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Presentation of the project
The recent years brought about two important refugee inflows from the post-Soviet countries into the European Union. First, in 2020, the unfair presidential elections conducted in Belarus were accompanied by prolonged protests and unprecedented political mobilisation of the society. In order to avoid repressions, the leaders and participants of manifestations that had not been imprisoned – as many as 100–150 thous. persons – fled the country and settled down mostly in Lithuania and Poland. Second, the Russian aggression on Ukraine in 2022 resulted in the outflow of more than 5 million persons, consisting mostly of women and children, that spread across Europe, with Poland remaining the main host country. To respond to growing needs of this massive refugee inflow, non-governmental organisations in EU started to get involved and expand their activities, providing material help and assistance to Ukrainian nationals that fled abroad or stayed in the homeland.
‘Diasporas at War’ project, funded within the Flash Ukraine programme of ICMigrations, focuses on organised groups of Belarusian and Ukrainian exiled populations in France and Poland, and the interactions between diaspora organisations of these two nationalities involved in the political struggle against the same or close authoritarian regimes. We aim at answering the following research questions :
1) Reaction to the war. How did the two diasporas react to the political and humanitarian crisis related to the Russian aggression on Ukraine in 2022 ? How did the extent and the scope of mobilisation change due to the war ? What types of actions have been taken ?
2) Inter-diaspora relations. How did the involvement of Lukashenko’s regime into the war affect the actions pursued by the Belarusian diaspora and the relations between the two (Belarusian and Ukrainian) diasporas ? How did the interactions start and evolve, did they relate to the humanitarian aid or go beyond the material help ? Was there any transmission of savoir-faire knowledge and practices between the organisations ?
3) Political representation. In case of Belarusian diaspora, to what extent the organisations aim at forming a political representation of the country of origin ? In what way the humanitarian activities (to the Ukrainians) correlate with the primary anti-regime activities ? In case of both diasporas, to what extent did the war change the communities’ self-perception from post-Soviet or Russian speaking into national-oriented ?
4) The use of social media. How did the both diasporas use the social media as an effective tool of communication and mobilisation ? Did the social media groups evolve into formal NGOs and if so, how did this process proceed ?
To answer these questions, we plan to conduct semi-structured in-depth interviews with representatives of these two diasporas in France and Poland.
Principal investigator
Agnieszka Fihel