The War in Donbas and the Resulting Internal Migration within Ukraine
The annexation of the Crimea by the Russian Federation on March 2014, and the ongoing military conflict over the Donbas region resulted in the continuous mass relocation of various groups of the affected Ukrainian population. In 2015, Ukraine found itself among the five countries in the world with the highest number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) associated with conflict and violence, and it continues to rank highest in Europe. This process resulted in wide social, political, and cultural implications for the country, challenging the pre-existing sense of belonging, national identification, and citizenship allegiances. It also stimulated an unprecedented wave of social mobilization and the emergence of a new type of social activism and a new quality of civil society in Ukraine.
The new MAPA module examines the most recent sociological survey data on attitudes towards Crimea and Donbas regions and internally displaced persons and war in Ukraine and aims at revisiting intraregional and cross-regional differences and sociopolitical dynamics in Ukrainian society.
Viktoriya Sereda, a sociologist with a PhD in Sociology (2006), is an Associate Professor of the Department of Sociology of the Ukrainian Catholic University. Prior to earning her doctoral degree, she graduated from Ivan Franko National University of Lviv (majoring in history, 1996); the Eotvos Lorand University of Budapest (UNESCO Ethnic and Minority Studies MA Program, majoring in sociology, 2000); the University of Edinburgh (MSc by Research in Sociology Program, 2001). In 2017-18 she was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin). In 2016-17 she worked on the “MAPA: Digital Atlas of Ukraine” project at the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University. In 2011-2015, she was a head of sociological part of the project "Region, Nation, and Beyond. An Interdisciplinary and Transcultural Reconceptualization of Ukraine." She is an author of a number of articles published in Ukrainian, Austrian, French, German, Hungarian, Polish and Russian academic journals.