Webinar & Fundraiser -
Humanitarian responses to the 2022 Russian war on Ukraine: anthropological perspectives
7 June 14:00 (CEST)
Organiser: EASA
Co-sponsors: SIEF, AAAs Soyuz & SAE
Conveners: Elżbieta Drążkiewicz & Mariya Ivancheva
This fundraising webinar collects funds for Scholars at Risk and other foundations working with scholars escaping war and authoritarian regimes.
The 2022 invasion of Ukraine prompted the largest humanitarian crisis in Europe’s recent history. With this panel we want to use anthropological knowledge to shed some light on this current crisis: its long-duree origins and precedents, parallels and contrasts, as well as its projections into the future. Hosted by the European Association of Social Anthropologists and co-sponsored by AAA/Soyuz and SIEF, this webinar is one out of two events that will invite discussants focusing on different aspects of the crisis. We ask: What impact will this humanitarian crisis have on the political landscape not only of Ukraine but also of the whole region and the European continent? In particular we are interested in discussing:
- How can we understand the ‘selective compassion’ phenomenon when it comes to both the war and the refugee wave that emerged? How does the institutional, media, and grassroots reaction compare to other waves of military and economic warfare that have caused mass migration? What is this crisis revealing about the mechanisms generating or preventing humanitarian compassion?
- What is this crisis revealing about the current state of the aid industry: its structures, modalities, trajectories and principles? The last 20 years have shown the aid industry to be highly divided. The proliferation of actors, and the growing competition between aid providers revealed strong hierarchisation of the aid structures and the increasing frictions between new and old players, established and emerging organizations. How is this tension playing out in Ukraine? How is it shaping the response to the crisis? Are we observing a shift towards bottom-up, civilian and network led assistance? What are the pros and cons of this shift?
- When the ‘new’ Eastern European countries joined the EU not as aid recipients but as donors, most of them were strongly criticized in Brussels for their reluctance to provide support for African states, and instead prioritising the Eastern Partnership countries, in particular Ukraine. How is this trajectory influencing their current response and ability to support Ukraine? Finally, what does the current crisis means for the moral economy of aid: its global ‘principles’ but also local variants of the aid ideology. What is the furture of neutrality paradigm, especially vis-a-vis controversies surrounding the work of the IRC? , the actions of the IRC once again brought to the light the question of neutrality in humanitarian assistance. What is the future of humanitarian industry?
- What is the impact of the war and resultant mass migration in Ukraine, where the shocks of a severe post-socialist crisis of social reproduction has long been absorbed by labour migration into Europe with Ukrainians taking up precarious insecure positions in some of the most undervalued and underpaid sectors such as agriculture, construction and care work? What would a meaningful long-term strategy look like and what would be the challenges to recuperate the social fabric of the country once war is over? In what ways can the outcomes of this crisis be mitigate to prevent further exploitation of the country such as economic exploitation, brain drain or emptying towns and villages?
Speakers: Ela Drazkiewicz, Olena Fedyuk, Anna Balazs, Céline Cantat
Dr Elżbieta Drążkiewicz is a graduate of Cambridge Anthropology and she is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Sociology at the Slovak Academy of Sciences. She is an author of ‘Institutional Dreams: the Art of Managing Foreign Aid’ (Berghahn) - book analyzing Polish humanitarian and development activities in Eastern Europe and in Africa. Her expertise builds not only on extensive fieldwork but also practical experience of working with numerous NGOs and the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Dr Olena Fedyuk is an expert on transnational labour migration, distant motherhood and transnational youth, her regional focus is on Ukraine and wider EU-Eastern Partnership relations. Her work appeared in numerous academic journals, she has also directed two documentary films Currently, she is a MSCA IF fellow in a project “RightsLab: Towards Transnational Labour Rights? Temporary Work Agencies and Third Country National Workers in the EU” at the University of Padua.
Dr Anna Balazs received her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester. Her doctoral research explored how residents in the East Ukrainian city of Mariupol re-evaluate infrastructural and symbolic legacies of the Soviet past after the start of the Donbas war. Dr Balazs is currently working as a researcher at the University of Sheffield. Her research interests include temporalities of crisis and transformation, deindustrialization and the material afterlives of socialism.
Dr Céline Cantat research concerns practices and politics of migration as well as migrant solidarity. In the past she held several research positions in Sciences Po (Paris) and at the Central European University (CEU). She also acted as Academic Program Manager for CEU's Open Learning Initiatives, which focus on providing access to higher education for displaced students. Currently she servs as Academic Advisor at the Paris School of International Affairs, Sciences Po.
Chaired by Prem Kumar Rajaram (Central European University)
