Conflict in Ukraine: multiplicity of narratives about the war and displacement

Lazarenko, Valeria

doi:10.1080/23745118.2018.1552108

Cited by 23 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…While two ceasefire agreements were signed in Minsk in 2015 under mediation of the OSCE and high-power diplomacy in the Normandy format, they remain unimplemented, and low-intensity shelling continues from both sides. More detailed explanations of the root causes and drivers of the conflict depend heavily on the respective narrative of the conflict (e.g., official Ukrainian, official Russian, geopolitical; see, e.g., Lazarenko, 2018).…”

Section: Method: Empirical Sources and Inductive Action Research Appr...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If someone like a vatnyk was taking part in the dialogue, then people believe that letting him in was a mistake of SBU [Ukrainian Security Service]. 10 Thus, in its extreme form, the militarized narrative of the conflict as "Russian aggression" (Lazarenko, 2018) denies any possibility of dialogue with NGCA residents or the people holding "pro-Russian" political views inside the controlled territories. Within the ongoing armed struggle, polarized mass media discourse, and the dominant militarized conflict narrative, it is enormously difficult to talk about inclusive society.…”

Section: Understanding the Underlying Reasons For The Lack Of Inclusi...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It is important to highlight the ongoing character of the armed conflict in and around Ukraine notwithstanding ceasefires 7 . The Russian hybrid warfare currently taking place in Ukraine as a “battle for minds and hearts of Ukrainian people” conditioned cementing of the dominant narrative of the conflict in Ukraine as “Russian aggression” (Lazarenko, 2018). Among numerous laws and policies that confirm this narrative was a ruling that the Ukrainian Parliament passed in January 2018 expressly stamping the conflict as “the armed aggression of the Russian Federation in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts” and the territories not controlled by the Ukrainian government as “the temporarily occupied territories in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts” where “armed forces of the Russian Federation and occupational administration of the Russian Federation have established and currently maintain general control” (Article 1) 8 .…”

Section: Understanding the Underlying Reasons For The Lack Of Inclusi...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Inclusion dilemmas in peacebuilding and dialogues in Ukraine.

Holper¹,

Kyselova²

2021

Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology

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This article aims to elucidate the reasons underlying the lack of inclusion of Ukrainians with "pro-Russian" political views in peacebuilding and dialogues in Ukraine. Based on an analysis of empirical data from interviews and focus groups, we argue that the following 4 factors contribute to patterns of willful and unwillful exclusion during facilitated dialogues: (a) the absence of a political will and a societal agenda for inclusion of people holding "pro-Russian" political views, (b) high security risks connected with Russian hybrid warfare, (c) difficulties in identifying this group and the loss of their agency after 2014, and (d) the risk of their identity being transformed, thereby again de facto excluding "pro-Russian" views. By providing a first mapping of the observed factors and underlying dilemmas, the article aims to raise critical awareness of these difficulties in the field. By formulating the key open questions, it seeks to stimulate honest and constructive reflection among dialogue practitioners, civil society organizations, international donors, policymakers, and scholars in order to scrutinize and redesign inclusion approaches in Ukraine with the aim of better responding to the realities of the conflict and the dialogue system of this country. Public Significance StatementThis study suggests that the following factors contribute to an exclusion of Ukrainians holding "pro-Russian" political views during facilitated dialogues: (1) the absence of a political will and a societal agenda for their inclusion; (2) high security risks connected with Russian hybrid warfare; (3) difficulties in identifying "pro-Russian" group and the loss of their agency after 2014; (4) the risk of their identity being transformed during facilitated dialogues.

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Section: Method: Empirical Sources and Inductive Action Research Appr...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Understanding the Underlying Reasons For The Lack Of Inclusi...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Understanding the Underlying Reasons For The Lack Of Inclusi...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Inclusion dilemmas in peacebuilding and dialogues in Ukraine.

