ABSTRACT
Since the Euromaidan protests of 2013–2014, Ukrainian political and civil society has been defined by the idea of self-organization: if someone has the ability to do something, and that thing needs to be done, then the person should simply do it. This concept is applied far beyond political activism and now permeates Ukrainian society. When Russia’s war in Ukraine began in 2014, mass numbers of people were displaced from the Donets’k and Luhans’k regions, as well as from Crimea. This chapter argues that self-organization has been a significant response to war for the past eight years, even pre-empting the work of government bodies and international organizations. While forcibly displaced people experience various kinds of loss—dispossession of their land and homes and a concurrent sense of abandonment by the Ukrainian state—they also participate in processes of re-creation and rebuilding through self-organization. Based on interviews with Ukrainians working with international organizations serving internally displaced people (IDPs) from 2021 and interviews with IDPs from 2014 to 2016, this chapter explores the various forms of self-organization as it developed in Ukraine before the February 2022 invasion.
