In November 2013, Paweł Pieniążek was in Ukraine, reporting on the country’s social and political life for outlets in his native Poland. Suddenly, protests broke out in Kyiv’s Independence Square—the Maidan. Pieniążek rushed to the scene and stayed there for weeks. He witnessed and reported on what became the Euromaidan, a wave of demonstrations that ousted the current president, aligned Ukraine more closely with Europe, and paved the way to the Russian-Ukrainian war.
“I understood that it was a historic event,” Pieniążek recalls, an impression validated brutally on December 1, 2013, when, alongside protesters, he was beaten by police forces, despite a clear insignia marking him as a journalist.
But Pieniążek wasn’t deterred by the violence. Instead, he embarked on a career as a war reporter. He dropped out of his master’s program in Eurasian studies in Warsaw and stayed in Ukraine, covering the war in Donbas, and later, wars in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Nagorno-Karabakh, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Along the way, Pieniążek developed a journalistic expertise in the early, transitional stages of war.
Ten years later, Pieniążek returned to academia to examine those moments. He found his intellectual home at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and its Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, pursuing a master’s degree in Russia, Eastern Europe, Central Asia (REECA) regional studies. As he graduates this spring, Pieniążek comes away with a new perspective on the dynamics he encountered first-hand in war zones, now informed by rigorous social sciences training.
Studying the Time Between
Pieniążek’s thesis is about interregnum periods: the time when one governing force is losing control, the second hasn’t yet secured it, and there is a lack of political authority. The work is based on interviews with 30 civilians and soldiers from three Ukrainian cities currently under Russian occupation—Izium, Kherson, and Mariupol—about their experience, from the outbreak of war, to local government collapse, to occupation. “It’s the direct result of my experience in 2014, and from my work in different countries as well.”
Pieniążek was attracted to the REECA because it allowed him to root himself in regional studies while exploring a variety of academic disciplines. After dabbling with several methodologies in his first year of coursework, he settled on a mix of social sciences: anthropology and sociology. “I think anthropology is similar to journalism in many ways,” he says. “It’s about trying to understand people.” He found special inspiration in several courses taught by Harvard Professor of Sociology Emily Fairchild, who became his thesis advisor.
“I was a student in her Methods in Social Sciences class, and understood she would be an amazing advisor for me," Pieniążek shares. “She forces you to think in a different way, because you need to ask yourself a lot of questions when you’re writing, about your methods. I hope it will make my work more concrete.” Coursework in methods in oral history and on how to conduct population samples were also revelatory, providing Pieniążek with skills that sharpen and nuance his approach to people living through conflict.
“Pawel’s time covering armed conflict in Ukraine helped him identify his research question,” explained Professor Fairchild. “He had seen firsthand that periods between the collapse of a government and control by occupying forces can create conditions under which citizens are particularly vulnerable. With no one in control, supplies and information are difficult to access. By examining how people experience this period, his work lets us see the additional difficulties that civilians in conflict areas have to navigate, in addition to the threat of violence. Throughout, he was able to draw on his experience in the region to approach his interviews and analysis with admirable sensitivity.”
“It’s hard to say exactly why [life as a war reporter] works for me. I think I’m really good at compartmentalizing. When I feel that things that should be scary are not scary anymore, I take a step back, take a rest to refill this tank of fear.
—Pawel Pieniążek
Difficult Conversations
As Pieniążek explores in his thesis, interregnum periods are defined by confusion, the ability to still move between sides, and uncanny, often funny conversations. One particularly bizarre moment happened in Mariinka in 2014, when the journalist was sitting in a bunker alongside a pro-Russian separatist who served as a police officer at the Maidan uprising. “We were there for stability, we didn’t beat anyone,” the separatist insisted. “But I was beaten by policemen,” Pieniążek retorted. The separatist paused: “Were you protesting?” “No, I was a journalist.” Another pause, and the separatist concluded: “Ok, but I didn’t beat you.” “In the end we just started laughing and went on to other conversations,” Pieniążek recalls.
Another unforgettable memory was Pieniążek’s interview with the mother of a high-ranking rebel and her pro-Ukraine neighbor in Sloviansk in 2019, an interview that solidified Pieniążek’s understanding of the possibility of reconciliation during times of conflict and desire to study it from an anthropological perspective.
“She [the pro-Russia woman] agreed to talk, but only if her neighbor would come with her. The neighbor was pro-Ukraine, but they liked each other,” he explains. “I asked her like, two or three questions, but the pro-Ukraine neighbor was so angry and just started fuming. I just sat there for two hours, recording their conversation.” After the interview, the two women showed Pieniążek the garden they cultivated together. As they departed, the pro-Ukraine woman uttered the Ukrainian national salute: “Slava Ukraini!” (“Glory to Ukraine!”). The pro-Russian answered with the mandatory response: “Heroyam slava!” (“Glory to the heroes!”)—but quickly qualified: “Ours, not yours.” Since the full-scale invasion in 2022, the pro-Ukraine woman left the country, and the women no longer speak.
