Losing and finding home twice: Ukrainian women’s experiences of secondary internal displacement

While much work examines internal displacement, little research has considered the phenomenon of ‘secondary internal displacement,’ wherein internally displaced persons experience internal displacement a second time. Fewer, if any, studies have analysed twice IDPs’ relationships with the notion of ‘home.’ To address these theoretical and empirical lacunas, this paper investigates how Ukrainian women internally displaced at the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war in 2014 and again after Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion conceptualise and relate to the notion of ‘home.’ Drawing on thirty semi-structured interviews, the analysis reveals that, for twice internally displaced women, ‘home’ represents lost physical places, severed social ties, and a feeling they have or seek to (re)established. As the first study exploring twice internally displaced women’s relationships with ‘home’ – in Ukraine and globally – the paper pushes forward our understanding of secondary internal displacement and the experiences of women forced to rebuild their lives over again a second time. The paper moreover reveals acute grassroots implications of Russia’s war against Ukraine.