In Their Own Words: Return Decision-Making of Ukrainian Refugees in the Czech Republic and Germany

• In Event: Migration and Return amid Conflict and Resettlement in the Post-Soviet Space

Abstract

How do forcibly displaced people think about return when there is an ongoing violent conflict in their home country? What of refugees who are neither able to return nor committed to staying in refuge for prolonged periods of time? We draw on in-depth interviews with Ukrainian refugees in the Czech Republic and Germany from the summer of 2023 to investigate these questions in the light of the mass displacement due to Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

We identify two major ways of classifying and typologizing refugees’ thinking and decision-making around the choice between returning to Ukraine and remaining abroad. First dimension indicates whether an individual Ukrainian refugees has accepted that they will be staying in the country of refuge for the foreseeable future. The second dimension asks whether given refugee has cognitively updated to the fact that the homes and Ukraine they would be returning to will be very different from the lived reality of pre-invasion Ukraine. While this sentiment might be harder to measure, we consider it a key factor in return decision-making.

We also find that as the Ukrainians refugees abroad consider return, they navigate the tension between the return intentions contingent on pre-invasion perceptions of future in Ukraine and the emergent cleavages in Ukraine and in Ukrainian communities abroad. Our research revises and updates traditional theories of return decision-making that prevailingly focus on the perceived trade-off between conditions in the host and situation home countries (push and pull factors).

Authors

• Neonila Glukhodid, Northwestern U

• Matej Jungwirth, Northwestern U