When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the world watched as neighbouring European countries opened their borders to Ukrainian refugees — a welcome that stood in sharp contrast to the reception often given to refugees fleeing Africa and the Middle East.
Many observers pointed to race as the reason. A new book from Dalhousie University's Dr. Raluca Bejan argues the real story is far more complex.
Decentring Race: The Politics of Welcoming Ukrainians in Romania, published in May, uses Romania as a case study. Dr. Bejan draws on 51 interviews with civil society stakeholders, community activists, and Romanian state officials, along with 25 interviews with international students, primarily from Nigeria and India, who were in Ukraine at the time of the invasion.
The book complicates the widely held view that race alone counts as the only factor as to why some refugees were categorized as deserving and of neighbouring states’ protection and others were not. Alongside race, Dr. Bejan highlights nationality, ethnicity, religion, class, gender, as well as geopolitical realities and the bipartite EU–Ukraine legislative framework as forces that shaped who was granted transnational mobility rights.
Race alone cannot explain the entire story.
"Race has been traditionally the go-to category of analysis in the Anglo-American space," she says. "However, when talking about other spaces, especially those in Eastern Europe, where people have shared histories that spill across borders, where borders in themselves have been shifted throughout history many times, it is important to note that other commonalities and other structural variables equally matter in why certain states feel an affinity towards certain groups of migrants or refugees and less towards others."
It's not to say race was irrelevant in the case of those transitioning through and out of Ukraine in February 2022, she says. "But race alone cannot explain the entire story."
A more complex picture
Dr. Bejan is an associate professor in the School of Social Work at Dalhousie, where she is also cross-appointed with the Department of European Studies and serves as a research associate with the Jean Monnet European Union Centre of Excellence. Her research spans comparative social policy, migration and forced displacement, whiteness and critical race studies, and post-communist and post-Soviet studies in South-East and Eastern Europe.
Decentring Race is Dr. Bejan's first book, but her work on refugees and migrant labour has been featured widely in national media, including CBC, CTV, Global News, Radio-Canada, the Toronto Star, and The Globe and Mail. In 2018, Dr. Bejan co-directed Trace, a documentary on the Greek refugee crisis filmed on the islands of Lesvos, Chios, and Samos and in Athens, which won Best Feature Documentary at the 2019 Santorini Film Festival.
“Romania is interesting as a case study, primarily because it borders Ukraine, it has a long border with Ukraine in the North, it has a somewhat shared history, both countries were under socialism, and because it has been somewhat understudied in terms of migration and refugee studies," she says.
She says Romanians constituted the bulk of labour migrants in Western Europe folliowing the 1989 revolution, so it has been traditionally a country that has been producing cheap labour for the more economically developed parts of Europe.
Why Romania matters
Below, she explains in her own words, how that dynamic has shifted over the past decade and why Romania was a compelling case study:
Even in 2015, when Europe was managing that heavy migration flow and countries were pledging to take in refugees, Romania could not fulfil its 6000-entry commitment, primarily because most refugees refused to settle in it due to the economic concerns, mainly low wages. So it provides a little bit of an understudied terrain, although things have been changing in the last few years.
Moreover, choosing Romania was easier for me: as a Romanian national with good command of the language, and a good enough cultural knowledge of how things work there, I had good access to the population I aimed to interview. It would have never been able to interview so many local people without insider access to the community. That said, I hope some of this book’s findings could be generalizable to the field of forced migration, especially as it pertains to other Eastern European countries, and overall, to the literature on what matters in the welcoming and/or selection processes that states always make use of in relation to various groups of people.
I also hope that readers can take away the fact that social issues and social reality are always more complex than a one-cause, one-effect explanation. And that when we try to make sense and/or explain what happens in different societies, we need to at least try to understand the local context as much as possible rather than universalizing a very peculiar way of thinking or applying a predetermined frame of thought from one geo-political space to another. While we do aim, in the social world to work with universalizable theories, we need to also integrate into the equation that conceptual reference frames are always embedded in their own particularities.