Foreword

If migration were merely the study of spatial movement and settlement, it might not be worth the effort. Yet migration and mobility studies are more than that. They relate to the cultural, economic and political aspects of covering socially relevant distance. Seen in this way, studies on migration and mobility provide a lens for far reaching societal concepts, such as the governance of people and territory, home, borders and boundaries, sovereignty and membership. This incomplete list of topics relevant for the study of migration helps us reflect on how we should study migration and displacement.

To exemplify the ways in which we study migration by using the example of Ukraine in a historical perspective is an ingenious move by the editor and authors of this Open Educational Resource (OER). For this endeavor defies the neat categorizations of South-South, North-North or South-North migration. Instead, readers and students of migration are invited to follow various paths intersecting different topics. Ukraine is thus much more than a geographical location – it is a migration nexus.

Any kind of migration study has to observe the need for observers to categorize social phenomena into groups and other entities. It seems that humans are hard-wired to make distinctions with the help of such categorizations. These social constructions are not innocuous; they are highly relevant for understanding the distribution of power between and within groups, states, regional entities, such as the European Union (EU), as well as global social inequalities. The migration categories created and imposed are thus subject to dispute and contestation.

Against this background it is worth uncovering the specificity of Ukraine as a migration nexus. Ukraine has been a major conflict zone in Eastern Europe, with implications for all of Europe and beyond. Of great significance here is that the nexus not only points to people crossing the borders of states, but that changing state borders cut across groups of people. The crossing and the redrawing of borders are dynamic processes. Contemporary migration and mobility cannot be conceptualized without considering the emergence, consolidation, and contestation of nation states. It is the borders of nation states that enable social closure toward the world outside and some sort of social cohesion within. Without such nation-state borders there would be mobility but no migration. The opening and closing of state borders, and how they divide and unify people, are thus contingent historical processes – one of the many puzzles that this resource helps us to address and reflect upon.

Thomas Faist
Bielefeld, April 2025