Bordering and Mobilities in Ukraine: Inconvenient People in the Time of War

This book analyses how war and bordering impacts daily life and mobility and immobility tactics. It brings to light the memories of people who were displaced from Ukraine’s eastern regions because of Russian aggression against Ukraine started in 2014.

Based on extensive in-depth research including interviews with individuals who were direct witnesses, participants, and victims of the events in Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, the study presents a novel perspective. It explores everyday experiences of war, bordering, and (im)mobilities through the lens of ’inconvenient people’ including their hard journeys and resistance in occupied territories, the loss of home and struggles to find housing, volunteering, and the traumatic responses. The book amplifies the voices and agency of civilians experienced the war and displacement, including older adults and people with disabilities and provides theoretical and practical implications beyond Ukraine in a context of global uncertainties and growing mass population displacement.

The book urges politicians and experts to look at the experiences of both displaced and immobile people who lived through the war in Ukraine before the full invasion. It will be of great interest to scholars of Race and Ethnic Studies, Asian Studies, European Politics, Security Studies, Migration Studies, Human Geography and War and Conflict Studies.

Irina Kuznetsova is Associate Professor in the School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham. She has extensively researched the social impacts of displacement from Ukraine’s war-affected regions and led the AHRC-funded Ukraine’s Hidden Tragedy project. With over 25 years’ experience in migration, immobility, and social exclusion across countries, she brings a cross-disciplinary, impact-driven approach to collaborative research, particularly in understanding both internal and international dimensions of war and conflict- related displacement.

Oksana Mikheieva is Professor of Sociology at the Kyiv School of Economics. During her work at various academic institutions, including Donetsk State University of Management, Ukrainian Catholic University (Lviv), and European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), as well as during research fellowships at the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University (HURI), Institute for Human Sciences (IWM) and ZOiS/the Centre for East European and international Studies, she researched various aspects of migration processes related to war and forced displacement. She also focuses her research on aspects of paramilitary motivations, everyday life under conditions of war and occupation.