This paper examines the everyday practices, social infrastructures, and identity negotiations of young Russian emigrants in Tbilisi and Batumi following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The study draws on in-depth interviews and participant observation to analyze how migration is experienced as a prolonged, non-linear condition of uncertainty, and how urban spaces and informal networks shape migrants’ sense of belonging, social distance from the host society, and future trajectories. Using liminality as a theoretical lens, the paper highlights how cafés, bars, coworking spaces, and other “third places” serve as key sites of social assembly and routine stabilization under conditions of extended uncertainty. These spaces provide emotional support, mutual aid, and community formation, while simultaneously reinforcing transnational ties and ethnolinguistic boundaries that delay deeper integration into Georgian society. Prolonged liminality, the study argues, is both lived and reproduced through embodied practices and spatial arrangements, revealing how uncertainty is experienced not only cognitively but materially and socially. The paper also explores forms of low-intensity civic engagement and “micro-solidarities” that emerge within these networks, including informal care work, volunteerism, and community support. Such practices allow migrants to maintain moral agency and social purpose outside formal political arenas, reflecting adaptive responses to unstable sociopolitical conditions. By comparing experiences in Tbilisi and Batumi, the study demonstrates how variations in linguistic regimes, urban scale, and local social dynamics influence patterns of interaction, mobility, and the negotiation of belonging. Positioning these findings within broader debates on migration, mobility, and post-imperial subjectivities, the paper contributes to understanding how young migrants navigate uncertainty and reshape social, spatial, and moral boundaries in transnational contexts. The research highlights the interplay between individual strategies and collective infrastructures under conditions of political and social instability, offering insights into how everyday life mediates experiences of (un)certainty. This approach not only illuminates the lived realities of Russian emigrants in the South Caucasus but also provides a lens for analyzing the adaptive and resilient capacities of mobile populations in times of regional and global upheaval.

This paper explores academic displacement as an overlooked dimension of international academic mobility, focusing on the forced migration of Ukrainian scholars following Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. While academic mobility has traditionally been associated with voluntary movement, professional development, and global collaboration, this research highlights a contrasting and underexamined form of mobility driven by crisis and compulsion. The paper reconceptualises academic displacement not merely as a humanitarian concern but as a structural and epistemic phenomenon that reshapes global higher education systems, reconfigures scholars’ identities, and challenges conventional frameworks of academic mobility. The study investigates how displaced Ukrainian academics navigate the intersections of privilege and precarity across four host-country contexts – Germany, Poland, the Czech Republic, and the United Kingdom – which collectively host the largest numbers of displaced Ukrainian scholars. Drawing on the theoretical lens of translocational positionality, the research examines how displacement affects both physical and intellectual dimensions of academic life. It asks how displaced scholars’ professional trajectories evolve within different national and institutional settings, how their agency interacts with structural constraints, and in what ways they negotiate belonging and recognition while facing temporary contracts, visa insecurity, and loss of institutional affiliation. Employing a mixed-methods design, the paper integrates macro-level analysis of displacement patterns and policy responses with micro-level qualitative inquiry. Quantitative data from institutional and governmental sources will map the scale and geography of displaced academic mobility across Europe. Qualitative components – including in-depth interviews and surveys with displaced Ukrainian academics – will capture the lived realities of displacement in four European countries, exploring resilience, adaptation strategies, and the interplay between vulnerability and agency. Comparative case studies of host universities that have successfully implemented inclusion mechanisms will further illuminate best practices in supporting displaced scholars. The proposal posits that displacement functions as both constraint and opportunity. It opens access to new networks, collaborations, and forms of recognition, yet simultaneously reinforces exclusion through legal precarity, intellectual marginalization, and restricted professional mobility. By analyzing these dual dynamics, the research challenges deficit-based narratives that portray displaced academics solely as victims and instead presents them as active agents navigating shifting spaces of opportunity and constraint.

After 24 February 2022, Poland received the largest number of people fleeing the war in Ukraine. Civil society – ahead of the state and international organisations – provided them with enormous support. This included not only monetary donations, food and clothing supplies, and volunteering at reception points, but also providing shelter in private flats and houses. It is estimated that hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees were hosted by ordinary Polish residents, who often had no activist experience or familiarity with refugees or migrants. This was spontaneous and unprecedented act of support, given the previous rather reluctant attitude of Polish society towards refugees, which was the result of anti-refugee discourse constructed since the 2015 “crisis” in Europe. Drawing on 15 ethnographic interviews conducted with Ukrainian women hosted in the city of Wrocław, Western Poland by Polish families during the first months of the full-scale war I explore what happened behind the closed doors of these homes – places of occasional care, power relations, and complex negotiations. Using Yuval-Davis’s (2006) concept of the politics of belonging and Derrida’s conditional hospitality (2000) I ask how relations were negotiated in these domestic environments. How my interlocutors did cope with their role of, sometimes prolonged, “guest status”? What emotions did the status of being hosted evoke, and were the expectations (often unspoken) of reciprocity mutual? What kinds of conditional inclusion and tension emerged in these intimate but simultaneously asymmetrical relationship? I examine as well how everyday caregiving activities were intertwined with emotional labor, power dynamics, deskilling and class hierarchies.

The paper examines relationships between UDPs and host communities in Ukraine and shifts of IDPs acceptance over time. This research on patterns of exclusion and inclusion of IDPs adds new perspective to the existing research works mainly based on economic conditions and causes and reasons of poverty and radicalisation of IDPs worldwide. The case of displacement in Ukraine is different from most other cases as that of taking place in a relatively economically and technologically developed society with strong horizontal ties and no decisive ethnic and religious divisions. Unlike in numerous other countries where massive internal displacement as a result of armed conflict, mass violence, and political persecution took place, there have been no camps or any other large shelters for long-term accommodation of IDPs in Ukraine. So, people from generally the same background and life experience have resettled largely by their own choice and according to their own social connections and financial means, without involvement by the state or municipal authorities. In 2014-2015, officially, about 1.5 million people from the eastern Luhansk and Donetsk regions of Ukraine, as well as Crimea, were forced to leave their homes fleeing Russian occupation and the war. In other parts of Ukraine, they have encountered labelling them as criminals and pro-Russian traitors and had to deal with mutual negative stereotypes which reflected longstanding internal political divisions in the country. The full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine created a much larger wave of internally displaced persons (IDPs), also from communities where discrimination against the 2014-15 IDPs sometimes took place in the past. At the same time, in 2022, numerous former inhabitants of Donetsk and Luhansk regions and Crimea became IDPs for the second time. This new wave of forced migration revealed various patterns of tensions between IDPs and local residents. Many of them returned to their homes though after the Russian forces were pushed away from the capital and the northern regions of the country. The new, nearly invisible wave continues to flow until now from eastern, southeastern and northern parts of Ukraine, consisting mainly of older, poorest, and generally least privileged citizens who had avoided and even resisted evacuation before. This research aims to offer ways to reduce tensions based on differences and failed expectations between local residents and forced resettlers. It is based on observations, focus group discussions, and qualitative interviews with internally displaced persons from different regions of Ukraine as well as representatives of local communities.