Ukrainian Civilian Men and Limited Mobility During Russia’s Full-Scale War against Ukraine

6th session of CEFRES in-house seminar
Through the presentation of works in progress, CEFRES’s Seminar aims at raising and discussing issues about methods, approaches or concepts, in a multidisciplinary spirit, allowing everyone to confront her or his own perspectives with the research presented.

Location: CEFRES Library and online (to get the link, write to cefres[@]cefres.cz)
Date: Tuesday, March 3, 2026 at 16:30
Language: English

Speaker: Ruslana KOZIIENKO (CEFRES / CEU)
Discussant: Martin FOTTA (Institute of Ethnology AV ČR)

Abstract

As a whole, this research focuses on the experiences of adult civilian men in Ukraine as affected by the limited mobility under martial law, which was introduced in 2022 in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion. The restricted mobility resulted from the travel ban, which prohibited men between 18 and 60, with few exceptions, from traveling outside Ukraine, as well as from mobilization processes within the country. Among the major foci of the project are the wartime transformations of citizenship, the coping strategies civilian men develop to sustain themselves and their families, and the transformations of civilian men’s masculinities and subjectivities under the conditions of constrained mobility and limited freedom.

The paper presented during the seminar will particularly discuss the transformations and contestations of citizenship and of what it means to be a “good” (male) citizen in times of war. By examining the situation through the lens of “citizenship as alterity” (Isin 2002), the presentation will look at the emergence of different categories of citizens over the first three and a half years of the war. It will further focus on the (re)defined relationship between citizenship and territory, and how the latter, being vested with new meanings under martial law, began to (co)produce new forms of alterity. Finally, it will consider acts of illegal border crossing as potential “acts of citizenship” (Isin 2008; Isin and Saward 2013) through which men contest citizenship and attempt to reclaim their body, subjectivity, and right to mobility.