Hello and welcome to the Migration Oxford Podcast. I'm Jackie Broadhead, and I'm Rob McNeil. Rob, what are we talking about today? So we're talking about emptiness, which is it's a slightly odd concept for those of us who spend most of our time dealing with people freaking out about how full the UK is. But it's a really fundamental component of migration because when people arrive somewhere, they have to have left somewhere.
The impacts of that, the impacts of people leaving in large numbers, in particular on on communities and places is dramatic. And in particular, we were talking to Vladimir Archduke and Maria JUNCO, who were part of the Emptiness Project, which is run from campus. And they a lot of their work is focussed on the former Soviet Union. And so we're talking to them. But it's definitely not just about the impacts on places in the former Soviet Union.
Yeah, the discussion really reminded me of the conversation that we had about immigration and the way that so many of our debates focus on immigration and so few focus on the kind of politics of immigration and what as places kind of change, what will happen to them and what that will mean.
I thought there was just so many resonances between the way that we think about them and also this idea that it's relational, that actually it's not about full places and empty places, but about the kind of conversation between ideas of fullness and ideas of emptiness, and that both of them actually can have impacts on people in those communities.
That's right. And I think that one of the key things that that's that comes up in this discussion is the idea of an imagined past, an imagined time when things were vibrant and alive and when there was something there rather than a sentence of the now where you know, where there is nothing there, even when as we discovering, you know, through the conversation with people,
even when there are actually scenarios where there's quite a lot of change and sometimes there's actually quite a lot of new arrivals, even in communities that perceive themselves as empty. So it's this idea that the place being empty or there being nothing, there is a very complex idea that emerges from people's idea of how things should be rather than necessarily from from a sort of empirical idea of how things are.
Feels like half of our debate about migration is about the facts and figures and understanding what is happening. And then there's a whole other part which is just about perceptions, about how questions of migration and mobility make people feel, and that this is a really important flipside that we don't hear as much about.
I think that's exactly right. And I think that that that feeling, that sense of a place having been abandoned, particularly when that sentence is that it's been abandoned by the state, the people that you're looking at, who you feel should be looking after you.
What that drives people to, I mean, whether the idea that it might drive people to make certain political choices or get involved in conspiracy theories about why they've been left behind resonates, I think, really strongly with, you know, a potent post-industrial parts of Britain, the US, parts of Europe.
It's it's a really complex and interesting idea, and it's fascinating to speak to these guys about the very extreme versions of it that are that are evident in these parts of the former Soviet Union. I completely agree. So let's get to that conversation.
I'm joined today by Vladimir Archer, who's a researcher on the Emptiness Project, which is based at the Centre of Migration Policy and Society here at Oxford University, and by Maria JUNCO, who's a Ph.D. researcher, also working on the Emptiness Project. So, Maria, if you don't mind, I'm going to start with you. I'm and this is really kind of just something to situate us a little bit. In the UK, migration debates tend to be about the idea of fullness.
You know, the concepts that dominate the debate tend to be about things like arrivals, overcrowding, competition for jobs and resources, whatever it may be, and controls. But the Emptiness project is at the other end of the spectrum. It is about emptiness. Can you just explain to us why this is such an important part of understanding migration?
Well, I think if we just look at one spectrum, we don't get the full picture, so we understand why people come, but then we won't understand from where they come from and what are the push factors. So that's why it's really important to look at the places that are experiencing outmigration.
It's just like in the debates, for example, in urban studies, if we only concentrate on large CDs and we don't look at smaller places, then we don't have the full understanding of the world we are living today. So that's why I think we only can get the full picture of what is going on with. Increasingly, if we look both at places of out and in migration.
Okay, that's that's fine. But while there are fullness is quite easy to describe, I mean, we can imagine large numbers of people, the things, events and actions that will make somewhere feel full. Emptiness is quite an abstract concept. It leaves a lot of scope for interpretation. So can you explain? Is emptiness actually just a lens for scholars, or is it something that's actually tangible and meaningful for people in the places that you're studying?
And if so, how does emptiness actually affect people? So I think that both emptiness and fullness are very abstract concepts. So we cannot have complete emptiness and complete fullness in our world. So there was one time I read the paper about impossibility of awfulness. So it's just very relational. So when we talk about emptiness, we don't actually mean nothingness. We actually talk about the sort of configuration of relations between people, state capital and territories.
