Author(s) / Editor(s):

 Kutsenko Olga Dmytrivna, Doctor of Sociological Sciences, Professor, Chief Research Fellow

 email: olga.kutsenko.ua28@gmail.com

 ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9921-0654

Year: 2025

Pages: 245-272

Publication language: Ukrainian

Publisher: Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

Type of Publication: chapter in edited volume

Publication Place: Kyiv

DOI: TBD

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has generated not only one of the largest displacement waves in contemporary Europe but also a qualitatively new transnational social formation. Millions of forcibly displaced Ukrainians remain deeply embedded in Ukraine’s social, civic, and economic life through remittances, volunteering, advocacy, digital communication, and increasingly institutionalized diaspora networks. Conceptualizing this population merely as “temporarily displaced” is analytically insufficient.

This chapter conceptualizes Ukrainians abroad as an organic component of Ukraine’s social structure and as a diaspora-in-the-making that sustains social reproduction across borders. Drawing on an agency–structure framework and transnational migration theory, it advances the notion of a transnational structure of social reproduction, linking everyday practices, host-country institutional regimes, and cross-border flows of resources and norms.

Empirically, the chapter combines original research conducted within an Einstein Foundation–funded project (2023–2025) with secondary analysis of large-scale survey and administrative data from Germany, Poland, and Czechia. The analysis operates across micro-level strategies of capital conversion, meso-level institutional opportunity structures, and macro-level transnational processes.

The findings show that local integration and transnational engagement are not competing but mutually reinforcing forms of agency, though unevenly realized due to language barriers, credential recognition, care constraints, and housing precarity. The chapter argues that Ukraine’s external population constitutes a strategic resource for post-war recovery, contingent on policies that reduce institutional hysteresis and recognize transnational forms of agency.

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