23 Journal of Ukrainian Politics and Society UKRAINIAN POLITICAL SCIENCE AND THE STUDY OF UKRAINE WITHIN AMERICAN POLITICAL SCIENCE: HOW SIMILAR, HOW DIFFERENT? Oxana Shevel The objective of this essay is to compare key characteristics, pathways of development, and challenges facing the discipline of political science in the West (primarily in the US) and in Ukraine, to consider the causes of these diferences, and to relect on what it would take for political science in Ukraine to overcome the challenges it has faced in the post-Soviet period. Political Science in Ukraine: Stability or Crisis? There are not many published studies on the state of Ukrainian political science as a discipline, and those that exist difer in their conclusions. Among Ukrainian practitioners of political science who have writen on the topic in recent years, there seems to be a consensus opinion that the discipline has reached a “period of stability,” having emerged out of the formative decade of the 1990s when the discipline had to be essentially developed from scratch in post-Soviet Ukraine (Rudych 2003b; Rudych 2003b; Matvienkiv 2008). This conclusion is supported by pointing to such facts as the establishment of the discipline within academic institutions and its formal recognition by the Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Education, deinition of key research topics and methods of the discipline,1 publication of many textbooks and monographs dedicated to political science, launching of political science periodicals, establishment of research institutes, professional associations, and the growing number of professional political scientists who were granted kandydat and doctor of political science degrees. By contrast, assessment of Ukrainian political science by scholars based in the West, Western scholars working in Ukraine, and Ukrainian scholars more integrated into Western political science community is a lot less sanguine. In a scathing assessment of the state of the political science discipline in Ukraine one such scholar characterized Ukrainian political science as a “deeply provincial pseudo- science” that is “on a far periphery of world political science.” (Kudelia 2012). Responding to this assessment, another scholar, while taking issue with the broad juxtaposition of Ukrainian and Western political science as, respectably, “bad” and “good”, agreed that in Ukraine during the last twenty years, “the quality of political science research has not reached either European or American levels {of quality}, and description of known realities has not transformed into their explanation” (Matsievskyi 2012). Journal of Ukrainian Politics and Society, Volume 1, Issue 1, 2015, pp. 23-32