Forced displacement in Ukraine: understanding the decision-making process

ABSTRACT

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 resulted in millions of people being internally displaced and seeking refuge abroad. European countries responded with favorable socio-legal conditions and a welcoming political climate. In this paper, we are interested in how people make and rationalize their decisions and destination choices following forced displacement. The paper sheds light on the particular conditions under which Ukrainians made their migration decisions and illustrates how this case of displacement allows focusing on the decision-making process when many external constraints faced by other migrant populations are absent. The analysis draws on recently conducted qualitative interviews with internally displaced people and those displaced to several European countries. The study shows how displaced people exercise agency through migration-related decisions and choices based on specific rationalities, which contributes to the discussion on the rigid binary between forced and voluntary migration. The paper adapts the threshold approach to migration decision-making for the investigation of war-driven displacement and shows how it highlights the role of timing and affect in the decision- making process as well as its relational nature.

KEYWORDS:

• Forced displacement
• decision-making
• Ukraine
• migration

1. Introduction

Since Russia launched a full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, it is estimated that up to a third of the Ukrainian population left home, including half of the Ukrainian children. At the moment of writing, almost seven million Ukrainians seek refuge abroad, and six and a half million are internally displaced (UNHCR 2022a). According to IOM (2022), six million people have already returned home, including from abroad. The scale of the forced migration – both external and internal – triggered by Russian aggression is unprecedented in recent European history.

Besides the sheer scale and speed of the displacement, this case of forced migration is unique when it comes to socio-legal and political conditions for Ukrainian refugees abroad. The typically cited constraints and obstacles for cross-border forced migration from war-torn regions are absent or significantly reduced (e.g. de Haas 2011). The evacuation out of the severely affected or temporarily occupied regions in Ukraine remains dangerous and might include a so-called ‘filtration procedure’ by Russian forces and a long trip through Russia to safety (Human Rights Watch 2022). However, transportation from Ukraine and through Europe is legally accessible and safe. Ukrainian refugees have access to a favorable legal status of temporary protection, which offers the right to work, claim assistance, and housing support (Gerlach and Ryndzak 2022; Küçük 2023). The majority of Ukrainians displaced abroad are women, which is another unique feature of this refugee population, because most men are prohibited from leaving the country due to martial law regulations (UNHCR 2022b). Across Europe, Ukrainians escaping the war are welcomed, which is strikingly different from the 2015 refugee ‘crisis’ (Global Detention Project 2022). Internally displaced people in western and central Ukraine also experience arguably higher levels of support and solidarity than in 2014–2016, yet the housing problem remains acute (e.g. Rating 2022).

In this paper, we draw on recent qualitative research to shed light on this particular case of forced migration and contribute to our understanding of the decision-making processes regarding evacuation, internal displacement, and emigration in a conflict environment. We are interested in how people make and rationalize their decisions during the whole process of migration – pre-decisional, pre-actional, and actional phases (Kley 2011: 472). Given the favorable socio-legal and political conditions in Europe towards Ukrainians, this case of forced migration is particularly conducive to focusing on the decision-making process. When the ‘fortress of Europe’ is wide open, how do people decide where to go?

2. A note on methodology

This paper is based on the analysis of in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted during the summer of 2022. We have talked online and on the phone to nine internally displaced persons and 21 people from Ukraine displaced abroad; all were Ukrainian citizens and lived in Ukraine permanently before the full-scale invasion. We selected research participants using convenience and theoretical sampling. In the first stage, we recruited people who were easily accessible and sought them through personal networks. In the second stage, we recruited people using the snowball technique. Following this recruitment strategy, we selected research participants according to several predefined categories, which could represent different experiences of forced migration. First, potential research participants were informed about the focus of the study and completed a short questionnaire online. Then, people who met the predefined categories were selected for interviewing. There were 37 filled-out questionnaires, and 30 people were recruited for interviews.

Hence, the sample has been constructed by filling in such categories as gender, age, family composition (with or without children), region or country where people were displaced to, and considering two more categories to avoid a biased sample – the region of origin and the month of displacement. We sampled approximately the same number of people for each of the three periods of displacement – (1) February to March; (2) April to mid-May; (3) mid- May to the end of June of 2022.

