Making Donbas, Breaking Donbas: The Impact of Conflict Experience on Identity Shifts in the East of Ukraine^*

* The article is based on the master’s thesis research of the author, defended at the University of Tartu (Mitchnik, 2017).

ABSTRACT

This article adds qualitative insights into research investigating the interrelation of changes in socio-political attitudes and identity of civilian population under circumstances of war by comparing youth attitudes in two cities in the Donbas region of Ukraine. The theoretical lens lies with Bourdieu’s thinking tools, Brubaker’s triadic nexus, and Fox’s/ Miller-Idriss’s concept of ‘everyday nationhood’. The focus groups indicate that a stronger experience of conflict-related clashes has an impact on how negatively the researched youth groups perceive Russia politically, and the local separatist movement, and on how positively they relate to nationalising trends by the Ukrainian government.

Acknowledgements

The author is thankful to the journal’s reviewers and editors and to Rūta Valaitytė for their comments on earlier drafts of the paper. Moreover, he gratefully acknowledges the research assistance by Ulyana Egorova, who helped recruiting participants for his research and to Anastasia Dmitrichenko, who took the effort to transcribe the audio files of the focus groups.

Notes

* The article is based on the master’s thesis research of the author, defended at the University of Tartu (Mitchnik, 2017).

1 Participants were asked to provide details of their education, employment, native language, and region where they and their parents grew up.

2 At the start of every focus group, I would sketch the seating on an extra sheet of paper and allocated a Latin letter to every person in the focus group: A, B, C, D, E, G, and one time I used the letter X for a person, who was more than half an hour late. This procedure sought to strictly anonymise the data of all participants. According to these codes, I constructed the names of the participants in the empirical part. The first letter stands for the city (B for Bakhmut, K for Kramatorsk), the second part tells the number of the focus group in this city (FG1 to FG4), the third part stands for the allocated letter in the group (A, B, C, D, E, G, X), the small letter at the end for participant’s sex (m for male, f for female).

3 BFG1-Em was not from the selected cities, but from the settlement Kurdiumivka, roughly 19 km away from Bakhmut. I kept BFG1-Em in the sample, to avoid getting mistrust by the other participants by excluding one of their friends and because I assumed that FG1-Em’s background might lead to comparisons in the group conversation.

4 These questions were only visible for myself. Phrasing and order were adjusted depending on the focus group dynamics.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the Archimedes Foundation with the grant Dora Plus sub-action 1.1 (Short-term mobility).