Why Ukraine?

This open educational resource (OER) critically examines the place of Ukraine within the global history and theory of migration.

Drawing on contemporary migration studies, border theory, postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, and digital humanities, it centers Ukraine as a migration nexus.

For centuries, the lands of present-day Ukraine have been home to diverse ethnic and religious communities—Poles, Jews, Roma, Germans, among many others—as well as the Indigenous peoples of Crimea, such as the Crimean Tatars, Karaites, and Krymchaks. The region has also served as a refuge for displaced groups fleeing from the war (Ahiska (Meskhetian) Turks after 1991) or political refugees (Byelorussians after 2020). Our OER is centered around the experiences of some of these communities.

On this site, past and present movements—both voluntary and, more often, forced by imperial, national, and totalitarian regimes, as well as by local and transnational actors—intersect in complex and dynamic ways.

Migration processes are not only about population movement but also about governance, subject formation, temporality, and memory, inclusion and exclusion. These processes are both structured and structuring, shaped by institutions, infrastructures, political discourses, and individual actors, while simultaneously reconfiguring categories such as citizenship, home, sovereignty, and humanitarianism or dehumanization.

This resource invites students, educators, and scholars to explore these dynamics through the lens of Ukraine—a space too often peripheralized in mainstream migration narratives yet deeply embedded in the longue durée of European and global mobility systems.

As such, it will be of interest to advanced students and scholars in migration, nationalism and memory studies. It will also be relevant to scholars of international relations, comparative politics, sociology and human geography, think tanks, and policymakers elaborating recommendations on peacebuilding strategies, refugees and forced migration.

The concept of Ukraine as a migration nexus is not merely geographic. It signals a paradigmatic shift away from the nation-state-centered and crisis-driven frameworks that dominate migration discourse. Instead, it proposes a multi-scalar and multi-temporal perspective, attentive to imperial or totalitarian legacies, border regimes, bottom-up migration infrastructures and informal volunteering networks, shared governance, and the politics of return and belonging. It allows us to emphasize that the ethnic or religious composition of migrant or refugee flows can be very complex, and different groups can be treated differently.

This theoretical framing resonates with calls within migration studies to decenter the Global North and to historicize displacement beyond the confines of 20th-century refugee law. It also prompts us to reflect on the centrality of Eastern Europe in shaping global migration trajectories that are often overlooked in dominant narratives centered on Western destinations.

A significant part of the OER encourages readers to critically reflect on how knowledge about migrant groups is constructed, particularly through the processes of naming, counting, and researching populations that are often difficult to access, especially in extraordinary situations or war-affected societies. It further invites consideration of how these groups are subsequently represented, especially through increasing visual representations of migration and refugeehood, and how they influence public perceptions and expectations, and translate to policy discourses.