Holper¹,

Kyselova²

2021

Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology

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“…The displaced people form their personal stories of war and peace in order to deal with their psychological trauma, and these stories are formed within the contradictory fields of multiple discourses and interpretations of the conflict. They face difficulties in adaptation to the new living conditions because of social and economic problems, and also cannot easily accept the changed reality (Васютинський, 2016;Блинова, 2017;Коробка, 2017;Lazarenko, 2018). At the same time, the displaced people coming from Donbas bear a specific regional identity that reflects the complicated history of the region and appeals to values of freedom and self-determination , and desire to preserve or strengthen civic identities in a polarizing society Васютинський, 2017;Горностай, 2012).…”

Section: картографуючи переселення: потенціал використання психогеогрmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping Displacement

Lazarenko¹

2019

PoPP

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The international armed conflict in Ukraine, which has been going on for already more than five years, has caused significant changes in Ukrainian society. More than 1.7 million people have been forced to leave their homes and become internally displaced. In such conditions, the question of identities becomes one of the most important for the affected people. The overall social situation of displacement has contributed to the individual and community self-perception of displaced people, and the creation of the ‘resettlement identity’ among them. Such specific social identity became the main subject of the author's research and will be discussed in the current paper. This article presents the first results of the ongoing research into social identities of displaced people in Ukraine. The research was conducted through a combination of narrative interviews and mental sketch mapping of the respondents' home cities in Donbas and their current places of residence. The research data was analysed from the perspectives of social psychology as well as of human geography, and the results show how the emotion-laden phenomenological experience contributes to spatial perception of the city and to turning space into place. The mapping and narrativization processes make it possible to distinguish the crucial elements of the complex identity of the displaced people: the Donbas identity, the Ukrainian identity, and a specific resettlement identity that simplifies the identification with a huge group of people sharing similar experiences. Our research shows that mental sketch mapping as a method helps to elicit the complexity of identities among the displaced people. Moreover, mapping exercise, combined with a narrative interview, also had a therapeutic effect upon the respondents as the research subjects experienced change during the interview. The complex usage of a position of existential outsideness (Relph 1980) revealed in the research, may be the symptom of a personal crisis. Thus the reflexive work on the maps may be a tool for displaced people to rethink and transform their spatial-temporal coordinates and their identities.

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“…The conflict itself is often defined by scholars as a hybrid war, as it includes both the usage of weapons and an ideological component (Wilson 2016;Katchanovski 2016;Lakomy 2016;Lazarenko 2018). The current Ukrainian conflict itself is labelled differently according to various perspectives: academics may define the situation as a "conflict," "armed conflict," "civil war," or "insurgency," while Ukrainian authorities and media mostly use the word "war" or the official names of "anti-terroristic operation" (2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018) and "operation of joint forces" (since 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Renaming and Reclaiming Urban Spaces in Ukraine: The Perspective of Internally Displaced People

Lazarenko¹

2021

Nationalities Papers

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For more than six years, Ukrainian society has been constantly searching for ideas as to how to write a new “national biography.” In a society divided by armed conflict, the so-called decommunization process is considered to be an idea capable of uniting a nation. This process started back in 2015, with the passing of a specific law that required not only the deconstruction of Soviet-time monuments in public spaces, but also a huge decommunization of place names. The article will explore the main practices of place (re-)naming during the different stages of the decommunization (but not de-ideologization) of spaces, as well as describing the problems that may emerge in society as a result of a rapid transition from one narrative to another. Based on a case study of spatial identities of internally displaced people, I am going to answer the question of how people perceive renamed spaces, and how they reclaim and re-appropriate these spaces in the midst of an identity crisis.

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Conflict in Ukraine: multiplicity of narratives about the war and displacement

Cited by 23 publications

References 23 publications

Inclusion dilemmas in peacebuilding and dialogues in Ukraine.

Inclusion dilemmas in peacebuilding and dialogues in Ukraine.

Mapping Displacement

Renaming and Reclaiming Urban Spaces in Ukraine: The Perspective of Internally Displaced People

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