And this is an empty concept, meaning that people actually use this word to describe the reality in which they live. It came from that said, and Oskar's, who is the P.I. of our project Fieldwork, where people in rural Latvia will say, this is empty. That is empty, the shop is empty, the bus is empty, the house is empty, and emptiness is everywhere. Sort of like denoting that there was something there, but now it's not there anymore.
So it's relational. It's always there. It was a school, but now there is no school. So now this place is empty, right? And in my view side, people in Armenia, people see a bunch or of watching charcoal, which literally means nothingness on actual nothing is not there. If you translate by Armenian standards and it's funny because the word one means also word of God. Like in the Bible, Word of God. And so it's so empty that even the word of God is not there anymore.
And people say about smaller places, a bunch of watching people talking about how their relatives are out migrating, talking about how there is no money, how there is no possibilities, how there is vacancies in apartment vacancies, housing vacancies, other vacant buildings. So they come they compare this reality to what was there before. During the Soviet times, when there was a bus road, there was a hospital, there was a factory, and now everything is closed.
The bus doesn't run anymore. And so on. They use this words to to make sense of how they live now and what was there before. So for them, this is a very tangible thing, but it is also very relational. So it's always in comparison to something else. And I guess that's really helpful. I suppose one thing that I realised that we haven't directly focussed on yet is the location of your research. I'm say both, both you, Maria and Vladimir. You're working in the post-Soviet socialist sphere.
Is this something which is very specific to these locations, or do you think this is something which is more global in scope? Well, I think it's quite a global phenomenon. If you talk about urban decay, for example, or urban shrinkage, these are the terms that are wildly used in literature. Can think about Detroit, for example, which is a very canonical place. We think about Detroit, we think about ruins, right? We think about people leaving something behind.
And in Europe, we can talk about, for example, Leipzig or Saint-etienne or I don't know, there is there's a bunch of empty places in in empty in places in UK also. So it's not only in the post-Soviet, but I think what is specific to the post-Soviet is this political component that the whole regime changed and and then there were a lot of wars in the region. So it's different types of emptiness. There is this emptiness that is produced by state neglect.
When people are forced to leave to their places of residence to to find a job, to to get a better living. But then there's also emptiness that is produced by state violence, meaning war in displacement. So I think these things make the post-Soviet region the poor socialist region quite specific. But it's not that emptiness is just confined to that. It's interesting how you can also find a lot of ghost towns in China, for example, which is usually perceived as this massive, very dense country.
So so yeah, it's kind of leaving the world of empty. Places. And they are all around us. But for some reason, they haven't gained so much attention yet in this colour and literature. So we are kind of on the brink of bringing this wider debate to not only to academic into the academic room, but also, I guess, policy and just to the general public. Maria, thank you so much. Now, Vladimir described the drivers of emptiness in this post safety space.
Your your team has been differentiating between what you referred to as slow violence and fast violence. And Maria has just been talking about the concept of violence within that as a key part of understanding this post-Soviet experience. Can you just explain a bit what you mean by these terms, slow violence and fast violence and how they've manifested themselves in different forms of emptiness and what the implications of those of these concepts are for people and communities?
Oh, yeah, indeed. We use slower structural violence and faster or spectacular violence as correlates of emptiness of different types. And speaking about slow violence, I would define it as a closure of essential resources for a potential development of communities and individuals and in these places that are emptying.
And here we may think about structural factors such as systemic lack of investment in infrastructure and housing, in the lack of productive investment that would provide decent job opportunities and ultimately a lack of vision of the future in the in the people who inhabit this emptiness and in in the local authorities and places affected by these processes are badly connected as the consequence to to the centres of economic growth,
to the centres of opportunities. They they become stagnant due to the lack of productive investment. And this experience causes the population outmigration, whereas those who remain in such areas describe their settlements as empty, abandoned places where the death is the only certainty. And have. This was the case in the MAI in the first part of my fieldwork, which I did in central Ukraine, in a region that was actually provided with the full range of raw materials, agriculture, even oil.
But due to the lack of coordination between the state and private investment, due to the mismanagement and the inequality, this these resources did not did not contribute to the girls. They contributed to stagnation and people who live in such places, they refer to themselves not as victims of some sort of definite violence as as we would.
You use it in normal language. But they hinted that they hint that they are victims of corruption, of the mayors and politicians higher up of greedy businessmen and oligarchs and mafia networks and so on. And this the the ideological correlate of of what's what was produced in such places are often are often demobilisation lack of lack of any resources for collective actions and the concomitant dispersed kind of conspiracy theorising.
