‘Maidan has become part of Ukrainian identity’: the dynamics of naming and framing civilresistance in parliamentary discourse

This paper examines how civil resistance is constructed in parliamentarydiscourse, focussing on naming choices for the 2013–14 protests in Ukraineknown as the Euromaidan, Revolution of Dignity, or Maidan, and theirsurrounding contexts in speeches by Ukrainian Members of Parliament andforeign guests in full-house sittings of the Ukrainian parliament from 2013to 2023. Using metadata annotation in the newly created corpus of Ukrainianparliamentary proceedings under the ParlaMint project, the study exploresthe interplay between naming and framing the protests over time and acrosscollective actors at different levels of data aggregation. The results indicate adecline in explicit references to the 2013–14 protests in Ukrainianparliamentary discourse, but each name in question follows its uniquetrajectory, showing variations in relative frequency and semantic preference.The study also discusses the limits of using these names interchangeably,considering their non-arbitrariness and word-building potential within thecontext of competing framings of the events by different political players.