Abstract

Based on my ongoing ethnographic fieldwork in Romania, I explore the strategies of leaving and staying of migrants from Ukraine under the conditions of radical uncertainty. Romania is both a host and a transit country – almost 1.4 million people crossed its border from Ukraine and over 100 000 received temporary protection there – which makes it a strategic research site for exploring the trajectories of forced migrants. Through participating in networks of local volunteers in Bucharest and collecting migrants’ life stories, I reconstruct how those displaced manage the property and household members left behind in Ukraine, their temporal interpretive schemes of the war and identity-formation, as well as their tactics of coping in host communities under short-term planning horizons. Preliminary results of my fieldwork demonstrate a cleavage between the temporal imaginary of Ukrainian refugees as participants in the war of national liberation and their pragmatic choices of coping with economic and social uncertainty that drives them towards contemplating long-term integration into the host communities.