Ivan Shmatko publishes article in the Oñati Socio-Legal Series journal The assistant professor of sociology authored a paper titled “Against synecdochic thinking: Southern criminology and the erasure of ‘Eastern Europe.’”

By Abby Harlan
November 4, 2026

Ivan Shmatko, assistant professor of sociology at Washington and Lee University, recently published a research article in the Oñati Socio-Legal Series journal titled, “Against synecdochic thinking: Southern criminology and the erasure of ‘Eastern Europe.’”

The article examines Southern criminology, a way of studying crime and justice that shifts attention away from Western perspectives and toward the histories and everyday realities of the Global South. Shmatko argues that the movement risks becoming exclusionary if it continues to prioritize perspectives from some countries while neglecting others. He attributes these blind spots to synecdochic thinking, in which the experiences of certain regions are treated as representative of the entire world.

Shmatko illustrates his point through two examples: Russia’s war against Ukraine, which he sees as an attempt to rebuild an empire, and the history of slavery in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. These cases demonstrate that oppression rarely follows clean geographic lines and that injustice is difficult to understand through the viewpoint of only a few particular regions. He calls for moving past synecdochic thinking and toward a more complete understanding of epistemic injustice and the ways it emerges and is sustained.

Shmatko is in his second year as a member of the W&L faculty. He earned a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Alberta (Canada) in 2025 and previously served as a mentor at the Invisible University for Ukraine. His research focuses on the scholarship on the sociology of law, military ethnography and the ethnography of post-socialism.