Among 30 interviewed people, three were men: two were externally, and one was internally displaced. The age of interlocutors ranged from 21 to 76. Interview partners resided at the moment of the interview in Ukraine’s western and central regions or different European countries: Poland, Moldova, Germany, Switzerland, Lithuania, Italy, Sweden, and the UK. Settlements of approximately half of our interview partners were either under occupation or immediately at the frontline. We understand internal displacement as leaving the region (oblast) where the person used to reside before the Russian invasion, irrespective of whether they have the official status of an internally displaced person. Despite comparative provisions under the temporary protection status in all countries in question, there are significant differences between countries and sometimes even between localities when it comes to administrative practices and effective rights that displaced people from Ukraine have access to. However, this is beyond the scope of this paper.

We conducted interviews together with a small local team of interviewers trained to work with the interview guide. All interviews were conducted in Ukrainian or Russian, depending on the interlocutor’s preferred language of communication, transcribed and coded using Atlas.ti program for qualitative data analysis. We generated theoretical codes based on the primary conceptual framework of the migration threshold approach (van der Velde and van Naerssen 2011, 2015b) and conducted open coding of the interview transcripts.

Any study of mobility is biased toward those on the move if the ‘immobile’ population is not included in the sample. In this study, we wanted to explore how people decide where to go once they choose migration as the preferred course of action, so we focused on people who left Ukraine or decided to stay within national borders yet left their region of residence.

We did not include people who never left their region of residence, closer to the front line, for ethical and safety reasons.

This study addresses forced displacement in an ongoing war. The project followed strict data security and confidentiality protocol, which meant no personal data was stored or transferred without persons’ informed consent. To conduct the empirical work with care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2012), we developed collaborative strategies to ensure the emotional safety of our interlocutors and the team. Among them were several meetings led by a psychologist to devise coping strategies before the empirical work and workshop the outcomes after the interviews. We used an elaborate distress protocol to cope with strong emotions during interviews. The research design remained flexible throughout the study, and the interview guide was reevaluated and adjusted during the intermediate workshops, which was necessary to grasp the unfolding situation.

3. A note on concepts

Our research is based on the primary assumption that migration can never be characterized as entirely forced or voluntary (Erdal and Oeppen 2018; Steinberg 2015; Charron 2020). Besides that, one cannot assume or generalize the conditions under which people leave their homes, and such generalizations are not consequential to the forthcoming journey or ‘arrival’, and neither is it explanatory of migration decision-making. Even though all of our interlocutors left home because they were forced to by the war, they all exercised agency in one way or another and made many decisions that fundamentally altered their journeys (Yarar and Karakaşoğlu 2022). The concept of forced displacement reflects the lived experience of being put in the position of having to consider migration for safety. It is also essential to recognize the effects of forced displacement on the person’s life, which is reflected in deep and continuous psychological trauma and socio-economic hardships that often have intergenerational consequences (Becker and Ferrara 2019). Finally, the concept of forced displacement carries political power, and its continuous application in the political realm directly affects the status of the displaced and, consequently, every aspect of life at the destination. However, in our opinion, the rigid binary of forced and voluntary displacement does not contribute to understanding migration decisions or the conditions under which they take place (Erdal and Oeppen 2018; Bakewell 2021; Charron 2020). To experience forced displacement is to have one’s future dispossessed (Ramsay 2020; Brun 2016; Baas and Yeoh 2019). When plans and decisions are made under conditions of such ‘suspended temporality’, these are not just agentic but political acts (Ramsay 2017). In this paper, we recognize the forced nature of the displacement in Ukraine, which transpires through every interview, but we focus the analysis on the decisions and choices that displaced people make that give shape to the migration as such.

