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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.