THE CONTEMPORARY UKRAINIAN SOCIETAL COMMUNITY IN WARTIME: LEGITIMATION, LOYALTY AND SOLIDARISATION

On 3 May 2023 the head of the department of the history and theory of sociology of the Institute of Sociology of the NAS of Ukraine, Doctor of Sociological Sciences Volodymyr Reznik delivered a report at a meeting of the Presidium of the NAS of Ukraine on the topic:

«THE CONTEMPORARY UKRAINIAN SOCIETAL COMMUNITY IN WARTIME: LEGITIMATION, LOYALTY AND SOLIDARISATION».

He emphasised the exceptional importance of sociological research during the period of full-scale Russian armed aggression against Ukraine, which makes it possible to study social behaviour and to diagnose public moods in contemporary Ukrainian society, and thereby substantially deepens the scholarly understanding of the social potential of successful national resistance to the aggressor.

Unique empirical data for scientifically grounded interpretations and assessments of the consequences of Russian aggression against Ukraine are provided by the fundamental research project of sociological monitoring of moods, preferences, behavioural patterns and attitudes towards events, carried out by the team of the Institute of Sociology of the NAS of Ukraine throughout 1992–2022. Studying the monitoring data makes it possible to establish the current degree of legitimacy of the social order in Ukraine for its citizens, whose manifestations are the levels of mass anomic demoralisation and cynicism. No less important is the possibility of sociologically monitoring the level of solidarity within the contemporary Ukrainian societal community on the basis of recording the ethnic, confessional, regional and civic self-identification of respondents.

After the full-scale invasion of Russian troops in 2022, the largest declines in the values of the indices of anomic demoralisation and cynicism over the entire period of the 30-year sociological monitoring by the Institute of Sociology of the NAS of Ukraine were recorded. These trends are manifestations of a substantial rise at that time in the level of legitimacy of the social order in Ukraine as a reaction of mass consciousness to overt Russian aggression. At the same time, no significant divergences were observed in the mean values of the indices of anomic demoralisation and cynicism between the West, the Centre, the South and the East of Ukraine.

Important preconditions of national solidarity for Ukraine’s societal community are ethnic and religious factors, as well as the general status of citizenship. The observed gradual decline in the ethnic heterogeneity of Ukrainian society may substantially facilitate the process of its national solidarisation. A weighty factor of national solidarisation in Ukraine is the process of civic self-identification. Monitoring observations revealed a substantial growth in the share of those who identify themselves first and foremost as citizens of Ukraine. In the religious sphere of Ukrainian society, the social demand for autocephaly is the strongest Orthodox orientation of the second half of both the 1990s and the 2010s, as well as of the early 2020s. Yet the more than 30-year competition and uncompromising conflict between the leading Orthodox Churches in Ukraine weakens the process of national solidarisation within it.

In the discussion of the report, the academic director of the Ilko Kucheriv Democratic Initiatives Foundation, professor of the department of political science of the National University of «Kyiv-Mohyla Academy», Doctor of Historical Sciences Oleksii Haran noted the importance of the results of the sociological monitoring conducted by the Institute of Sociology of the NAS of Ukraine since 1992, both for specialists in the field of sociology and for the authorities.

The head of the department of sociology of the National Technical University of Ukraine “Igor Sikorsky Kyiv Polytechnic Institute”, Doctor of Sociological Sciences Pavlo Fedorchenko-Kutuiev highly appreciated the results of the work presented in the report and expressed his gratitude to the researchers of the Institute of Sociology of the NAS of Ukraine for the valuable empirical material about Ukrainian society that they have been providing to the entire sociological community for more than 30 years.

Academician of the NAS of Ukraine Valerii Heiets also joined the discussion, proposing to launch joint projects of sociologists and economists that would make it possible to answer the social demands that may arise in the post-war period.