Transnational Resistance against Discursive Borders: Remaking Vocabularies of Belonging among Ukrainian Refugees in Russia

Since the happening of a series of shocking events in Ukraine in 2014, including the Euromaidan, the annexation of Crimea, and the Donbas war, scholars have shown particular interests in how the ongoing war has been changing and shaping Ukrainian national identity of various actors, including politicians, masses, and internally displaced people. However, the identity of externally displaced people, most of which chose to flee to Russia during the war, has not caught much attention, even though the number of Ukrainian refugees in Russia exceeds a million. Upon their arrival in Russia, they found out they are stuck in-between two discursive borders. On one hand, Ukraine has been continuously creating a hostile environment for their future reintegration, as Ukraine sees people who chose to flee to Russia carrying anti-Ukraine emotions. A most recent example is the draft law for opening up the recognition of multiple citizenships in Ukraine. According to the law, multiple citizenships will be ratified in the future, but citizens of the aggressive state, that is, Russia, will be excluded. On the other hand, Russia insists on a Russian national identification and assimilation as the prerequisite for membership to the Russian society, and Russia has been trying to eliminate Ukrainian culture and language from the discourses on the displaced people from Donbas. Moreover, the conflict in Donbas was also followed by the persecution of some high-profile Ukrainian diaspora in Russia working in various Ukrainian cultural organizations or human rights civil societies. Hence, as Ukrainian refugees are experiencing these aforementioned forms of belonging and exclusion simultaneously, do these contradicting discourses regarding their identity also polarize their sense of being? There are already some studies that may be helpful for answering the question. Theoretically, as James Scott’s well-known argument also resonates here, modern states tend to use state power to simplify intricate social realities and to make them controllable. The knowledge produced by the Ukrainian and Russian states may not accurately reflect Ukrainian refugees’ self-position and the fluidity of their identity in different temporal and spatial contexts. Empirically, a recent surveyed-based study by Sasse and Lackner (2020) informs us that by comparing the political views of displaced people from Donbas across different locations, there is not an evident tendency of polarisation and there are actually many similarities between internally and externally displaced people in various political issues. The research question of the proposed study, therefore, asks the ways they imagine themselves and their self-positioning with regard to two opposite political and, arguably, cultural communities. As social media functions as one of the few platforms where Ukrainian refugees in Russia can relatively express themselves freely, the proposed study will conduct digital ethnography in Russian and Ukrainian social media, focusing on qualitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis. The proposed study will focus on their creative ways to reclaim and remake the vocabularies of belonging, paying particular attention to the ways in which Ukrainian refugees unmake the discursive borders and negate border logics and methodological nationalism way of thinking.