Besides challenging the premise of no volition in forced displacement, we are interested in understanding the process and identifying the significant moments in migration decision- making. There are several approaches developed to understand how migrants make decisions. Among some of the most influential is the economic sociological rational choice theory (e.g. Portes 1995; De Jong and Gardner 1981), the social network and social capital approach (e.g. Faist 1997; Pries 2004; Haug 2008), the theory of migration drivers, otherwise called ‘push–pull plus’ (Van Hear et al. 2018), and the aspiration/ability model (Carling 2002; for comparable ‘motivation – opportunity – ability’ framework, see Zwick 2022). Given that our focus is on war-driven displacement, neither of these approaches helps us answer the question how decisions are made along the migration journey, provided that the fundamental reason for migration is determined. In this respect, the literature that focuses on the ‘migration journey’ as such is helpful (e.g. Crawley et al. 2018; Collyer 2007; Schapendonk and Steel 2014; Benezer and Zetter 2015; Schapendonk et al. 2021) with its focus on migration as a process that includes multiple decisions, periods of mobility and immobility, and does not end once the supposed destination is reached.

For this case of forced migration and to answer our research questions, we found the ‘migration thresholds’ approach proposed by van der Velde and van Naerssen (2011, 2015b) particularly useful. They refer to a set of psychological barriers that individuals must overcome mostly during the pre-actional phase in migration and suggest three thresholds – mental border, locational, and trajectory – that can be revisited once crossed. The mental border threshold is located in the ‘pre-decisional’ stage (Koikkalainen and Kyle 2015: 757) and refers to the moment when the ‘border’ between what van der Velde and van Naerssen (2011: 221) call the ‘space of belonging’ and the ‘space of indifference’ is redrawn so that migration is considered as a viable option to resolve whatever problem or dissatisfaction a person faces, ‘something that might potentially bring a positive change’ (Mallett and Hagen-Zanker 2018: 343). Depending on how and, most importantly, when this first threshold has been crossed, the consequent decisions – on when, how, and where to leave – are contingent. Van der Velde and van Naerssen (2011, 2015a) propose to differentiate the locational threshold, which refers to the decision to move as well as the destination, and the trajectory threshold, which concerns the route.

The migration threshold approach was initially developed to explain decision-making processes in European cross-border labor migration (Van der Velde and van Naerssen 2011). However, this approach, unlike others mentioned above, has explanatory power and is abstract enough to be applied in the case of war-driven forced displacement to show how people make decisions when leaving home (country). The threshold approach has been applied to different contexts and types of mobility, which made it more robust (contributions in the edited volume Van der Velde and van Naerssen 2015b; Mallett and Hagen-Zanker 2018). Notably, the thresholds were shown to be non-sequential and contingent on the broader context of the decision-making and the specific situation of the social group on the move. Relying on the concept of ‘bounded rationality’ (Simon 1982), the authors of the approach included individual, social, and cultural aspects that needed to be considered to grasp the extent of information and reasoning pivotal to the decision-making process in migration (Van der Velde and van Naerssen 2011, 2015a). In this paper, we propose to adapt the threshold approach for investigating decision-making in war-driven forced displacement (Mallett and Hagen-Zanker 2018). The analysis shows that to understand how displaced people make decisions, we need to pay further attention to the role of the affect and situate the decisions within a wide range of social relations.

4. Decision-making process in forced displacement

This study has been designed to bring forward different routes, choices, and accounts of decision-making. In the rest of this paper, we reconstruct the decision-making narratives along the three thresholds, reflecting on the importance of timing and location in this process.

1. Beginning of the journey: The mental border threshold

Every interlocutor described the beginning of the Russian invasion in February 2022 as a shocking and traumatic event, which left people struggling to devise a plan of action. The initial fear, uncertainty, and shock drove many to leave their homes during the initial days of the invasion: ‘I was in such a state, I had panic attacks, and I didn’t fully understand what was going on, and I wasn’t interested specifically in [planning to] leave. I was all over the news at the time’ (Woman, 27, Kyiv – Sweden, left in February 2022). This young woman left Kyiv with her child on the second day of the war to move in with relatives on the outskirts, reflecting how numb and easily swayed she was in those initial days. Two days later, her mother decided for the whole family to join an organized group going to Sweden.

For others, these initial days meant a paralyzing state of being unable to make a decision or follow someone else’s.

