Short Abstract

This panel examines how families navigate mobility, care, and belonging amid wars and shifting borders. Focusing on cases from Ukraine to Sudan, it explores how conflict displaces and reshapes kinship, revealing how care, communication, and emotion sustain family life across militarized borders.

Long Abstract

In the last decade, the world has witnessed ongoing wars, armed conflicts, and border clashes across regions, from Afghanistan to Ukraine and many places in between. Their consequences have profoundly disrupted family lives, displacing, dividing, and reconfiguring kinship relations. Studies of families in wartime form a long scholarly tradition: addressing displacement (Akesson et al. 2018; Denov et al. 2009), separation by war and border regimes (Shinan-Altman & Levkovich 2025; Slyusar 2022), the effects of conscription and military life (Huxford 2022; Dodd 2019), families seeking help across borders (Dewachi, Rizk & Singh 2018), and binational families torn apart by ideological divisions within conflicts (Protassova & Yelenevskaya 2024; Lorke 2019).

This panel explores how families navigate and reconfigure mobility, care, and belonging under conditions of war and shifting borders. While the Russian invasion of Ukraine serves as a central reference, it extends to broader experiences of war-induced separation - from Ukrainian, Russian, and Ukrainian-Russian families divided across frontlines or scattered throughout world to Armenian, Syrian, Palestinian, Sudanese, Israeli, and other families whose geographies of kinship and care have been radically reshaped by violence and displacement. The call invites ethnographic contributions that trace how wartime conditions reshape intimate geographies, including (but not limited to) the following questions:

1. How are gendered responsibilities, parenthood, and intergenerational care renegotiated amid exile, conscription, and separation?

2. How do remittances, digital communications, and cross-border care practices sustain kinship across militarized borders?

3. What happens when states reclassify relatives as “enemies,” disrupting long-standing familial ties?

4. How do families and communities negotiate the physical and emotional divisions engendered by wartime conditions?

The panel examines visible and invisible mobilities of people, emotions, and digital traces and investigates war as a regime of (im)mobility where reunification, surveillance, and humanitarian control intersect with everyday tactics of maintaining connection and care.

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