How Does War Shape Identities? The Case of Ukraine

• In Event: Russo-Ukrainian War

Abstract

Despite commonplace media narrative that differences in identity generate most violent, in-transigent conflicts, social science has demonstrated that this view is wrong because identities are not fixed. Instead, political mobilization by elites—whether in the context of electoral competition (e.g., Eiffert et al 2010) or through discriminatory policies against minorities (e.g., Cederman et al 2010) or through recruitment into armed forces/groups (e.g., Kalyvas 2008)—often results in intensified ingroup attachment. Given well-documented short- and long-term anti-perpetrator attitudes that victimized civilians form during armed conflicts, warfare likely serves as one of the major catalysts of shifts in identities. If shifts towards nationalism (greater attachment to national identity) happen during wars, do they occur in localities that suffer from warfare the most or through-out the country? Do these shifts in identity subside after violence wanes and intensify when violence starts again? Do citizens change their behaviors to signal the embrace of national identity? We answer these questions by studying the variation in geographic and temporal warfare that Ukraine has suffered from Russian aggression in 2014–2022. The survey design alternated the language in which enumerators initiated interviews. This randomization allows us to contrast the rates of the language of convenience in which interviews were conducted with the claimed rates of the native language. We rely on multiple waves of survey data from Ukraine in 2005–2023 which allow us to answer these questions at the district and oblast level, using a series of difference-in-differences comparisons.

Authors

• Anna O. Pechenkina, Utah State University

• Daniel Silverman, Carnegie Mellon University

• Austin Knuppe, Utah State University