Paper short abstract

This paper shows how war anxiety, as part of a broader affective governance that includes the deployment of notions of duty, loyalty, and “comfort refugees,” shapes East–West mobility imaginaries and decisions among Estonians at home and abroad.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how long-standing anticipatory fears related to Russia shape East–West mobility imaginaries and moral evaluations among Estonians both at home and abroad. Drawing on interviews and audiovisual extracts from an ongoing documentary research with Estonian migrants conducted primarily before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the paper argues that war anxiety should be understood not as a sudden reaction to geopolitical rupture but as a historically sedimented affective condition that has long structured decisions to leave, stay, or return.

For many interlocutors, migration to Western Europe was framed as a search for “freedom”—not only economic or lifestyle freedom, but also relief from a persistent affective atmosphere of stress, vigilance, and insecurity associated with living in close proximity to Russian state power. Mobility in post-EU-accession Europe has often been romanticised and admired in public discourse. At the same time, it has also been accompanied by more subtle moral evaluations, in which migrants may be labelled as “comfort refugees,” implicitly contrasted with those who remain, or positioned within quiet debates about responsibility, loyalty, and collective endurance.

The paper highlights how these ambivalent judgements operate as a form of affective governance, regulating mobility through emotions such as fear, guilt, and duty rather than formal policy alone. By situating contemporary debates within longer affective histories of post-socialist insecurity, the paper shows how conditional privilege and polarised imaginaries of belonging were already in place before 2022, and how the war has since intensified—rather than fundamentally transformed—these affective and moral regimes of mobility.

Paper short abstract

Ethnography of Lithuanian lifestyle mobility in Fuerteventura shows how war anxiety and “escape” framings recast “better life” projects as morally contested safety-building. Among mothers, care provides a moral rationale for longer-term settlement, shaping how guilt and anxiety are negotiated.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how war anxiety reshapes Lithuanian lifestyle mobilities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with lifestyle migrants, digital nomads, and seasonal residents in Fuerteventura (2021–2025), I trace how mobility projects shifted after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Motivations once articulated through cosmopolitan idioms of self-realisation, slower rhythms of life, and wellness have become entangled with imaginaries of threat and historical memories of occupation. Empirically, I document a shift from flexible, rental-based stays towards more durable settlement practices. Analytically, I conceptualise this shift as a war anxiety-driven hybridisation of motivations and imaginaries within lifestyle migration, where “a better life” projects become inseparable from projects of safety.

Foregrounding affect, the paper focuses on fear, guilt, and the moral pressure exerted by the origin society to stay and prepare to defend the homeland. These emotions do not merely accompany mobility decisions; they shape what can be said, justified, and enacted. Among mothers, care and child protection become a central moral rationale for longer-term settlement, while also intensifying the felt stakes of leaving. Media analysis provides contextual evidence for the production of guilt and polarisation: Lithuanian debates about politicians purchasing holiday properties in Southern Europe frame such assets as “escape infrastructure”, generating accusations of betrayal. As a result, conditionally privileged mobility is re-signified as both heightened privilege and morally contested, sharpening tensions between those who can leave and those who remain immobilised. Taken together, these materials suggest that war-driven imaginaries reorganise the moral economies of mobility.

Paper short abstract

Based on over 90 interviews with post-2022 Russian migrants residing in 6 countries, we examine how transnational fear of the Russian state is structured and experienced, paying special attention to how socio-economic situations of our informants condition their emotional states.

