Minorities at War Cultural Identity and Resilience in Ukraine

Foreword: exploring how and why minorities shape the majority (Catherine Wanner)
1. Introduction. Ethno-cultural minority identities at war in Ukraine and beyond (Kyriaki Topidi)
PART I: Minority politics, language, and identity during the war.
2. National minorities in Ukraine: contextualizing challenges and searching for policy solutions (Olena Bohdan and Viktoriya Sereda)
3. Majority-minority relations in Ukraine: state minority politics in a changed security context (Kateryna Haertel)
PART II: Collective memory and minorities’ coping strategies.
4. Collective memory, Islam, and coping strategies of Crimean Tatars in occupied Crimea (Elmira Muratova)
5. Public discourses connected to the Russian war in Ukraine: the representation of Jewish communities (Alla Marchenko)
6. Shia Muslims of Ukraine during the Russian invasion (Akif Tahiiev)
PART III: Mobilization, resilience, and humanitarianism
7. Muslim organizations in Ukraine and the challenges of wartime: moderation, mobilization, and resilience (Oleg Yarosh)
8. Mobilizing Christian emotions: everyday ethnicity and resiliency in a Transcarpathian Hungarian NGO (Marc Roscoe Loustau)
9. The Ukrainian national minority and forced migrants in Poland: the case of Przemysl (Tomasz Kosiek)
10. Going beyond regional: the Greek Catholic Church as a communicator of dignity during the Russo-Ukrainian war (Nadia Zasanska)
PART IV: Displacement and identity preservation during the war
11. Exodus of the Hungarian minority from Ukraine? War-induced ethnic dynamics in the Ukrainian-Hungarian border region (Ágnes Erőss, Katalin Kovály, and Patrik Tátrai)
12. Meskhetian/Ahiska Turks in time of uncertainty: changes in civic, ethnic, and religious identification (Mykola Homanyuk and Hasan Basri Bülbül)
13. Ukrainian Roma facing the challenges of the Russian-Ukrainian war and displacement (Valentyn Zharonkin, Janush Panchenko, and Mykola Homanyuk)
14. Concluding remarks (Elmira Muratova and Nadia Zasanska)

Biography

Elmira Muratova is a post-doctoral researcher at the European Centre for Minority Issues, Germany. Before that, she was an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science and International Relations,Taurida National University (Ukraine). She has published widely on Crimean Tatars, collective memory and Islam.

Nadia Zasanska is a research fellow at the Interdisciplinary Center for European Studies at the Europa-Universität Flensburg, Germany. Her interests involve digital religion, media studies, and religious studies. Nadia has published in the areas of linguistics and digital religion.

"Often underappreciated, Ukraine’s cultural diversity is a crucial source of its strength as well as a challenge for its policymakers, especially as Russia tries to weaponize minority rights in its bloody warfare. This timely book, featuring leading Ukrainian and global experts, is an essential read for understanding this important topic".

Henry E. Hale, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, and Director of the Elliott School's Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies at George Washington University

“This volume makes a thoughtful contribution to the discussion about national minorities in Ukraine. A range of different perspectives and case studies capture the diversity and hybridity of identities within the larger civic identity of Ukraine, mapping their role in the resilience of the Ukrainian state and future policy challenges”.

Gwendolyn Sasse, Director of the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) and Professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; author of Russia’s War against Ukraine

"This urgent and extraordinary interdisciplinary volume sheds overdue light on how Ukraine’s minorities conceive of their future. It will change the way you think about Ukraine, and it will change the way you think about the most consequential conflict in Europe since the Second World War".

Rory Finnin, University of Cambridge, Director, Cambridge Ukrainian Studies Programme