Abstract
The study of identities struggles to capture the moments and dynamics of identity change. A crisis moment provides a rare insight into such processes. This paper traces the political identities of the inhabitants of a region at war – the Donbas – on the basis of original survey data that cover the four parts of the population that once made up this region: the population of the Kyiv-controlled Donbas, the population of the self-declared “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic,” the internally displaced, and those who fled to the Russian Federation. The survey data map the parallel processes of a self-reported polarization of identities and the preservation or strengthening of civic identities. Language categories matter for current self-identification, but they are not cast in narrow ethnolinguistic terms, and feeling “more Ukrainian” and Ukrainian citizenship include mono- and bilingual conceptions of native language (i.e. Ukrainian and Russian).
Highlights
The recent political developments in Ukraine—mass protests, regime change, and war—widen the relevance of this case for theorizing about change and continuity of identities and cleavages
The analysis presented in this article proceeds in three steps: First, this article presents the descriptive insights of the four-part survey—both with regard to the question combining a more general wording of the identity categories and a selfreported change compared to the pre-war period and with regard to the self-reported changes in the identification as a “Ukrainian citizen.”
It is striking that Ukrainian citizenship is by far the most prevalent self-reported identity in the Kyiv-controlled Donbas and among the IDPs
Summary
The recent political developments in Ukraine—mass protests, regime change, and war—widen the relevance of this case for theorizing about change and continuity of identities and cleavages. The likelihood of self-identifying as “more Ukrainian” increases across the three models when a respondent reports Ukrainian or both Ukrainian and Russian as his or her native language(s).
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