Paper long abstract

Many Russian citizens have left Russia following its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Due to their physical distance from the repressive state with its intensified ‘politics of fear,’ they might appear to be relatively safe. However, recent research suggests that Russian migrants’ perception of spaces of vulnerability does not coincide with national borders and is more complex, whereby fear of Russia continues to affect their well-being abroad. We contribute to this strand of research by analyzing multi-scalar triggers of fear of the Russian state among post-2022 migrants and their attempts to navigate this fear, paying special attention to how socio-economic situations of our informants condition their emotional states. Drawing on the anthropology of emotions and transnational authoritarianism research, we place fear at the center of analysis, demonstrating how transnational repressions are experienced from below. Empirically, we analyze over 90 semi-structured interviews with Russians residing in 6 countries (Armenia, Georgia, Serbia, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan). Our research reveals that perceived proximity to Russia – relational and not simply physical – plays a pivotal role in triggering fear of the state among Russian migrants, while the unpredictable repressive politics of the Russian state and the overall precarity of migration journeys exacerbate their anxieties. Analysing these emotional experiences against the backdrop of our informants’ socio-economic positions, we highlight how transnational privileges and vulnerabilities intertwine in the context of forced migration. Finally, we identify multiple scenarios of navigation through fear and highlight how they transform migrants’ political participation, citizenship strategies, and visions of the future.

Paper short abstract

Based on fieldwork with Russian war emigrants in Central Asia, I show how conflicting pressures to position themselves politically produce political detachment: a political and affective practice through which these mobile subjects are negotiating and reconfiguring themselves.

Paper long abstract

How does war anxiety produce political detachment? And what emotional work does it take to remain politically detached in the midst of war? This paper examines Russians who left their country after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. I show how emigrants, most of them relatively privileged young urban professionals, are held together by shared affects – fear of conscription and repression, relief at having left, longing for home. While some of them might appear “unpolitical” in comparison to political dissidents in exile, they constantly face conflicting pressures to position themselves politically – from host societies questioning their complicity in the war and in Russia's imperialist ideology, from fellow emigrants establishing moral hierarchies among those who left, and from family members who remained in Russia. Each positioning risks severing attachments that emigrants depend on. Faced with such pressures, many of these emigrants respond with political detachment. Yet this detachment is not apathy or withdrawal. It requires intimate knowledge of the political stakes one seeks to avoid, and intense affective labour to navigate relationships and attachments. My research shows that political detachment is itself a political and affective practice through which the mobile subjects produced by Russia’s war in Ukraine are negotiating and reconfiguring themselves.

Paper short abstract

Ukrainian mobility to Poland’s capital intensified and progressed from existential to forced due to the escalation of the Russo-Ukrainian war. This increase in mobility came concurrently with a class-conflict transportation and a collective (re-)assessment of worth vis-à-vis the Polish society.

Paper long abstract

The world of the 21st century has been initially theorised as boundless, whereby roots have become routes (Friedman, 2002). Whilst this idea of boundlessness has been countlessly criticised as a hyperbole (Ingold, 2009; Kirby 2010), the question of bounds remains. A decade ago, a Ukrainian engaging in cross-border mobility to Poland’s capital seemingly possessed the capability to decide where to live, thereby turning an aspiration into reality. Yet, this migration of hope was a blend of existential mobility at the backdrop, and (im)mobile momentums of fear-inducing Polish bureaucracy and a sense of responsibility to provide for those left behind at the forefront. In this decade, when Russo-Ukrainian war is a lived experience, the mobility of a Ukrainian national is often reduced to the label of ‘forced’. Forced mobility tends to be equated to dispossession and displacement, which albeit present, do not holistically define the journeys of all Ukrainians seeking refuge in Warsaw. One of my long-term settled Ukrainian migrant interlocutors in the summer of 2022 described the early influx of Ukrainian refugees as “Mazhory have arrived”. The term mazhory- privileged children of upper/middle-class in Ukraine- inferred privilege amongst the vulnerability of war that they fled. Indeed, the privileged were a fraction amongst those who entered Warsaw traumatised and dispossessed. It is clear, however, that the Varsovian Ukrainian community has expanded owing to an increased war-driven mobility, but with this enlargement came a class-conflict transportation and a new inner Ukrainian hierarchy of deservingness based on sympathy, trauma, and fear.

