Negotiating citizenship on the margins of the Ukrainian state

The project “Negotiating citizenship on the margins of the Ukrainian state” focuses on the access to social rights and on citizenship practices of people affected by the war in Donbas in Eastern Ukraine, on both sides of the so-called ‘contact line’. The project investigates how the social rights of internally displaced persons and residents of the occupied territories are legally regulated and constructed in political discourses, how people negotiate their access to social rights in their interactions with the state, and what strategies the state and the displaced persons employ to make or deny claims. The study advances the relational concept of social citizenship, which implies that people conceive of, practice, and negotiate their rights and duties in social interactions contingent on institutional and political conditions of multiple (quasi)state actors in the region. This approach is beneficial for comparative inquiries into other contested social spaces on the state’s geographical or political margins.