The mental border threshold is conceptualized as a moment when a person includes the ‘space of indifference’, usually on the other side of the ‘border’, be it regional or national border, into the mental space of searching for ways to improve one’s living conditions. According to van der Velde and van Naerssen (2011), this process is influenced by various material, social, cultural, and personal conditions. Applying this approach to the case of war- driven forced displacement means that another important aspect explaining how and when this threshold is crossed needs to be brought to the forefront, namely the affect.

Making the decision to leave in acute circumstances (Crawley and Hagen-Zanker 2019) is shaped by the affect, pushing a person over the mental border threshold. The ‘turning points’, recounted in interviews, when leaving was transformed from a distant possibility into a concrete option, usually concerned directly witnessing the war – an explosion, a missile flying over the house or damaging the house, or another shocking sign of war.

Additionally, the question is how the ‘space of belonging’ is understood and the extent to which it is threatened. Following the critique proposed by Sandberg and Pijpers (2015) to the migration threshold approach on the rigid understanding of borders, the design of this study combines migration decisions that pertain to movements across national and regional borders. The war in Ukraine that started in 2014 entered its full-scale stage in 2022 with bombardment across the country. Our interlocutors who left in the first weeks of the invasion crossed the mental border threshold fast because they felt acute fear and uncertainty and perceived their place of residence, their region, or the whole country as unsafe.

‘Borders’, especially mental borders, are sometimes dramatically redefined under the effect of changing circumstances. Two women in our sample changed their initial decision to stay in the country as internally displaced because they also felt unsafe at the new location. A mother of two daughters from the quickly occupied southern region left home on the first day of the war, shortly before the doors of the railway station were blocked, fearing attacks by the Russian forces. Under pressure from her grown-up daughter, she made the decision to move quickly, fearing occupation, but the decision to eventually leave the country instead of staying in Lviv, her first temporary destination, was made a week later when she saw armed men in the shelter for the displaced:

We woke up in the morning in this school gym and saw police running through the building looking for diversionists. Turns out, while there was an air raid alarm, a strange person got into the building, who was identified as a diversionist. He was then caught with a drone in his possession and taken by the security service. So, it was also unsafe in Lviv, and we decided to go to Poland. (Woman, 49, Kherson – Poland, left in February 2022)

This incident made her perceive even the most Western region of the country as unsafe, facilitating her cross-border mobility. Although multiple aspects need to be considered to understand the choice between staying in the country or crossing the national borders, for example, social and family connections, all interlocutors abroad perceived the whole country as a dangerous place under Russian bombardment and the threat of occupation.

Movement from occupied regions follows its own timing. We interviewed five persons from quickly occupied southern regions, who had, at best, a couple of hours to leave or were immobilized until the first window of opportunity months later. A young man from a city under occupation reflects on the changing conditions, slowly growing sense of insecurity, and the eventual moment when the decision to leave was made:

At first, we had the opportunity to control the order in the city. […] [The Russians] have not brought their [people] yet. In principle, it was somehow calmer. Maybe even for a while, the city was safer than when the police were there because people took the initiative to protect the city directly from looters, crime, and so on. […] [Then,] they brought in or found these collaborators, kidnapped the mayor, and replaced him with a new [leader]. They forbade patrolling the city and began driving around drunk on APCs or URALs, singing songs. As you understand, any security and safety ended right there. And then other things started to happen … (Man, 31, occupied town – Kyiv, left in May 2022)

Russian soldiers visited his home at night with, what he perceived, a threat based on his political activities as a community leader. This was when he started looking for an opportunity to leave: ‘My colleague collected the necessary amount of fuel, he had seats in the car, we got in touch and left as soon as we had the opportunity’. They waited until a corridor toward the Ukrainian positions opened and crossed the frontline.

For interlocutors who left later in the war, it was more important to imagine the journey as possible and suppose they would have support at the destination before they could make the decision (Koikkalainen et al. 2020: 4). To an extent, this is what Koikkalainen and Kyle (2015: 759) refer to as engaging in ‘cognitive migration’. The decision becomes easier even if everything about life in displacement remains unknown, but the person can place someone they know along the route or at the destination. This could be a family member, a friend, a distant acquaintance, or an organization. However, this is not a prerequisite for people to cross the mental border threshold.

