Social Cohesion and Return Intentions among Ukrainian Refugees
Abstract:
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to more than 8 million Ukrainians fleeing the country, in addition to many more millions being internally displaced.
We first study how this affects social cohesion within the country. Previous research on armed conflict has repeatedly emphasized the long-term negative consequences for social trust and social engagement, but only focused on relations between the attacker and the attacked. By employing pre-registered vignette study among Ukrainians that stayed in Ukraine but also those that fled the country as part of the second wave of the ReUp project (December 2023; N = 2,612) we show a social division in evaluating other Ukrainians, that differs substantially between those that stayed and those that fled the country.
Second, we analyze the drivers of Ukrainians refugees' decision-making about returning home using data from the third wave of the ReUp project. Using a pre-registered vignette among Ukrainian refugees (June 2023; N = 400) we find that conditions in the home country play a minor role amidst an on-going war. We discuss our results in lights of the study by Alrababah et al., 2023 in BJPS among Syrian refugees in Lebanon.