Hostility Towards Internal Displaced People: Researchers’ Contribution to its Formation

Abstract

Hostility towards internally displaced people in contemporary Ukraine which was fixed by numbers of survey and other kinds of sociological researches understood in this article as an effect of discursive construction of IDP’s identity. Reports by four Ukrainian research organisations about IDPs status have examined as an object for discourse analysis procedure in seeking for answers to following research questions: how the hostile perception is emerging and forming, in what kind of the net of meanings, in competition of which discourses. According to the study the nominations of IDP used in researchers reports are emphasizing their status as object of help and influence, weak and dependent category, victims, socially unsecured groups, «strangers», «internal enemies».  These meanings are supporting by paternalistic discourse of state, discourses of social care and social security, discourses of volunteers, NGOs  and international organisations as source of help. The active status of IDP mainly remains as a wish with the exception of situation when IDP identity replace by religious, ethnic (Crimea tatars) or economic (entrepreneurs). These results allow to illustrate how researchers as actors of academic field take part in formation of discriminative status of IDP. Researchers are producing nomination as one of the cultural mechanisms of power by which current power order reproduces oneself.