Local Conflicts, but Transnational foci? Ethnic Organizations in Sweden and the Conflict 'Back Home'

Using Scott Feld’s model of the focused organization of social ties (1981) this paper argues that the conflicts invoking the ideas of ethnicity, territorial belonging, and religion may be reflected in and frame the interethnic relationships not only in the places where they happen, but also the social networks of the migrants that come from these countries. This paper aims to further develop the theoretical approaches to the social network theory of focused organization of social ties and as related to the conflict development in the home countries of different migrant groups. In this analysis I focus on the Ukrainian and Russian ethnic organizations active in Sweden. I use the logistic regression models to account for the probabilities of Ukrainian and Russian organizations to send different types of links to other ethnic organizations depending on the developments of the conflict in Eastern Ukraine. The data for the analysis combine the conflict event data from Uppsala Conflict Data Programme (2014 to 2015), and the ego-centered directed network data of the officially registered Ukrainian and Russian ethnic organizations available for the period of 2013 until 2016. I show that the conflict “back home” might become a focused activity of the ethnic organizations’ in the host country if the home country is in conflict, and thus build patterns of interaction, social elements of activity and sentiments not only to the representatives of the home, host and the country from the other side of the conflict, but also other ethnic groups with the perceived similar past.