Paper short abstract

This paper focuses on Bessarabian families from Ukraine seeking refuge in their historical homeland and pursuing Bulgarian ancestral citizenship aftermath displacement in 2022. It asks how “kin-state protection” reorganizes family life during war and reconfigures notions and practices of homemaking?

Paper long abstract

Drawing on the project on ancestral citizenship pathways in Europe, this article focuses on Bessarabian families from Ukraine in Bulgaria after their flight from Russia’s full-scale war. In the aftermath of displacement, Bessarabian families sought refuge in Bulgaria as their “historical homeland”. Since temporary protection provided shelter and safety without guaranteeing longer-term stability, many Bessarabian families turned to ancestry-based residence and citizenship claims as a more durable route to securing livelihoods and belonging. Taking “kin-state protection” not as a humanitarian corridor but as a classificatory regime that reorganizes mobility and recognition through documentary proof of origin, this paper traces how “kin-state protection” reorganizes family life during war and reconfigures narratives and practices of homemaking?

First, I show how kin-state recognition operates through documents, converting family histories into bureaucratic assets. This “ancestral documentation work” becomes a gendered project undertaken by women who mobilize archives, and networks to substantiate belonging alongside their childcare, wage work, and crisis management. Second, I analyze belonging as simultaneously enabled and destabilized by kin-state narratives. While “Bulgarian-ness” can provide legitimacy and institutional access, it also produces ambivalence and friction—between those who can claim ancestry and those who cannot; between “return” imaginaries and lived experiences of marginalization; and between obligations to kin “back home” and the demands of settlement “here.” The paper foregrounds "kin-state shelter" as a regime of (im)mobility that operates through genealogical classification and bureaucratic proof, demonstrating how ancestry-based protection becomes a site where gendered care, intergenerational relations, and family belonging are renegotiated in everyday life.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines wartime mobility through the experiences of mothers who fled an ongoing war with their children. Drawing on ethnographic research, it explores how care, responsibility, and temporary forms of belonging are organized across borders amid uncertainty.

Paper long abstract

Wars and armed conflicts increasingly reshape family life through displacement, separation, and uncertainty. This paper examines wartime mobility through the experiences of mothers who relocate with their children under conditions of conflict. Based on ethnographic research conducted during an ongoing war, including interviews, participant observation, and analysis of digital communication platforms, the paper explores how mothers navigate decisions of flight, care, and belonging across borders.

Many of the women described themselves as “privileged refugees,” a term they used to articulate the tension between experiences of threat and access to mobility, resources, and legal protection. While their movement was framed as temporary, it gave rise to provisional communities organized around care, safety, and the maintenance of children’s everyday routines.

The paper highlights ambivalence surrounding departure, shaped by fear, responsibility, and moral obligation, as well as the practical considerations that shape mobility choices. It further examines how digital platforms function as key infrastructures for coordinating information, enabling mutual aid, and sustaining family life across militarized borders.

Paper short abstract

Drawing on the politics of extended cross-border German kinship during the Cold War (Thelen 2023), this paper explores how East Germans negotiated categories of belonging at work to sustain their relations to “West kinship” through concealing and revealing such ties under state surveillance.

Paper long abstract

How did East Germans maintain their ties to West German kin when the East German state aimed to restrict or prohibit cross-border kin relations? Whereas West Germany promoted a “natural” kinship with East Germans, East Germany aimed to limit such kinship with West Germans on the grounds of its legitimacy as a nation-state and security concerns. Drawing on the politics of extended cross-border German kinship during the Cold War (Thelen 2023), this paper explores how East Germans negotiated categories of belonging to sustain their relations to Westverwandtschaft (“West kinship”) through concealing and revealing such ties under state surveillance. Zooming in on the East German workplace in state-owned enterprises in the 1980s, West German relations were perceived to increase risks to the domestic economy – such as economic espionage, sabotage, and the exit of valuable labour to the West German foe – and thus required prospective job candidates to declare and often to cease cross-border kin relations. Tasked with the protection of the domestic economy, the State Security – East Germany’s infamous secret police – employed three information channels in enterprises to this end: its human surveillance network, security commissioners, and its strategy of political-operative cooperation (“POZW”) with other state institutions, mass organisations, and enterprise management. Refining Chelcea’s (2021) concept of “boundary kin” and focusing on the power and limits of the POZW strategy, this paper analyses two cases in which East Germans strategically declared or omitted Westverwandtschaft to the state to secure employment while maintaining extended cross-border kin relations.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how the war in Ukraine fractures ethnic Korean migrant families from the CIS living in South Korea. Focusing on one transnational family split by political loyalties, it shows how war reconfigures kinship and belonging even far from the battlefield.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores how the war in Ukraine produces new forms of familial rupture among Koryo-saram (ethnic Koreans from the CIS) families who are geographically distant from the battlefield yet deeply entangled in its political and emotional aftermath. Drawing on ethnographic material from South Korea, it focuses on one extended Koryo-saram family whose members migrated from Ukraine and Uzbekistan to South Korea before the outbreak of the war.

The family’s internal divisions crystallised along political lines: while the father openly supports Putin, his daughter and her husband—who lived in Ukraine before moving to South Korea—found this stance irreconcilable and withdrew from communication. Similar tensions emerged with extended relatives, also Koryo-saram migrants in South Korea, whose pro-Putin views forced the young family either to sever ties or to carefully avoid political discussion altogether. While such fractures may seem expected, the paradox of this case lies in the fact that the extended family lives in South Korea, was born in Uzbekistan, and is ethnically Korean.

