Emotioner och konflikt : Identitet och relationer hos den ryska diasporan iSverige efter invasionen av Ukraina

Sammanfattning: The Russian invasion of Ukraine has affected millions of people in different ways. The everyday lives of Russians has changed significantly. Our purpose in this study is to explore the experiences of Russian immigrants in Sweden. The areas we are specifically interested in are the understanding individuals have of the conflict and the experiences these individuals describe when it comes to how the conflict has affected their sense of identity as well as their personal relationships with friends and family. This qualitiative study was conducted through interviews of these Russian immigrants. The perspective from the Russian diaspora is a rather unexplored one compared to their Ukrainian counterpart. This study covers many different subjects and there is a lack of previous research on this specific topic, likely because of the recency of these events. Considering this, the section on previous research is based on the themes the study discusses. These themes are public opinion of international military interventions, the Russian diaspora, empathy in polarized politics, shame, and group responsibility, and finally the group borders in the Ukrainian solidarity movement. The theoretical framework this study is based on is emotional sociology. A theory has been built out of the combined viewpoints of Goffman’s theory on categorization and stigma, Collins’s theory of group solidarity, interaction ritual, and conflict talk, Hochschild’s theory of deep stories and empathy walls as well as Scheff’s theory on shame and conformity. The final results of the study show that the understanding of the conflict varies wildly between individuals and said understanding tends to affect in which manner the conflict has changed the sense of identity as well as personal relationships. The individuals who share an understanding that agrees with the idea that Russia is at fault tend to feel a larger sense of shame over their identity and it has had a more negative effect on their personal relationships especially with family in Russia. Individuals who are more inclined to either have a more ambivalent- or pro-Putin understanding didn’t express these experiences but instead had different worries, such as receiving negative sanctions for their opinions. Respondents of all understandings expressed a worry about suffering sanctions for their ethnicity, but none of them described personal experiences with this in Sweden.