The support for people who are forcibly displaced, whose lives are ruined, should not rely only on individual efforts. Researchers Daria Krivonos and Olga Tkach can see that governments and institutions need to take more responsibility for the support efforts and develop infrastructures that ensure people have
Since Russia's full-scale invasion into Ukraine, many lives are on the edge of loss and death. In this context, instead of focusing on the militarised grand narratives around geo-politics, researchers Daria Krivonos, Olga Tkach and Roman Urbanowicz turn their gaze towards what they call life-making labour: the labour that makes, sustains, and reproduces life itself amidst collapsing times. In their research project LIFEMAKE; "Life-breaking and Life-making: Social Reproduction and Survival in Times of Collapse", they focus on the question: what sustains social life continue when lives are breaking?
The research project is conducted at the Centre for Research on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism (CEREN), Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki. The research is funded by the Kone Foundation. Sociologist and postdoctoral researcher Daria Krivonos is the principal investigator of the research project, and she describes the perspective in their research.
"There were all these discussions about standing with Ukraine, but what does it mean to stand with Ukraine? And who is this 'we' standing with Ukraine? Talking more concretely, what does it take on the everyday level, not on the level of high politics? We wanted to shape this perspective and investigate what it means for people in their everyday lives and what makes social life possible in these conditions, for people who were displaced by the war in Ukraine, but also in conditions of repression in Belarus and how these developments affect wider regions, and in general in Europe and the world."
The research focus is on migrant communities and displacement, i.e. on the kind of practices people are engaged in and what the everyday realities involve for sustaining lives in conditions of displacement. The project offers three ethnographic case-studies, the first focuses on Ukrainian migrant communities in Warsaw, the second focuses on Rural minoritised Polish communities in Belarus and the third focused on volunteer groups hosting Ukrainian refugees in their homes in Finland.
The important question of who does the work
Olga Tkach highlights that it is the aim to make invisible bour visible that makes this research project important.
Historically, female labour has been unpaid and unrecognised, which has been a focus for feminist scholarship and literature that has highlighted the labour that goes into making, sustaining and reproducing life itself. This literature has inspired their research project. Krivonos also views this as an important perspective in times of war and forced displacement.
"We can follow the media and social media in learning how the national states and international NGOs cope with the situation and it is very much publicised. But this invisible labour that occurs in so many different areas and communities goes unrecognised. People spend a lot of time and energy and emotions and care in this work just to help related and unrelated people. For us this work is very important, as is the social impact to talk about these people, to make their efforts visible through our research."
Tkach's ethnography localised in Finland is about the voluntary home accommodation of people displaced from Ukraine. Tkach applies several methods, of which interviews are the main one.
"I interviewI people who we refer to as hosts, although they may refer to themselves differently. But generally, they are people who shared their private homes and space, opened the doors of their apartments and houses to people who had to flee the war, who are displaced and whose lives are ruined."
Mundane activities have great value
The research is ongoing, but for Tkach some preliminary ideas are already starting to form.
"So far I am thinking about these very, under-recognised, routine activities that we all do, how valuable they are for people who lack them, who have lost them in their lives. How they get back to them in these new relationships and these homes away from home."
Tkach's case shows that the forms of volunteering differ in duration, the intensity of the relationships and in which ways they remain in contact.
"The stories are very diverse in terms of housing conditions, family situations, of nationality, class, gender and engagement in volunteer labour overall. For some people it was just a very single or short-term activity and for others it might take a year or a year and a half, for instance."
When people are displaced and their lives are in crisis, the different everyday activities that the volunteers and Ukrainians do together becomes very important.
"When one's life is damaged, property is ruined and people really get stuck or feel in limbo or they just do not have anything to return to, these very routine, boring things, like cleaning, cooking or washing dishes, walking a dog, shovelling snow or gardening, might signify something that normal people do, and you still have the opportunity to do them. Not all of those activities are possible to practice in the reception centre, but it is possible in the home that is equipped and adjusted to living this homely life."
Who is responsible of the care for displaced people?
The context for the Krivonos case is within the community of Ukrainian people living in Warsaw, Poland. Her ethnographic research started in 2020, before the full-scale invasion.
Interviews are also part of her research methodology. The method allows for sustaining longer-term relations and connections with people in the field.
"Ukrainian people have long been present in the EU and in Poland in particular. There were one million people from Ukraine living in Poland before the invasion. When the war began, it was these Ukrainian communities that were confronted with the primary responsibility of taking care of their relatives or their families, hosting them in their homes, sending money to Ukraine and donating to different humanitarian organisations. While at the same time, these people continued to work for EU labour markets, most of which are very precarious, and the jobs people do are often unprotected and insecure."