Ultimately, yes. So it was a little while at stake of our agency, whereas the first immediate spectacular violence, such as the violence of this war, has has an opposite effect. Most of my research participants in the second part of my fieldwork, which are now doing in Romania. So I talked to people who fled the war when they recall the start of the war that they describe. At first a debilitating shock. They experienced hearing and seeing the explosions on the 21st of February last year.
About the end. This shock quickly gave way to mobilisation to an energetic and hectic activity. In a few days or couple of weeks where people people started joining efforts to help the weakest in their communities or to join the army or eventually to save the kids by leaving the country or leaving to another place. So as opposed to slow violence, the spectacular violence has this this mobilising effect. However, this effects they they bitter bitter all with time.
So throughout my fieldwork I saw how the refugees started reproducing the patterns. This ideological explanatory patterns peculiar to slow violence. They resort to rumours to distrust in the states, to conspiracy theorising which which signifies something, which signifies the fact that they they feel they lose agency and they feel they lose potential for collective actions.
And this this kind of dialectic between these two types, two types of violence they they persists with time with as the war goes on. That's extremely interesting. I don't want to go off on a tangent here, so I'm going to just kind of but it's interesting that Maria was referencing Detroit in her earlier answer, and in fact, the description that you're giving of of a world in which rumour and can. Spiritual theories emerge in these decaying places.
Actually sounds enormously like the situations that you find in the kind of industrial heartland of America. It sounds similar to the kinds of things that we hear in, you know, that seem to occur certainly in sort of former industrial areas in the UK as well, even. Maria, we're talking about this in the context of countries, of countries of origin, you know, places that people are leaving. But it's it seems that emptiness does seem to have a relevance for countries of destination as well.
Could you just I mean, elaborate a little bit on what your research sort of direct us towards in that situation? Well, I have two answers. I guess it is. First is that people who have lived in places that are losing their constitutive elements, they have been affected by that. And I think that when they move to some other places, they definitely care. And care is some sort of a lens of how they look at places.
But since they are changing their place of residence, there might be a different type of emptiness that emerges. Is that a lack of a meaning, lack of attachment, lack of integration? And for them they can be in a place full of things, full of people, events. But if they are, I guess they can't integrate and they would still feel emptiness inside. So this is like one of the answer to that. But one the other answer emerges from my own field side.
Strikingly, the the recent war between Russia and Ukraine has brought fullness to Armenia, which has been actually losing population at a very fast pace. The capital, for example, has been changing rapidly. There is an enormous Slavic population now in the capital of Armenia, but not only in the capital, but even my field site, which is 1000 people in the middle of mountains, basically in the middle of nowhere, there is a community of Slav.
There is political migrants. They are refugees. There are even expats. I'm just going to a how they call themselves. And there is a community of about 50 people there now who are inhabiting a vacant factory. So there's another spectrum. So in the country of destination, they found emptiness. They found a place which people they are residents of that place actually say that there's nothing there. But now there is something I mean, there was always something.
There was the residence, there was two shops, there was a post office, there was a museum. And now there's this community of Slavic people who are doing something. There is some creative activity. Most is creative, so they are doing some sort of their creative things.
And when they come to the countries of destination, they not only come to capitals, but sometimes they land into places or with their own residency that there is nothing there and then they completely change the landscape or what is going on. It doesn't mean that they feel this emptiness, because I think that for the residents, this place is still empty.
They still say that there's nothing there, but they create a new layer of relations and a new layer of interactions that somehow changes the social landscape. But this is a very, very, very something work in progress. It's been going on for one year since since the beginning of the war. And so the consequences of this in migration to a place to empty in place of a completely different population with completely different values and types of lives.
It's still hard to grasp like what is actually going to change. But that's fascinating. I'm just I mean, just as an aside, I mean, you're you're describing a Slavic population now. I'm just interested, is this primarily Ukrainian population or a Russian population or a mix of the two or. Yeah, there is some Belarusians, but actually let's not forget about that part of slow population.
But so I would say that mostly these are Russians, but then there also are some Ukrainians there and several Belarusians and also several Iranian people who are also escaping the violence of their estates. So it's it's an open ended creative community, but mostly I would say like over over 50% is Russians. Though it seems self-evident, the change from fullness to emptiness will will affect places and change places and people.
Obviously, I imagine that that's inevitable. But is it always I mean, I was going to say, is it always for the worse? Is that change always for the worse? As Maria was already said, these are relational terms and they don't exist on their own individually. We start as as anthropologists. We start from the point of view of our research participants and the people who experience their places are empty or emptying.
