Experiences of forced migration and internal displacement: The case of adolescents in the East Ukraine conflict in 2014-2022

By Ian Thompson, Lyudmila Nurse and Kyle Davison | OMC 2025

Photo courtesy of UNICEF Ukraine on Flickr, shared under CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

UNICEF has described child displacement due to conflict and violence as a growing global phenomenon. Children and young people are disproportionately affected by war and the adverse psychological effects of trauma from the effects of conflict and displacement are well documented. This article addresses the experiences of young internally displaced persons (IDPs) from East Ukraine. These adolescents were children when the conflict in Donbas started in 2014 and had been forced to migrate with their families within Ukraine across the conflict area borders. 

The article draws on data from our AHRC-funded project Cultural Artefacts and Belonging, a comparative study of displaced young people in Ukraine conducted from 2021-2022 by researchers from the Department of Education, University of Oxford in collaboration with Karazin Kharkiv National University. The study addressed the complex process of identity construction of young, displaced individuals in East Ukraine and their biographical life strategies. Many of these internally displaced adolescents had experienced several traumatic moves across the borders before they had settled in their current location which led to tensions in their cultural identities and sense of belonging. We were interested in how internally displaced adolescents’ skills and memories (for example, their knowledge of their regional language and culture, literature, music, poetry etc.) helped them to navigate feelings of belonging and cultural connectedness in the schools and neighbourhoods of a new city. 

Memories as stories of experience  

The research team used quantitative, qualitative and participatory methods to gather data from schools in residential areas of Kharkiv with high densities of internally displaced people and refugee families. We first used a survey to map the profiles of the internally displaced young people, their families and circumstances. We also gathered basic information related to their socio-psychological wellbeing and schooling conditions. In order to avoid the singling out of displaced students we collected data from the whole school cohort. 

We conducted in-depth online biographical interviews with young IDPs to establish the importance of key events in their lives before and after their move to new places of residence and schooling. The narrative descriptions produced were stories of experience rather than a timeline of events that happened nearly eight years before the interviews took place. However, their selective memories were stimulated by the then rising political tensions between Russia and Ukraine (the current war started the day after our data collection ended). We also used other qualitative innovative interventions such as a virtual “memory box” in which the IDP young people “deposited” objects which represented the memories and cultural artefacts that had mediated their identity making processes.

Adolescents navigating trauma and adaptation  

The survey revealed that whilst 76% of IDPs reported low psychological distress, 24% were more negatively affected and showed considerably higher trauma scores. Less affected IDPs described stronger, more supportive family relationships whereas more affected IDPs reported higher conflict and feeling misunderstood. Less affected IDPs spent more time with parents and friends outside school. More affected IDPs spent time with classmates, online, or alone. A greater proportion of IDPs spent time with family (76% with parents, 42% with siblings) and on social networks (49%) compared to non-IDPs. A greater proportion of non-IDPs spent time with friends outside school (36%) and in extracurricular activities (14%) compared to IDPs.

The qualitative findings showed that the process of adaptation of IDPs to the new post-migration location is lengthy and did not stop with settling in a new home, new school, or making new friends. For the IDPs school became one of the important places of socialisation and a gateway into new communities and society. Local schools were potentially a stabilising factor and provided a sense of educational direction for those who saw the advantages of the place for further education. 

Families also played a very important role in supporting young people in providing them with opportunities to continue education and in promoting their well-being. The adolescents constantly re-assessed their sense of belonging to the new place from the perspective of their cultural heritage and family background. Their formal identity building involved both an emotional attachment to their old “home” and a growing attachment to the new place.  Through this process they developed new cultural, social and linguistic identities.

Belonging to a place is an emotional and memory-related process, but it is also partly an agentic choice that leads to an individual’s construction of their own self-identity through a process of becoming other. For adolescents, their school, family, friends and neighbourhood constitute the basis of their social support system and influence identity formation. Moving places means that this system had to be re-assessed and their roles and status negotiated and re-negotiated. 

What the data reveals about displacement and trauma 

The analysis of quantitative and qualitative data in this study detected a wide range of consequences of early-life traumatic events on the long-term psychological wellbeing of adolescents. These findings suggest potential implications for young people’s lives affected by both military violence and displacement. The importance of this analysis of the traumatic effects of the historical conflict in Ukraine on adolescent IDPs lies in providing migration and refugee scholarship with evidence-based information to understand the long-term consequences of displacement and forced migration for children and adolescents. The fact that we have no way of knowing what further displacement and trauma have been endured by the subjects in our study since the current war broke out only adds to the urgency of this endeavour. 

Ian Thompson 

Ian is an Associate Professor of Education at the University of Oxford. His recent funded projects include Excluded Lives: The Political Economies of School Exclusion and their Consequences (ESRC) and Cultural Artefacts and Belonging: A Comparative Case Study of Displaced and Refugee Young People and Families in Ukraine (AHRC). His primary research interests are in understanding all aspects of school exclusion and inclusion and the unintended outcomes of policy and practice for marginalised young people.  

Lyudmila Nurse 

Lyudmila is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Education, University of Oxford where she was Research fellow between 2017 and 2022. In 2021-22 she was a Co-I in the AHRC-funded project Cultural Artefacts and Belonging: A Comparative Case Study of Displaced and Refugee Young People and Families in Ukraine. Her research interests and publications include international comparative studies of education, identities and belonging, migration, inclusion and qualitative biographical research methods. Dr Nurse is a co-editor of Policy Press (Bristol) book series: Advances in Biographical Research. 

Kyle Davison 

Kyle is a post-doctoral researcher at the Department of Education, University of Oxford. Kyle has worked on a number of recent projects, including Excluded Lives: The Political Economies of School Exclusion and their Consequences (ESRC), Cultural Artefacts and Belonging: A Comparative Case Study of Displaced and Refugee Young People and Families in Ukraine (AHRC), and The Effect of Studying a Text by an Author of Colour: The Lit in Colour Pioneers Pilot (Pearson, Penguin). Kyle’s interests include inclusion and social justice, interpersonal processes in the classroom, and quantitative methods in education.