A project led by Jeff Sahadeo – “Global Consequences of Displacement from Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: Space, Place and Pluralism” – has been awarded a SSHRC Connection Grant.
The project involves David Carment, David Sichinava, Milana Nikolko, and Suzanne Harris-Brandts as co-investigators, as well as James Milner, Martin Geiger, Matthew Burkard and Mustafa Alio as collaborators.
Russia’s War in Ukraine has set an entire region in motion. Millions of Ukrainians have fled in the face of violence, moving west within their country or across borders to major European cities and to Canada. Neighbouring countries in Eurasia have witnessed an influx not only of Ukrainians but also of Russians or their own citizens leaving a country under increasingly tight authoritarian rule and sanctions. Half of Ukraine’s children have already been displaced and Russian missile strikes in civilian areas across the country makes nowhere seem safe. Ukrainians who remain in their country face the question: stay or go?
The ongoing crisis of displaced communities, asylum seekers, migrant workers, and trafficked persons within Ukraine and Russia is preoccupying policymakers at national and local levels as well as international and community NGO’s and ordinary citizens. This Connections Grant will unite policymakers, academics, NGO representatives and displaced peoples themselves at a workshop hosted and livestreamed by the Global Centre for Pluralism, November 3-4, 2022. Participants will form a diffuse knowledge network, connected through a team website that will contain podcasts and teaching material online and produce conference proceedings through a special issue of Canadian Foreign Policy Journal. We face an immediate need to assess overlaps and misalignments between acute humanitarian assistance and longer-term consequences of this substantial, potentially massive, redrawing of Eastern Europe’s and Eurasia’s demographic maps and futures.