Panel 1: Conflict Dynamics in the Post-Soviet Region
Gwendolyn Sasse and Alice Lackner (ZOiS)
“The Impact of the War on Political Identities in Ukraine”
> ZOiS project
With about 1.8 million internally displaced people Ukraine is now among the ten countries with the largest internally displaced populations worldwide. Additionally, an estimated one million Ukrainian citizens have fled to Russia. Through their displacement, these individuals have disappeared from view. They fall outside standard opinion polls, they hardly figure in media reports, and in policy circles they are primarily seen as a social policy or humanitarian issue. However, the displaced as the group hardest hit by the war are an important test group for the analysis of attitude and identity change through conflict. This paper is based on a recent ZOiS survey which may well be the first of its kind, as it covers the displaced in both Ukraine and Russia. It is supplemented by two further ZOiS surveys conducted in the whole of Donbas (including the government-controlled and the occupied territories). Here the coverage of the whole region allows for a comparison of attitudes and identities across the lines of conflict. A comparison with the data on the displaced marks a step towards a systematic analysis of the variation in the effects of the war on the populations of Donetsk and Luhansk oblast.
Oleg Zhuravlev (Public Sociology Laboratory, St. Petersburg and European University Institute, Florence) and Natalia Savelyeva (Public Sociology Laboratory, St. Petersburg)
“Getting Involved: Motives, Identities, and Mobilisation Channels of Donbas Rebels in Eastern Ukraine”
In our presentation we will touch upon social background, motivations and channels of mobilisation of insurgents fighting on the pro-Russian separatist side in Eastern Ukraine. We will use the data collected by the Public Sociology Laboratory team in 2016-2017, namely in-depth interviews with armed groups' participants in Luhansk, Donetsk, and some other Donbas’s cities as well as in Russia. Combatants, especially those from the pro-separatists’ side, are often depicted as criminals or "miserables" who took part in the conflict to get money or access to upward mobility. Our analysis of the interviews with various categories of individuals – locals who created or joined the armed groups, "volunteers" from Russia and Russian military officers – provides a more complex picture.
Stefan Wolff (University of Birmingham) and Nadja Douglas (ZOiS)
“Big or Small Bridges? Confidence-Building Measures and Conflict Settlement in the Case of Transdniestria”
The lack of progress towards a settlement of protracted conflicts on the territory of the former Soviet Union is variously attributed to local intransigence and geopolitical blockage. This has given rise to the idea that a meaningful settlement process needs to address both of these issues by building bridges across local divides in the protracted conflicts and across the deepening divide between Russia and the West. In our paper, we examine the dynamic between these two arenas in the case of the Transdniestrian Conflict Settlement Process. We will do this by 1) reviewing past confidence-building measures (CBM) in the field of security and trade; 2) assessing whether it is reasonable to expect decreasing geopolitical blockage, and ultimately progress towards a sustainable settlement, as a result of local confidence-building. An analysis of recent statements by the negotiators in the 5+2 format will serve as a basis for identifying areas in which CBMs can be more efficiently deployed.