The method of long-term engagement with the field allows for important questions about minorities living in the EU and their precarious position in the labour markets.
"These longer-term continuities, labour migration and current displacement of people and the invisible work of taking care of people who have become displaced, quite often falls on migrant communities themselves, because this solidarity response was largely based on individualised effort. The case in Finland also shows that it is based on people's goodwill in terms of their willingness to open their homes, but in the longer-term you cannot really sustain the response to forced displacement in this way, and that is why these migrant communities in the end have the responsibility of taking care of these displaced people."
Solidarity and the construction of whiteness
Krivonos also focuses on the narratives about Ukrainians before and after the war began.
"One of the major narratives since the war began has been the fact that Ukrainians are white and, therefore, they receive so much solidarity from the European community, unlike other non-white, non-European asylum seekers."
Labour migration is important to the Ukrainian economy, which depends on remittances, the money being sent to Ukraine from people who work abroad. Even before the war, labour migration from Ukraine was already an important aspect of the labour markets within the EU.
"There is this idea that solidarity is racialised, but it is also important to problematise the whiteness construct of the Ukrainian people. Before the full-scale invasion, if we look statistically in Finland, it was Ukrainian nationals who received the highest number of permits based on work. Ukrainian workers were mainly constructed as a cheaper labour force. When the borders closed, and Ukrainian people could no longer come here to do agricultural work, then suddenly there was this realisation around who does this work. Then with the war, the whole narrative started to construct Ukraine as part of Europe and Ukrainians as white."
The solidarity efforts have an unstable nature to them, and Krivonos highlights that this is not something that Ukrainian people are unaware of.
"People in the field were very aware that it was most likely to be temporary, they knew how they were treated before the war. People were very critical about the treatment of Ukrainians by the Polish majority, for example, and they were very aware that this response and solidarity can very quickly evaporate. It shows how whiteness is not something given or natural but something that can be constructed depending on different circumstances."
The findings remind the researchers of people's goodwill
One of the findings from the research is about people's goodwill, how they do volunteer work and their willingness to help displaced people, which Tkach has witnessed during the research process.
"For some people this is also their contribution to making life better, to making this world better. Because in my research I also see that sometimes neighbours, when they learn that their neighbour is hosting someone, they get involved."
Communities respond and work together to positively impact the everyday lives of the hosted people.
"Mainly people are getting very positive feedback and help from their networks, colleagues, friends, relatives, and neighbours. They donate things, they get together to take hosted people to show them around in the city or to spend time with them, to hang out with them, and to somehow contribute to their activities in their everyday lives. This shows that this is a very engaging activity when you do something good, it attracts people who also want to help and contribute to having a normal life."
It is an important and positive reminder for people that, in our communities, there are many people who are active and willing to help.
"In the face of extreme adversity, especially human-provoked adversity, it is good to know that people are not that bad. When something bad happens and it is your neighbour who is helping displaced people or donating or doing something else, it gives us hope that if something bad happens to us, we are not in a vacuum, we have communities around."
Societies should not rely on solidarity and individualised work
When Ukrainian refugees arrived in Finland there were people who volunteered and opened their homes. Tkach research findings show that this volunteer labour and these volunteer relationships were not regulated, they were open-ended.
"When people decide to open their doors for people in need, displaced people, they actually have nothing to base it on, they just feel some solidarity, a strong willingness to help and to do something."
While Krivonos also mentions the positive developments we see with individuals' willingness to help, she cautions that we cannot individualise the labour of care.
"Because many people are already so overburdened with care, we cannot invite these people and these communities to do even more care to survive. One of the implications is that the response to the displacement of people, cannot be based only on individualised solidarity, there is no infrastructure, there should be working institutions and structures that can support people in the long-term."
Tkach agrees that this is one of the important implications of the research.
"It is very important not to rely only upon those people who are ready to help. This is not only about the lack of infrastructure, but this is also about the lack of the sufficient infrastructure. This everyday volunteer work really filled so many gaps in the state-led humanitarian outreach, but on the other hand doing this research and volunteer work we also see how people get burnt out and how they really must balance this volunteer work and their productive work."
Krivonos also highlights that it is important to remember that it is possible for institutions and governments to develop structures to support people who are forcibly displaced if there is political will. There is a continued need for this support.
"I think that it is important to remember that, in the case of Ukraine, it was designed to be temporary, with the idea that the war would soon be over, and people would return to their homeland. As that is not the case, the full-scale war has been ongoing now for more than 2.5 years and some people returned, some have nowhere to return to, and the future is unstable. At the same time, it is also possible to see that unlike other forms of displacement, Ukrainian forced migration was not framed as a crisis in the public debate. This shows that there is capacity to receive people if there is the political will, and across countries we all see that the Ukrainians receive continued support."
