2018/03/29 by Gwendolyn Sasse, Alice Lackner · 4 citations
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Eastern European Communism and Reforms #Linguistics, Language Diversity, and Identity #Soviet and Russian History
paper · doi:10.1080/1060586x.2018.1452209
openalex publication_date 2018/03/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/26
The study of identities struggles to capture the moments and dynamics of identity change. A crisis moment provides a rare insight into such processes. This paper traces the political identities of the inhabitants of a region at war – the Donbas – on the basis of original survey data that cover the four parts of the population that once made up this region: the population of the Kyiv-controlled Donbas, the population of the self-declared “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic,” the internally displaced, and those who fled to the Russian Federation. The survey data map the parallel processes of a self-reported polarization of identities and the preservation or strengthening of civic identities. Language categories matter for current self-identification, but they are not cast in narrow ethnolinguistic terms, and feeling “more Ukrainian” and Ukrainian citizenship include mono- and bilingual conceptions of native language (i.e. Ukrainian and Russian).