Jungwirth, M., Glukhodid, N., ”Returning to the Past? Typology of Decision-Making of Ukrainian Refugees in the Czech Republic and Germany,” in Fragmented Lives: Uncertainties of War Displacement within and from Ukraine, ed. Lidia Kuzemska (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2025).
Unequal Sacrifice, Emerging Divisions: How War Reshapes Society
Drawing on a preregistered conjoint experiment (N = 1,365) and in-depth fieldwork in Ukraine, this paper examines how unequal wartime sacrifice reshapes national belonging and political authority. I develop the concept of wartime contribution and shift the focus from citizens' claims on the state to how citizens recognize, reward, or penalize one another's contribution to the war effort. I find that wartime contribution is now the strongest basis upon which Ukrainians judge their compatriots' belonging and entitlement to lead, outweighing penalties for Russian ethnicity or language by more than twofold. Yet this reward is uneven: it is concentrated in frontline military service, does not fully erase ethnic penalties, and is carried largely by the Ukrainian majority. Wars of national defense thus do not simply unite or divide societies. Rather, they create new hierarchies layered on top of prewar divisions.
Concordia Discors: Impact of Wartime Violence on National Identity
Does losing members of your community in war strengthen national identity? Drawing on an original dataset of individual-level high school exam results from 2010 to 2026 and a difference-in-differences design, this paper shows that settlement-level exposure to aerial bombardment and military deaths leads students to perform comparatively better in Ukrainian language and literature than in mathematics. I introduce a novel behavioral measure of national identity and rely on fieldwork with teachers, former high school students and local education elites across Ukraine to argue for collective mourning and peer pressure as the central mechanisms at work.
Rethinking the Citizen-Soldier: Wartime Contribution and Shifting Boundaries of National Belonging
This paper develops the concept of wartime contribution and shows how citizens redraw who belongs to the nation based on who fights, serves, and sacrifices or avoids contributing to the collective war effort by evading, going abroad, or remaining passive. I use over 200 hours of in-depth fieldwork interviews and ethnographic observations across multiple locations in Germany and Ukraine to illustrate the relational and horizontal nature of wartime contribution in wartime Ukraine.
Who Counts as a Defender? Women's Wartime Contribution
How do gendered expectations of women as mothers and caregivers interact with the overall social expectation to contribute to the collective effort of national defense? In a preregistered conjoint experiment (N = 1,365), I find that women are substantially rewarded for their own wartime contribution, though less than men for comparable contributions; that motherhood is modestly rewarded, contrary to expectations in much of the literature; and that husbands' service, death in service, or draft evasion carries over to how respondents evaluate women's national belonging. I call this last effect transferred wartime contribution.
Church Property Regimes, Local Elites, and Parish Switching
This paper asks: When do changes in national sentiment translate into institutional change? Using an original national dataset of parishes leaving the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate for the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate, and later for the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, from 2014 to 2026, along with interviews with parishioners, priests, and religion experts, I show that grassroots mobilization alone is rarely enough. Whether a parish switches depends on who controls church property, where the local priest stands, and local politics.