Paper short abstract

The paper scrutinises the hierarchies of deservingness in the perception of war refugees from Ukraine in the context of private hosting in Poland. The place of origin (and its assumed safety), social class, gender, and ethnicity are the categories on which these hierarchies have been constructed.

Paper long abstract

In the wake of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Poland received the greatest number of refugees. At least half a million of them were spontaneously hosted in private homes, which is an unprecedented phenomenon, given the earlier, rather unwelcoming attitude of the Polish society towards refugees. Such a hosting, which often lasted for months, included providing refugees with shelter as well as extensive instrumental and emotional support. However, not all those fleeing Ukraine were equally considered by Polish hosts as refugees deserving support. Sometimes, hosts felt misplaced compassion and disappointment with their guests – among others, refugees from Western Ukraine, more affluent refugees, male refugees, or Ukrainian Roma.

In the paper, I scrutinise the hierarchies of deservingness based on moral judgements in the perception of war refugees from Ukraine in the context of private hosting in Poland. These hierarchies – that spanned between vulnerability and privilege – have been constructed upon the place of origin (and its assumed safety), social class, gender, and ethnicity. As a result, an indigent woman from Eastern Ukraine has been perceived as vulnerable and forced to flee, and thus a genuine refugee deserving support more than the others, e.g., those affluent or coming from Western Ukraine, who have been considered searching for a better life rather than a refuge.

The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Western Poland among Poles who hosted Ukrainian refugees in their homes, and hosted refugees (National Science Centre grant, no. UMO-2023/49/B/HS3/02706).

Paper short abstract

This paper examines middle-class IDPs in Western Ukraine whose war-shaped immobility produces a form of conditional privilege. Focusing on housing investments and place-making, it shows how anxiety, safety-seeking, and self-realisation reshape urban space and moral hierarchies of mobility.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the experiences of internally displaced persons from Ukraine’s middle class and analyses how their war-shaped (im)mobility intersects with privilege, anxiety, and urban transformation. Based on ethnographic research conducted in Uzhhorod, the paper focuses on IDPs who, while formally protected and relatively resource-rich, remain immobilised by the war through destroyed homes, ongoing insecurity in their regions of origin, and restrictions on cross-border mobility - particularly for men of conscription age. These forms of forced immobility generate a condition of conditional privilege: middle-class IDPs possess economic, cultural, and social capital that enables investment in housing, entrepreneurship, and urban infrastructure, yet this privilege is fragile, morally contested, and continuously reframed through comparisons with both refugees abroad and less-resourced displaced persons. Under the shadow of war, projects of self-realisation - opening businesses, purchasing property, creating cultural venues - are inseparable from the search for safety and long-term anchoring.

The paper shows how middle-class IDPs actively produce urban space by reshaping housing markets, accelerating new residential developments, and creating “their own places” (cafés, co-working spaces, bars, neighbourhood networks), thereby transforming the social and symbolic landscape of host cities. At the same time, these practices provoke moral judgements, tensions, and polarised imaginaries among local residents and other displaced groups, revealing how war anxiety reorganises distinctions between privilege and vulnerability. By focusing on IDPs as mobile subjects positioned between choice and coercion, the paper contributes to debates on war-driven mobilities, moral economies of movement, and the affective politics of urban change.

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic research, this paper examines women’s migration following their husbands’ forced departure as morally obligated, gendered mobility. It shows how kinship, care, and moral economy blur distinctions between forced and voluntary migration and complicate notions of agency.

Paper long abstract

Migration is often framed as either voluntary, driven by economic aspirations, or forced, resulting from war or political violence. This panel contribution argues that such dichotomies overlook a crucial dimension of contemporary mobility: migration shaped by moral obligation and gendered expectations within kinship relations. Specifically, I focus on women’s migration following their husbands’ forced departure, a form of mobility occupying an ambiguous space between coercion and choice.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Lithuania in 2022–2023, I examine how women articulate migration as a moral duty embedded in marital, familial, and religious norms. Despite diverse backgrounds, legal statuses, and degrees of religiosity, women’s roles as wives and mothers consistently structured their migration trajectories. Following a politically persecuted husband was often described not as an individual decision, but as an obligation grounded in kinship, care, and moral economy.

