Displacement, Emplacement, and Reintegration: IDP Experiences of the Ukrainian State, 2014-2016
Speaker: Dr. Emily Channell-Justice, Director, Temerty Contemporary Ukraine Program, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University/Visiting Fellow, Aleksanteri Institute
Chair: Jouni Järvinen, University Lecturer, Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki
At the time of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the issue of internal displacement had already created major challenges for the Ukrainian state. With an official number of 1.5 million people from Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea displaced across the rest of Ukraine, the Ukrainian government had not created and implemented a singular policy about displacement since the illegal annexation of Crimea and the beginning of the war in eastern Ukraine in 2014.
Yet the status of “internally displaced person” (IDP) continued to exist as an official state status, with changing benefits and limitations through 2021. This presentation explores IDP engagement with state actors and institutions as they processed their displacement. It is based on analysis of interviews with IDPs in Kyiv, Lviv, and Dnipro in 2014-2016, in the immediate aftermath of the first invasion (2014) and before the newly elected Poroshenko government had the capacity to develop policies to support IDPs. It also assesses Ukrainian state policies toward IDPs that were created and implemented in this time period, paying special attention to the changing responsibility for displaced people among various Ukrainian government institutions. The gaps left by the state created the space for self-organized responses to displacement among ordinary Ukrainians, as well as for the intervention of international humanitarian aid organizations, many of which remained in Ukraine through 2021. This presentation concludes with a consideration of the implications of even larger numbers of displaced people on the feasibility of reintegration of Ukraine’s currently occupied territories in the future.
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