Our analysis shows significant differences in the decision-making process of those who left earlier and those who left later in the war. Affect plays a profound role and influences the initial (non)decision on whether to move or not. So far, we only showed how dramatic emotional reactions triggered migration. In contrast, one interlocutor reflected on his hope that the war will end soon, which postponed his decision to leave:

We never thought the war could last more than two-three days. So, we went to the store and bought groceries for two-three days; then, these three days passed, and there was no more food in the store. So, we had to go look for more food. Then we thought the war would probably last another two-three weeks. […] We bought groceries for two or three weeks, but the war continued. No one ever expected that. (Man, 53, occupied town – Bulgaria, left in April 2022)

Hence, some interlocutors crossed the mental threshold rapidly under the effect of fear and shock, while others postponed their eventual decision to leave, relying on hope – a reaction that we could assume was also prevalent among people who decided to stay. Interestingly, some interview partners who left home in the early weeks of the invasion conceded that if they ‘stuck it out’ for longer, they would probably decide not to migrate. Hence, the normalization of the war, which occurs with time, is another temporal aspect of the decision- making process.

2. The journey: Location and trajectory threshold

As van der Velde and van Naerssen (2015a: 268) recognized, the thresholds (mental border, locational, and trajectory) are ‘relatively dependent on one another and are not always distinguishable’. Once the initial threshold has been crossed, putting migration as a thinkable option on the table, the decisions on when, how, and where to go become contingent. More than that, our interlocutors had to (re)make and adjust their decisions along the route, which is ‘always in the making’, while ‘there is no destination to speak of’ (Leung 2015; Schapendonk 2015). In this part of the paper, we want to highlight the important role played by the unpredictability of the journey and by social relations when it comes to locational and trajectory thresholds.

The decision when to go is not always made once all three thresholds are crossed. As it was made clear above, leaving in acute circumstances meant that people made further decisions fast or en route (Collyer 2007). The woman from the occupied south quoted above, who left on the first day of the invasion, did not know where she was going when boarding the train, only that it was taking her to safer western regions of the country:

So, we stood in line [to buy tickets] at the train station, and when the cashier asked where we wanted to go, we told her to give us whatever tickets she had. We got one ticket to Kyiv, although we were three people. […] The Kyiv train arrived, and the conductor said: ‘We are not going to Kyiv, we’ll go to Mykolaiv. And then there should be a train to Lviv’. People came in. Nobody checked the tickets. (Woman, 49, Kherson – Poland, left in February 2022)

Benezer and Zetter (2015: 297) argue that the journey itself can also be a ‘profoundly formative and transformative experience’. For several interlocutors who left early, the journey was where they witnessed war:

As it turned out, we were going toward the Russian military. […] The first thing that happened, something that turned me upside down, was that we were driving through a road section, and […] two hours later, […] this bridge was blown up. Then we read in the news that the Russian occupiers fired at several cars with civilians. We understood that we were separated by about four-five hours from that moment […] we could have been in the place of those people! (Woman, 29, Kyiv – Germany, left in February 2022)

This young woman left Kyiv on the first day of the war with her friends, and by the time they made their way out of the Kyiv region, they changed their initial plan to go to Lviv and instead drove abroad. These experiences during the journey significantly changed the trajectory of their migration. Hence, where to and how to go is not necessarily predetermined at the moment when people leave, and the answers to both questions can change along the route.

This can happen not only because of changing circumstances and conditions but also because of social connections made en route. Several interlocutors changed their decision on the location or trajectory, especially beyond the Ukrainian borders, based on the information shared with them by their accidental travel companions:

On the train [to Przemyśl], we met a woman from Kyiv. She offered to call her son [who worked in Poland], so that he could find volunteers to pick us up or help us choose a destination. So, she called her son, and he found us a car. We arrived in Poland, and [these volunteers] met us and helped us with border control. […] We did not sleep, did not eat, we could not think. We just got into the car and went with them. They said we were going to [name of town] to a hotel. [After a couple of hours] I woke up in the car and saw Polish highways with high fences. I got scared about where we were taken and thought about human trafficking, but nothing happened. (Woman, 49, Kherson – Poland, left in February 2022)

With over 80% of the adult displaced population abroad being women (UNHCR 2022b), human trafficking is a risk recognized by women.