The paper argues that war operates not only as a geopolitical event but also as a moral and affective force that reshapes kinship ties from afar. In South Korea, Koryo-saram identities become increasingly marked as culturally Russian, compelling individuals to “take sides” within a conflict that does not formally claim them as nationals. This paradox—where families are ethnically Korean, legally Uzbek, and geographically displaced, yet nonetheless experience war as an intimate rupture—reveals how conflict reorders belonging and kinship across borders.

Paper short abstract

Based on oral histories, this paper examines how the 2022–2023 Artsakh / Nagorno-Karabakh blockade reshaped food practices, care, and moral obligation, showing how scarcity and enforced immobility reorganized kinship, gendered labor, and everyday moral economies.

Paper long abstract

Artsakh (Nagorno-Karabakh), historically inhabited by Armenians and incorporated into Soviet Azerbaijan in the early 1920s, remained a contested territory with unresolved political status after the collapse of the USSR. Following renewed warfare in 2020 and the deployment of Russian peacekeepers, the region was subjected to a nine-month blockade (December 2022–September 2023), whose inaction failed to prevent severe shortages of food, energy, and medicine. The blockade ended with a military offensive and the total forced displacement of the Armenian population in autumn 2023.

This paper examines how families navigated care, kinship, and moral obligation under conditions of prolonged siege. Based on approximately 150 oral histories with displaced families, it analyzes how households reorganized everyday life amid infrastructural collapse and extreme scarcity. Many families were physically separated across an impermeable border—members stranded outside Artsakh for work, education, or medical care—yet continued to experience the blockade affectively and practically through what we term distanced siege: synchronized hunger, time-bound digital communication, and shared regimes of deprivation across space.

Drawing on analyses of infrastructural breakdown under siege, the paper shows how food and energy shortages reactivated embodied practices rooted in memories of the 1990s blockades. Food substitution, preserving, soap-making, and rationing stabilized diets while reasserting moral economies of care. Decisions over who eats first reveal gendered negotiations of provision, sacrifice, solidarity, and vulnerability under immobility. Provisioning became a moral practice through which families negotiated endurance, legitimacy, and care.

Paper short abstract

The ongoing war in Ukraine reshapes family (im)mobility strategies in the autochthonous Transcarpathian ethnic minority: women sustain families through cross border care work while empowerment is curbed by patriarchal norms. The study highlight loyalty as an emotional retain factor in immobility.

Paper long abstract

Although Transcarpathia in Western Ukraine is geographically distant from the frontlines, the war has profoundly transformed it. Often referred to as an “island of peace,” it has received tens of thousands of IDPs, while tens of thousands of autochthonous ethnic Hungarians—mainly men—have resettled in the neighbouring kin state, Hungary. This has placed increased responsibility and workload on women, whose mobility is not restricted. In order to maintain their households, they cross the border on a weekly basis with their children, perform care work in multiple households on both sides of the border, and take over roles in the community that previously belonged to male domains.

Drawing on data deriving from qualitative fieldwork (semi structured interviews, field observations, and video) conducted since 2017 in different locations in Transcarpathia, the study first introduces the most typical (im)mobility based transnational family coping strategies in the ethnic Hungarian minority community. It then analyses the gender aspects of (im)mobility decisions and family strategies, highlighting the rigidity of traditional gender roles.

The study finds that Transcarpathian Hungarian families adopt diverse (im)mobility based coping strategies that transgress nation state borders. Furthermore, it argues that although war might accelerate women’s social empowerment through unconstrained community engagement (Webster et al. 2018), in the studied community this process is curbed by traditional patriarchal codes internalized by generations of women. By analysing (im)mobile women’s narratives, the study contributes to the scholarship on emotional retention factors of (im)mobility (Schewel 2019) by exploring the role of loyalty (Connor 2018) in immobility (Robins 2022).

Paper short abstract

The paper is a ethnographic contribution focusing on the host societies´s perception of Ukrainian Romani families who left Ukraine as a result of Russian full-scale invasion. It explains how large Romani families were perceived as problematic, indivisibile and unaccomodatable and its consequences.

Paper long abstract

This contribution draws on ethnographic research conducted within the ROCIT project (2024–2026) with Ukrainian Roma, Romani helpers and state institution officers in the CR. From the outset, Czech media reported on the arrival of numerous Romani families from Ukraine who were unable to find accommodation and began gathering at central train stations. The reluctance of landlords to accommodate large families was used as an excuse for ethnic prejudice, creating a discriminatory system that excluded most Roma from the country. The alleged inability to accommodate them resulted in a special government measure which defined the target group as those with 'a socio-cultural background', recommending their specific treatment.

This paper critically examines how the concept of the extended family served as a genuine logistical challenge and as a substitute explanation, masking structural deficiencies and anti-Roma prejudice. While some families were indeed extended, the insistence on staying together must be understood in context. Group cohesion often functions as a protective mechanism, especially when women travelled without male family members.

The paper focuses on the mobility of Ukrainian Romani families, living in completely new formations created as a result of war, forced mobility, and gender imbalances caused by compulsory mobility, and their form of maintaining kinship networks, relationships, and cross-border communication.

The “large families” argument gradually shifted from a practical concern to a discursive tool that legitimised exclusion. Those who successfully passed through the system were predominantly small nuclear families or individuals, especially if they were not identified as Roma/ „non-white“.