Pieniążek expanded his understanding of transitional periods of conflict when he began reporting outside Ukraine. Even though Ukraine was a war zone, it was his comfort zone, and he wanted to challenge himself. In 2016 he departed for Iraq to cover the conflict between the Kurdistan region and the Islamic State. From there, he traveled to Syria, Afghanistan, and Nagorno-Karabakh.
“It’s hard to say exactly why it works for me,” he says of life as a war reporter. “I think I’m really good at compartmentalizing. When I feel that things that should be scary are not scary anymore, I take a step back, take a rest to refill this tank of fear.”
A Blurry Beginning
If you asked a teenaged Pieniążek what he wanted to be when he grew up, he never would have said “war reporter.” “It’s the last thing I thought I would do with my life,” he admits. He was also never interested in war, or weapons. Instead, a series of coincidences carried him there. When he applied for university programs at home in Warsaw, he chose Ukrainian studies because he knew he could get into the program, and because Ukraine was so close to Poland.
“I just picked up Ukrainian studies because it was easy to get there. I had no idea about Ukraine, no roots, nothing. All I knew was that there was some revolution there,” he recalls, a reference to the Orange Revolution of 2004–2005. “It was a moment in my life where I was interested in everything. If I chose other studies, I’d be just as interested in that.”
While studying Ukrainian language, culture, and politics in university, Pieniążek started working for a local nongovernmental organization that asked him to write about Ukraine for their media outlet. He traveled to Ukraine to report on the country’s political, intellectual, and cultural life. That’s when the Maidan Uprising broke out.
From there, Pieniążek and a fellow Polish journalist traveled to Sloviansk in 2014. They arrived just as Russian-backed separatists seized the city in the onset of the war in Donbas, when armed men in unmarked uniforms overtook infantry vehicles and armored personnel carriers from the Ukrainian army. “We didn’t call it war, we didn’t understand, but it was more than just a pro-Russian protest,” he says. “People were so confused. What’s happening? Who is good? Who is bad?”
Pieniążek stayed in Donbas for months and kept returning for years, speaking to people on all sides of the conflict to capture this interregnum moment. His experience in Sloviansk was most influential on his conception of transitional moments of occupation, covered in his recent book, War in My Home: When Conflict Becomes the Everyday.
In retrospect, he admits that at the beginning, he was unprepared. “No flak jackets, no First Aid or understanding of how to use it. No one should ever do that,” he says. “I didn’t think I’d actually be covering a war. If someone asked me to cover a war, I’d imagine a front line, something more similar to Ukraine after 2022, not men in tracksuits. . . . That was this blurry beginning of the war.”
A Most Interesting Student
Pieniążek long harbored the idea of going back to academia and combining scholarly and nonfiction writing, but put this plan off while he was traveling and reporting. “Finally, I was so burned out that I couldn’t write anymore,” he says. “So that was the moment when I finally said, ‘Ok, I’ll do it,’ and I applied.”
Harvard Government Professor George Soroka, who teaches REECA’s proseminar, attests to the massive contribution Pieniążek brings to the program as a student, journalist, and person.
[Pawel] still leads a double life—last year he published a popular Polish-language book about his experiences as a war correspondent. This was in addition to doing all the regular classwork demanded of any graduate student. He has also been seen walking a robot dog around campus. So, he gets my vote for most interesting student I’ve known.
—Professor George Saroka
“The thing that most strikes me is how modest and self-effacing he is despite the amazing career he had before coming to Harvard,” Soroka says of Pieniążek. “He still leads a double life—last year he published a popular Polish-language book about his experiences as a war correspondent. This was in addition to doing all the regular classwork demanded of any graduate student. He has also been seen walking a robot dog around campus. So, he gets my vote for most interesting student I’ve known.”
Pieniążek plans to continue on the academic track and begin a PhD in anthropology in fall 2026 or 2027. Meanwhile, he’s back home to Warsaw this summer for a well-deserved rest.
As war becomes more present in today’s world, Pieniążek imparts wisdom from his experience in and research on war zones. The main message: don’t take the everyday for granted.
“I was focusing a lot in my writing about the routine of people. Even small things which we sometimes hate—the alarm clock, waking up in the morning, taking a hot shower, eating the same breakfast, going to work where we see the same people all the time—these are the things that are making and stabilizing life,” he advises. “They are super important to bring us all together. People often neglect them, but they feel really terrible when they disappear.”
