A new social reality ‒ the community of “Ukraine in Latvia”

Abstract

The article discusses solutions to the migration research challenge that appeared in 2022, when the flow of war refugees from Ukraine to Latvia increased very rapidly and in large numbers following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The challenge was to develop a conceptual framework to understand and describe the newcomer community and outline strategies for its integration in Latvia. The use of philosophical phenomenology and topological hermeneutics in the research made it possible to develop knowledge about the newcomer community, which is necessary to quickly get to know the values, attitudes, traditions, and regional characteristics of the newcomers.

Due to its geographical proximity, a similar historical fate and geopolitical threats, Latvian society welcomed the Ukrainian war refugees with great openness and it was evident that a community of solidarity and even fraternity was emerging between the newcomers and their hosts, forming a new social reality that can be described as the community of “Ukraine in Latvia”. This concept reflects the methodology of its development: the use of the concept of place as a synthesis of human geography and philosophical approaches, which sees migration as the movement of a person from one place to another with its own locus, i.e., values, attitudes, and traditions. The mutual need of newcomers and hosts to get to know each other quickly and to coexist is explained by the functioning of cognitive rituals, the key dynamic element of which is construction of the embodiment of one’s own world. The approach developed in the article is also applied to the study of religious communities as an ‒ as yet ‒ unconscious resource of migration, using as illustrations the communities of the Latin and Greek Catholic Rite, and the problem of pastoral care in the communities of the Orthodox Church which is influenced by the political nature of the Church’s activity in Ukraine.