variation in state response to minority group organizations in interwar Poland. More broadly, Daniel researches questions relating to the causes of ethnic conflict through examining local-level dynamics in the Polish-Ukrainian borderlands during the interwar and World War II era. In 2014-15, Daniel was a pre-doctoral fellow at Yale University’s Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence. He holds a MA in European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies and BA(Hons) from the University of Toronto. Currently, Daniel is a Shklar Fellow at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute.

2017 03 27 Daniel Fedorowycz: Divide and Rule: Managing the Ukrainian Minority in Interwar Poland

Founded in June 1973, the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute (HURI) serves as a focal point for graduate and undergraduate students, fellows, and associates pursuing research in Ukrainian language, literature, and history as well as in anthropology, archaeology, art history, economics, political science, sociology, theology, and other disciplines. 