Having made the point that decisions are made differently in acute circumstances of the war- driven forced migration, often seeming like non-decisions, we concede that most interlocutors who left home later (during the second and third periods in the sample) did so once they successfully crossed locational and trajectory threshold settling on the destination and route. In order to do that, interview participants usually found people to make the journey with or people at the destination who could provide support. For example, one woman from Odesa left at the end of April after arranging direct transportation to her destination in Germany, where she was promised assistance by the local authorities due to a former professional engagement: ‘In Germany, they told me that we would have free housing. Children will be in school. I will have a job’ (Woman, 44, Odesa – Germany, left in April 2022).

Particularly under conditions of the travel ban for most men on leaving the country, women were responsible for children’s safety, which often transpired as the responsibility to leave. Hence, women’s agency sometimes seems constrained by this responsibility (Hoang 2011), while women’s interests are misplaced with children’s interests (Stock 2012). At the same time, this might be a false simplification that erases other ways that gender dynamics reveal themselves under conditions of rapid war-driven displacement:

[M]y husband called and said: ‘People are leaving. Get in and go!’ I said: ‘Could it wait?’ It was not like that, yet, well, not that [dangerous]. He said: ‘Then it will be too late. And then, who are you gonna go with?’ […]. He called me in the evening, and I started packing, but I didn’t realize until the morning that I was really going. That’s how we made that decision. Well, my husband made it, and we obeyed and went. (Woman, 51, Odesa – Poland, left in March 2022)

This interview partner accepted her husband’s decision made from afar (he was stuck in the occupied region), despite her previous reservations: ‘I didn’t understand where I could go. Well, if there was somewhere to go, I might have planned earlier, in case it suddenly got worse, and then I would go. But I had no one to go to’. She still ‘had no one to go to’ when together with her two children, she joined her husband’s friends she had never met before, but this opportunity accelerated the decision-making. She joined people that she could trust by proxy, and the destination, as well as the route, was predetermined.

The migration journey is unpredictable and often determines the outcome of the mobility (Belloni 2020; Horst and Grabska 2015). On the way to the border, the family that the woman joined had to turn around because one of the children got unexpectedly and seriously ill. She had to make new decisions on the timing, destination, and trajectory, which led her to Poland instead of the original joint plan to go to Moldova, relying on new information and social connections made along the route.

The reconstructed narratives in this study show that decision-making is rarely individual, even when the displaced person is single and lives alone. Migration decisions are always made in relation with and to others (e.g. Hoang 2011). It would also be simplistic to reduce this complex process to traditional power relations within families, like the primary stage of decision-making in the example above. Instead, the migration decisions emerge in complex relations, which might include reverse family power dynamics, where children have a strong negotiating position, accidental actors, such as travel companions or volunteers, or unintentional actors, such as a Russian occupation officer whose intimidating home visit pushed an interlocutor to find a way to escape the region.

The responsibility to leave the territory perceived as unsafe for children’s sake dominates narratives of people with children. However, women actively negotiate the destination and the timing of migration vis-a-vis their families:

My husband and my parents had been trying to get me to leave since day one. Well, as soon as the war started. They told me: ‘Take the child and go, go!’. I was saying no, I’m staying home! […] My husband suggested Germany or France, [said]: ‘Go anywhere, anywhere you want’. But I realized that I needed to be closer to home. I realized that I would only go to Poland. So I stayed not very far from the border (smiling). […] I agreed to leave and said I’ll leave on Thursday, not before. [The husband said:] ‘Why not earlier? Why not go sooner?’ I said no, I will not hurry! I need three days to pack. (Woman, 41, Odesa – Poland, left in May 2022)

For her, both staying and leaving were expressions of being a good mother. Her grown-up child, a soldier, was missing in action at the moment of her migration and the interview. She left the country for the sake of the younger child but was ready to cross the border from Poland back into Ukraine when her older child was found. Another interlocutor agreed to leave Kyiv after long negotiations with her daughter but refused to leave the country, fearing that her younger child would be unable to integrate into a foreign school system. Similar to Paul’s (2015) account of Filipina migrants negotiating gender norms and migration aspirations, displaced Ukrainian women might reframe the expectation to migrate for children’s safety and negotiate the migration conditions.

