Return intentions of Ukrainian refugees: The role of national identity and pride

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The war in Ukraine has displaced over 6.4 million Ukrainians to neighboring countries. This study investigates the return intentions of Ukrainian refugees, focusing on national identity and pride as psychological factors. Using a large-scale experimental survey, we examined how increasing the salience of these factors affects return decisions. Our findings show that making national identity more salient slightly increases the desire to return, while making pride more salient decreases it, particularly among those with lower pride levels. These results suggest that interventions enhancing national identity could promote return migration, but pride-based strategies should be used cautiously. The study contributes to the literature on forced displacement and identity economics, providing policy insights for facilitating the return of war refugees. • We study return intent of Ukrainian refugees in a large online experiment. • Making national identity salient slightly increases refugees’ return intent. • Making national pride salient instead decreases refugees’ return intent. • Pride salience’s negative effect is stronger for refugees with low dispositional pride.