The violence of war is rarely, if ever, contained to the frontlines. Ukrainian women and men have long faced intersecting realities of violence: the shelling, bombing and destruction of infrastructure; the mental health impact of late night air raid alerts; the pain and uncertainty of being torn away from one’s family and community; and the economic violence of increasing cost of life and increasingly inaccessible social services.
Surviving these violences requires the largely invisible, unpaid and underpaid social reproductive labour of care.
Research we carried out in Kharkiv and Lviv within the framework of the project Caring to Survive, Surviving to Care, shows how diverse Ukrainians have adapted their lives and work in the face of violence in order to survive, and to sustain their families and communities. We refer to this phenomenon as wartime care economies — the reconfiguring of the provision of care in the face of the violence of war, and the political and economic shifts it creates.
We distill four spheres of the social reproductive labour that sustains wartime economies: households, family and neighbourhood support networks, volunteer networks and civil society organisations, and the public sector.
First, the war in Ukraine led to a sharp spike in unpaid housework and care labour, disproportionately carried out by women. Interviewees in our project highlighted that given the closures of schools, the burden of responsibility for education and childcare has fallen on the shoulders of mothers, leading to what one interviewee referred to as a “hellish parental burnout”. The burden of childcare has been made all the more difficult as several of our interviewees have referred to the psychological impact of the war on children. We also heard many accounts of adult children deciding not to move away from violence in order to continue to be able to take care of their elderly parents.
Second, the full-scale Russian invasion also sparked an inspiring surge of solidarity. Neighbours organised to share food, water and even electricity. One of the members of our project — Yuliia Soroka — has recalled such organising in her autoethnographic account of surviving the siege of Mariupol. In it, she describes a common area organised in a basement, where a generator was set up to charge phones, and neighbours came together to organise the supply of water and food, and to provide each other with comfort. We have also documented care networks among those displaced by the war, in which elderly women played a particularly important role.
Third, a culture of volunteering has been ingrained into Ukrainian society since the Revolution of Dignity of 2014, and in the aftermath of the full-scale invasion took a variety of forms — from joining the Ukrainian Armed Forces, to providing humanitarian assistance to those affected and displaced by violence. Civil society organisations also often reframed their activities in order to provide care and humanitarian assistance — distributing relief packages and supporting internally displaced persons in addition to their usual work, for example in policy advocacy.
Fourth, social workers have functioned as a bulwark for addressing the harms of the war for those least able to do so themselves. In Kharkiv, we spoke to social workers that were back to visiting the elderly and disabled people in their care only a few days after the beginning of the full-scale invasion, despite continuing heavy shelling and bombing. Their work during wartime was reshaped — not only because of the increased physical insecurity, but also because of the added emotional and mental load of addressing the fears and anxieties of those in their care.
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The testimonies we collected in Kharkiv and Lviv have brought to light the invisible yet ubiquitous labour of care during war. Social work, volunteering and taking care of those in one’s family and closest networks have enabled Ukrainian survival in the face of Russian aggression. This often underpaid and underappreciated labour has also, however, brought the spectre of depletion and burnout to those who do the bulk of it — women, including elderly women, social workers, volunteers and activists. Their work needs to be recognised in the ongoing discussions around (post-)war recovery.