Our sample with three male interview partners does not allow us to conduct a gendered comparison but provides different accounts of decision-making. These accounts suggest that for women, the responsibility of childcare sometimes includes the responsibility to migrate under the conditions of the travel ban for men; while men are rather expected to stay as defenders of the family, the property, and even the country: ‘Obviously, we let women and children leave first, while we remained in the city. […]I stayed behind to protect my territory, so to speak. The apartment. It would be a shame to leave it while it was not bombed or burned yet’ (Man, 53, occupied town – Bulgaria, left in April 2022). Male interlocutors also voiced feeling disempowered by the assistance and guidance of volunteers that they relied on during the migration: ‘I couldn’t believe that this was happening, that I would be running away and asking someone for help. Well, asking volunteers for answers, for guidance. Well, I am used to relying on myself, aren’t I?’ (Man, 29, Odesa – Poland, left in May 2022).

Facing these traditional gender expectations of being a defender and a self-reliant head of a household, our interlocutors struggled with the migration decision, particularly the two men who left the country. They internalized the traditional gender expectations and reflected on how they were seemingly falling short. The young father of three quoted above emphasized the role of his family in the decision-making process:

My friends, parents, and relatives pushed me [towards the decision to leave the country]. And my wife. I could leave Ukraine legally, that’s a big plus. I could help my wife. So I made the decision. I listened to the people who advised me to take my wife and myself abroad for a while and see what would happen. [Later,] I realized that I really made the right choice at that time. I listened to my heart and to those people who told me I needed to leave. (Man, 29, Odesa – Poland, left in May 2022)

His wife wanted to go to Germany, but he decided that Poland would be a better destination ‘not only for the route but also for life’. He wanted to stay close to Ukraine and, at the same time, imagined it easier to integrate in Poland than in Germany. The decision-making process is a reconstruction of the past through a moment in the present. This also means it extends beyond the moment when the decision has been made. In this case, the decision seems to have been made under pressure from the relatives, yet, unlike in the account above from a woman who was convinced to leave by her husband, the person takes credit for the right decision, which allows him to regain some level of control.

Our interlocutors sometimes regret, second-guess, and actively contradict their decisions. In the context of the rapid war-driven migration, the initial sense of disempowerment and helplessness might be coped with through various strategies of taking control back at the destination. An interesting example of this is the refusal of one interlocutor to learn the language, establish social connections, or settle in any other way at the destination, which was forced onto her by her mother: ‘For the first three or three and a half months here, I experienced this utter protest. I did not want to be here, I would not learn the language. I am quick with languages, but I really did not want to be here! Not in this particular country, but generally outside Ukraine’ (Woman, 27, Kyiv – Sweden, left in February 2022).

3. What decisions

The interviews suggest that the kind of decisions people make depends on whether one has children or not, whether the whole family can leave, or some family members stay behind, on the emotional state at the moment, on previous experiences of displacement or traveling abroad, and on the available opportunities, which one might think about in terms of social capital. With a focus on the mobile population, family relations are portrayed as more often enabling than constraining migration. Given the explorative nature of the study, there are few things that we could say with certainty when it comes to the connection between personal or situational attributes and choices of the destination. For example, our interlocutors with ethnic or linguistic connections to neighboring countries went to the said countries (Moldova, Bulgaria). Similarly, past experiences or social and family connections might prompt the person to go to these more or less familiar places. At the same time, there is also an example among our interviews where no family connections among several were utilized, while the person – an elderly single woman – eventually chose a different country, where she has never been before as her destination. Additionally, we could not draw definitive conclusions about significant differences between people who left the country or stayed as IDPs and not within their decision-making process. However, around 88% of adult Ukrainians displaced abroad are women (UNHCR 2022b), and 60% of the adult internally displaced population is female (UN Women 2022).

