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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.