Ukrainian society under war conditions. The year 2023

A large-scale interpretation of Ukraine's present

The Institute of Sociology of the NAS of Ukraine has published a substantial study: “Ukrainian society under war conditions. The year 2023”: a collective monograph / S. Dembitskyi, O. Zlobina, N. Kostenko and others; edited by Corresponding Member of the NAS of Ukraine, Doctor of Philosophical Sciences Ye. Golovakha and Doctor of Sociological Sciences S. Makeiev. Kyiv: Institute of Sociology of the NAS of Ukraine, 2023. 343 pp.

It consists of an introduction and 10 chapters, with tables of survey results at the end (M. Parashchevin). The cover design is by Viktoriia Golovakha-Hicks.

In the introduction, “Sociological enquiries at the Institute of Sociology of the NAS of Ukraine in 2023”, its authors Ye. Golovakha and S. Makeiev stress that the main part of the study consists of generalisations and conclusions about the large-scale and contradictory changes in the states and social processes, assessments, attitudes, aspirations, political preferences and priorities of citizens, made in the Institute's research units and based mainly on the empirical materials of monitoring the changes in the structures and everyday life of the country's population in 2022–2023 and on interviews conducted within planned research work. Such work is also being carried out actively within the Sociological Association of Ukraine and its regional branches. The team of authors set out to establish how society is being modified under war conditions and how accurately this is captured by the existing methodological and methodical instruments. Or, to put it differently, what the new reality is that has gradually or suddenly emerged in the present, and whether researchers have at their disposal a set of conceptions and methods that yield reliable knowledge. The introduction sets out briefly the substance of each chapter of the monograph.

In Chapter 1, “Features of public opinion and of its study in Ukraine during the war”, S. Dembitskyi sums up the results of applying his own instrument for determining the index of citizens' perception of the image of the state, stressing that the war has brought radical changes in the perception of one's own state and has completed the consolidation of civic identity. An important sign of Ukrainian citizens' adaptation to the demands of wartime is the shift in conceptions of when the war will end. At the same time a set of problems in society's existence has been recorded, in overcoming which the civic ethos must reach a qualitatively new and higher level of development. Posing the question in this way in the social and political plane also raises methodological tasks, without resolving which the sociological monitoring survey “Ukrainian Society” will be unable fully to track the status of the dynamic equilibrium between the building of a modern civic state and the reactionary resistance of the patronal networks that currently dominate Ukrainian politics: these are two urgent methodological tasks — widening the monitoring instruments to capture the state and effects of national-civic fragmentation, which in essence represents a moderately destructive form of social heterogeneity. No less important a task is developing instruments that would assess the existing social and cultural dominant, its social status and the alternatives to it within the space of public opinion.

In Chapter 2, “The war and the Ukrainian societal community: the dynamics of legitimation and solidarisation”, V. Reznik operationalises the notion of the “societal community”, drawing on the data of thirty years of monitoring the state of Ukrainian society and recording both unidirectional and reverse fluctuations in assessments of national and state self-identification.

O. Reznik and O. Kozlovskiy (Chapter 3, “The political consciousness of a society at war”) show that in new and traditional media, in the statements of officials and members of parliament at various levels and, as a consequence, in the political consciousness of the population, populist attitudes and expectations are growing. In post-war reconstruction, with its inevitable difficulties and conflicts, a further rise in simple political solutions to complex social and economic problems cannot be ruled out.

The next three chapters are based on the data of both quantitative and qualitative studies. O. Symonchuk (Chapter 4) launched the project “Social inequality: monitoring under war conditions”, whose empirical findings show that a consequence of the first year of the full-scale war is an optimistic trend — a softening of Ukrainians' perception of social inequality, recorded for the first time in 30 post-Soviet years. N. Kostenko and L. Skokova (Chapter 5, “From sacrifice to the projection of victory: the thematisation of civic discourse in Ukraine”) demonstrate convincingly that the values of freedom and of individual and collective security are present, explicitly and latently, in the humanitarian discourse of civic activists. O. Zlobina (Chapter 6, “The psycho-emotional state of the population against the background of war: from the mobilisation of resources to the polarisation of assessments”), comparing the data of various studies, records a tendency both towards the population's mobilisation of psychological resources of resistance and defence and towards the entrenchment of a contrasting, “black and white” perception of events and processes by citizens. At the same time the variability of psycho-emotional states is fairly high, so that, despite a relatively stable tendency towards maintaining psychological resilience, it is difficult to assess its potential over the long term, and a rapid growth of negative experiences and assessments cannot be ruled out. It should also be noted that there is a lack of research providing continuous monitoring of psycho-emotional states, which creates a substantial risk of losing information about the real state of affairs regarding the population's capacity for psychological resistance. Supporting such monitoring, at least at the level of academic research, is an urgent need.

O. Stehnii (Chapter 7, “The environmental context of the current war”) considers the war as the largest-scale ecological catastrophe, with negative direct and long-term effects on people's conditions of existence. H. Chepurko, O. Klymenko and O. Trofymenko (Chapter 8, “Socially dangerous diseases: the current state, the factors in their spread and their prevention”), on the basis of a large body of primary data, note the limited possibilities of countering the spread of socially dangerous diseases as a result of the destruction of many medical facilities over the past two years and the impossibility of providing patients with the necessary medicines. V. Smakota, I. Sokolovskyi and N. Tolstykh (Chapter 9) trace the positive and negative transformations of the labour market under war conditions connected with the digitalisation of many processes in production and governance. V. Bakirov and I. Rushchenko (Chapter 10, “The Russian-Ukrainian war and the changing paradigm of national security”) propose a new paradigm of national security. Its basic principle is that the population should undergo military training in accordance with their health and physical status, and that the strength of resistance to external aggression will grow with collective readiness and individual responsibility for the quality of the military competence thereby acquired.

This substantial collective monograph offers the academic community, social scientists and scholars in the humanities useful information and propositions that deserve their confidence.

The full text of the collective monograph is available at: https://isnasu.org.ua/assets/files/books/2023/Maket_Ukr_suspilstvo_2023.pdf