Fellows 2017
EMMA RIMPILÄINEN
School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography/University of Oxford
Bucerius Ph.D. Fellow
States of Displacement: Involuntary Migrants from Donbas in Ukraine and Russia
ABSTRACT
This project examines how the people displaced by the violence in Donbas, Eastern Ukraine navigate legal ambiguities in Russia and Ukraine. The case is particularly interesting, since the national border has thus far been relatively insignificant to local people and their understanding of their rights to movement, and because forced migration from Donbas is intertwined with labour migration. Looking at how the forced migrants from Donbas make sense of their own movement and how the states involved relate to this migration contributes to our understanding of migration regimes and states in the post-socialist space.
BIOGRAPHY
Emma's research project attends to the experiences of displaced people from Donbas, Eastern Ukraine, living in Ukraine and Russia. Regulating migration is arguably one of the key functions of sovereignty, which makes state practice visible. The research zooms in on the state-migration nexus in Ukraine and Russia, observing a “single-origin” population across two different regimes of governance and citizenship in order to theorise the relations between these post-Soviet states and their subjects. Looking at how the forced migrants from Donbas make sense of their own movement and how the states involved relate to this mobility contributes to our understanding of migration regimes and states in the post-Soviet space.
PUBLICATION
Emma Rimpiläinen: "Victims, Villains, or Geopolitical Tools? Representations of Donbas Displacement in Ukrainian and Russian Government Media", Europe-Asia Studies, 72:3, 481-504, DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2019.1672622, 2020
Available open access at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09668136.2019.1672622)
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