They do it because they remember them being cool or vibrant at some point, or because they see other places as vibrant as full of opportunities for for them. And 30 years of post-Soviet economic transformation led to an increase in income and wealth, but also in spatial inequality. And this is this is a sort of microeconomic correlates to our to our topic of emptying places in Ukraine, in Russia, but also in Belarus, to the countries that are no more.
The the dynamic dynamic is economic dynamism and growth, where with the existing mostly in the in 2000s are concentrated in the capital city and in Moscow and Russia, Russian in Kiev, in Ukraine, but also in the few economic centres. And this places vibrancy that attract people and capital. They exist at the expense of vast regions that have been stagnant or have been degenerating. That, Maria, you talked about people reassembling their identities in new places.
Now, is that something that migrants have to do or the migrants rather have to do? Or is there a different form of this to specific to those who who are who are leaving or or who have experienced emptiness? Um, I can't say for I can generalise here. I can only I guess give some maybe examples and some base my knowledge on what I'm seeing in my field site. But I am remaining small and in place where the Slavic predawn Slavic migrant community.
I would say that it's not the place or the or the local people that influence and influence them to reassemble their identity, but rather the conditions from which they fled. So most of these are either refugees or political immigrants, and so they're kind of really rethinking their life in various aspects. So they were both categories were displaced in some violently, others less violently. And now in a new place, they're kind of thinking of how to move forward, who they are.
They're experiencing very, very stark existential crises. This is what I can see. So I can't say for all migrants, but I can definitely say it depends on what are the conditions that they left behind. And in conditions of severe trauma, they definitely rethink their identity. And this might not be even related to to where they are lending. This is like a very internal process of rethinking how to move forward.
Finally, I was hoping that I could just talk to you a little bit about the idea of the relationship, rather, between between conflict and emptiness. Now, I mean, we spoke in our very first podcast to you just at the very beginning of the of the of the invasion of Ukraine about this a little bit. But I wonder if you could just elaborate a little bit on what you think that relationship is and how we should analyse it. Since then, obviously quite a bit of work has been done on this.
There have been numerous projects and journalists working on documenting, documenting the effects of the war on frontline communities and in places that have been affected by by bombings and by shelling.
Now we have an added layer. We have the environmental emergency that obviously affecting different the places around the frontline in Ukraine, not only the with the destruction of Cahokia Dam and the destruction of kilometres and kilometres of territories down there on the flow of the river, but also pollution of the land with with explosives, the inability to cultivate the land near the frontline.
In effect, if one looks at the current space maps of of the south and east of Ukraine, one can see from space how the frontline affects surrounding areas, creating spaces that have been on cultivating, creating belts of completely destroyed settlements that have simply disappeared. So the land that have been evacuated with few remaining residents, these are the most vital, the most urgent, the most urgent questions that one should focus on in the interdisciplinary studying of the war.
About this, The second aspect and to it will become crucial is this study of migration, because this has been a truly unprecedented migration in the recent European history. It includes, of course, millions over five millions of Ukrainian refugees that fled to Europe and uh, but also to Russia.
But it also should include systematic treatment of this wave of migration that include obviously the Russian citizens that are escaping from political persecution of Belarussian citizens, but also those who are caught in cutting between those who live in Ukraine without Ukrainian residence permit and or those who use this route through Belarus, from from the Middle East, from Afghanistan and Africa, and who are caught in this kind of geopolitical struggle on the border.
The migration obviously contributes to the emptying and the population of the countries migrants come from, but they also need to be studied in the new places, because by now I think it's evident that the war will not end soon. And meanwhile this people these people who ended up in Europe for Europe, for example. They are caught in a specific kind of temporal, temporal conundrum. They are given temporary protection without knowing exactly what is going to expire.
So it means that they should be potentially ready to to leave to to return at any moment in time. And given that the war is fundamentally uncertain, it's uncertain not only for for the refugees themselves, but also for the Ukrainian government.
They can't they can't plan anything. And this is this is something that that breaks down completely their idea about the future and that destroys that destroys their identity as not not only like identity as a national term, but identities as as as in terms of gender, in terms of family, in terms of social status. And that that's that's a huge that's a huge chunk of work that's that's ahead of us. Well, I have to say, Maria, and so to me, this has been an absolutely fascinating conversation.
I'm enormously grateful to you both. So I think that unless there's anything else, I'm going to say, thank you and hopefully we'll speak to you both again soon. Thank you. Thank you. You've been listening to the Migration Oxford podcast. I'm Robert Neill. And I'm Jackie Broadhead.