Identity Change in Times of Crisis: Evidence from Ukraine

• In Event: Identity Change and Fluidity in Wartime: Evidence from Ukraine

Abstract

The nature and salience of national identity often increases dramatically during periods of political crisis. Prior work on Ukraine has shown that the Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine and the Russian seizure of Crimea and parts of the Donbas raised the political salience of ethno-linguistic identity in Ukraine and triggered an important increase of civic identification with Ukraine (Kulyk 2018, Pop-Eleches and Robertson 2018, Sasse and Lackner 2018). Since early 2020 Ukraine experienced the double shock of the Covid pandemic and the Russian war of aggression, which have upended the lives of millions of Ukrainians in often dramatic ways. Our paper focuses on the question of how these two massive crises have affected Ukrainian national identity in recent years. Our analysis builds on a series of four online public opinion surveys with Ukrainian citizens: a three-wave nationally representative panel survey during the height of the Covid pandemic (with survey waves in June-July 2020, December 2020 and June-July 2021), followed by an additional cross-section in June-October 2022 in the months following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Since these surveys included detailed and consistently worded questions about different dimensions of ethno-linguistic and national identity, as well as a series of questions about conceptions of national identity, we can analyze how the twin traumas of the pandemic and the war have shaped Ukrainian identity.

Authors

• Grigore Pop-Eleches, Princeton University

• Graeme Robertson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

• Bryn Rosenfeld, Cornell University