Besides that, interviews show that people are afraid of occupation. With time, this becomes one of the main rationalities for people to start moving. People displaced from occupied regions were either channeled by the Russian forces along one route towards the Ukrainian army or through occupied Donetsk or Crimea towards Russia. In the latter case, men could legally leave the Ukrainian territory but had to undergo dangerous and criminal filtration procedures in Russia or Russia-occupied territories.

Two persons we interviewed have been displaced for the second or third time since the war started in 2014. A woman who left Donetsk for another city in Eastern Ukraine in 2014 and seven months later had to move again once she realized that the war would not end soon wanted to make a better plan this time around. Although she said that the decision to leave abroad was made on the first day of the full-scale invasion, it took her two months to devise a plan, organize a group, and evacuate a bus full of people to a country that promised what Mallett and Hagen-Zanker (2018: 349) call ‘a viable future’.

Besides the displaced for the second or third time, several people forcibly displaced abroad considered changing the country or region where they migrated to since February 2022. These were the two groups explicitly engaged in long-term rationalizations in their decision- making processes. For example, better education opportunities for children (going abroad) or yearning for meaningful social relations (staying in Ukraine) are some reasons for making destination choices. The interlocutors abroad considered changing their current country or region to seek better social provision and housing opportunities, which is sometimes derogatorily called ‘asylum-shopping’ (Bauloz et al. 2015), but all of them concluded that it was not worth the effort.

While the dominant discourse of return commands that the eventual homecoming for refugees is desired, the only interlocutors who explicitly plan to stay where they are, are those who mobilized future-oriented and even imaginative thinking when justifying the choice of destination and those who have nowhere to return, due to destruction and occupation. These might be retrospective rationalizations of the choices with an orientation toward the future at the destination. Future orientation and creative imagination are important for the success of the migration. Forcibly displaced are typically not given space to think positively and imaginatively about their futures (Kyle et al. 2020). At the same time, the normative public discourse of return in Ukraine dictates that conceiving of displacement as a way to seek a ‘viable’ or even better future is unspeakable, hence marginalizing.

5. Concluding remarks

The paper shows that forcibly displaced people in a rapid, war-driven migration exercise agency through migration-related decisions and choices. The case of forced displacement from Ukraine makes such choices especially unobstructed by external circumstances of border-crossing or obtaining legal status due to legal conditions created for Ukrainian migrants through visa-free travel and temporary protection status. Consequently, affective, temporal, and relational aspects of the decision-making processes come to the forefront. At the same time, the government restrictions preventing legal migration for most men indicated that women with children were compelled to migrate as an extension of their childcare responsibilities. Focusing on the migrants’ narratives, we showed examples of how women negotiate this expectation in terms of destination or timing and cope with the fallout, and we showed how men in our sample struggle to reconcile their choices with gender expectations.

The analysis in this paper illustrates several important aspects of the decision-making process, which could complement the migration threshold approach developed by Van der Velde and van Naerssen (2011). First of all, affect permeates and guides people’s decisions and actions. The strong emotions of fear, anger, uncertainty, and hope, among others, are equally consequential and need to be taken seriously if we aim to understand decision- making just like economic, social, and cultural aspects.

Second, the decision-making process is relational. Decisions emerge within relations – with people near and far – and in interactions, where information is exchanged. As such, the affective aspect of relations becomes even more apparent. Together, emotions and relations are part of the ‘decision-making field’ that van der Velde and van Naerssen (2015a: 273) propose to explore within a ‘holistic material-emotional approach’ to migration (Hoerder 2002: 20).

Finally, this study includes both externally and internally displaced persons and fails to detect any significant differences in the decision-making process that transpires through their interviews. By starting the research from the population on the move, instead of the population that arrived, usually in a Western country, we could decenter the international border regime as the only or even primary obstacle along the migration route.

Further research could benefit from a more targeted sample to reduce the diversity of cases, explore certain rationalities in-depth, or look specifically at how the decision to return or stay is made.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Center for Governance and Culture in Europe, University of St. Gallen.