Securitisation /De-Securitisation of Internal Displacement in Ukraine as an Unintended Consequence of the State's Resilience Building

This paper draws on the securitisation theory, its present and its current stage of development calling for more rigorous empirical studies to properly test its theoretical assumptions. So far securitisation literature has been very scarce when it comes to theory’s application in the non-EU, or more broadly non-Westphalian context. According to Huysmans (2006), migration emerged as a security issue in a context marked both by the geopolitical détente associated with the end of the Cold War and also by wider social and political shifts associated with globalization. It is, however, not always the case of the countries that have emerged after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, therefore new explanations are required to give the securitisation theory a more global applicability. In this contribution, we study the reasons and the process of securitisation and de-securitisation of internal population displacement phenomenon that has appeared as the result of the Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014, annexation of the Crimea and military conflict in Donbas. This contribution hypothesizes that the Ukrainian security dispositif has been largely mobilized after 2014 and led to instances of securitisation of the internally displaced persons (IDPs), with subsequent instances of de-securitisation. We suggest that this initial securitisation of IDPs mobility could be elucidated as an early defensive mechanism aiming at building state resilience and redefining strategic goals of Ukraine in the context of Russian aggression. It should be also read in connection with strategic goals of sovereignty dispositif and welfare dispositif aiming, respectively, at keeping political control and integrality of Ukrainian territory and redistribution of social benefits. We also observed that, when the capacity of Ukrainian state resilience was relatively stronger, there were many practices clearly de-securitizing IDPs. The paper has been prepared within ongoing 2-year research project “Securitisation (de-securitisation) of migration on the example of Ukrainian migration to Poland and internal migration in Ukraine” financed by the National Research Council of Poland.