No longer a citizen. Dispossession in Eastern Ukraine
ISBN
9781003382607
Type
book section
Date Issued
2023
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Catherine Wanner
Abstract
This chapter focuses on people who have been displaced and/or resided under occupation in Eastern Ukraine following Russian involvement since 2014. The two groups of people affected by the war often overlap, since many among those initially displaced eventually returned. The chapter argues that displaced people and residents under occupation have not only been dispossessed of their land and home but have also been dispossessed of their citizenship. Interviews with displaced people and residents of the occupied territories in Eastern Ukraine conducted between 2020 and 2021 show how viscerally people experience the absence of the Ukrainian state in the occupied territories and how it results in the suspension of their citizenship rights. The occupation presents a particular kind of dispossession, which does not necessarily or immediately mean the dispossession of property, land, or the right to own. The occupied territory becomes a container where people, now dispossessed of their rights as Ukrainian citizens, are under the sovereignty of a non-democratic military regime, which attempts to draw legitimacy from minimal social provisions to the population. Hence, dispossession of citizenship under occupation creates a space where citizenship is undone and redone against the will of citizens.
Book title
Dispossession. Anthropological Perspectives on Russia’s War Against Ukraine
Publisher
Routledge
Publisher place
New York
Contact Email Address
oleksandra.tarkhanova@unisg.ch