I argue that morally framed mobility challenges conventional distinctions between “forced” and “voluntary” migration and simplified notions of agency. While structural constraints and asylum regimes shape women’s migration, it is also actively negotiated through ethical reasoning, affective ties, and gendered responsibilities. Furthermore, the obligation not to return to the country of origin after asylum produces long-term immobility and loss, including permanent separation from extended kin and disrupted intergenerational relations.

By foregrounding moral obligation as an analytical lens, this paper highlights how gender, kinship, and morality shape experiences of mobility and immobility, and how women’s agency is enacted within, rather than outside, relational and ethical frameworks.

Paper short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among Estonians in Australia, this paper examines how the Ukraine War reactivates collective memory and fosters digitally mediated transnational civic engagement, expanding long-distance nationalism toward broader Eastern European solidarity.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has reactivated collective memory and reshaped transnational civic engagement among the Estonian diaspora in Australia. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork (40 in-depth interviews and participant observation), I analyse how the shadow of war reshapes decisions to move, stay, or return, producing hybrid moral and affective landscapes.

The findings demonstrate that the war functions as a mnemonic catalyst. Historical narratives of loss, exile, and interrupted family ties are reinterpreted through present geopolitical anxieties, producing a shared understanding that “Ukraine’s war is our war.” Australia emerged simultaneously as a site of professional fulfilment and as a “safe harbour” distant from Russia. Fear, guilt, and responsibility intertwined: some participants questioned whether leaving Estonia constituted escape, while others framed their distance as strategic—positioning themselves as potential protectors, ready to offer refuge to family members.

The paper demonstrates how collective memory of Soviet occupation and World War II displacement informs these moral negotiations. Historical narratives set a scene of mobility under imagined threat. Participants articulate vulnerability through anticipation, historical haunting, and digital proximity to war. This reactivation of collective memory strengthens intra-diasporic cohesion while simultaneously broadening solidarity beyond Estonia toward Eastern Europe more generally.

By linking long-distance nationalism with lived citizenship and digitally mediated “presence by proxy,” I argue that mobility under the shadow of war produces new moral economies. The collective memory, amplified through digital infrastructures, generates new forms of grassroots civic agency that transcend both homeland and host-state boundaries.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how communities of grief form in the diaspora, as individuals witness war from afar and negotiate the moral weight of beginning a new life elsewhere. Focusing on recent Lebanese émigrés, it explores how grieving intersects with hopes that migration should signify a new beginning.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how communities of grief take shape in the Lebanese diaspora as individuals witness war from afar and are forced to negotiate loss and the moral weight of beginning a new life elsewhere. Focusing on recent Lebanese émigrés in Czechia, many of whom left during the 2023–2024 war in Lebanon, it explores how grieving intersects with anxieties around expectations and hopes that migration should signify a new beginning and movement forward.

Emigrating from Lebanon where grief, hope, and lightness are folded into moments of everyday life, immigration causes these intricately woven systems to unravel. In the diaspora, one is left to ‘sit’ with one’s grief, while also navigating the precarity of immigrant life and the new status of racialized Other. Inspired by affect theory and cultural theorists such as Sianne Ngai and Sue Kim, the paper situates grief within racialized emotional regimes in which non-whiteness is associated with excessive or disruptive affect, while whiteness is aligned with composure, restraint, and private emotion. These regimes shape how Lebanese migrants regulate and pre-empt their emotional expressions of grief to be perceived as adaptable and socially acceptable. Building on fieldwork in Lebanon and Czechia during and after the war, the paper traces how new communities of grief emerge in response to both isolation and the undesirability to express grief publicly in a European context. The paper ultimately sheds light on how the desire to live a good life in the diaspora is both hopeful and burdensome under conditions of war.