Conflict-Induced Emigration of Scientists from Ukraine to Internal and International Destinations

Michael Zaslavsky, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Aliakbar Akbaritabar , Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR), and Institute of Sociology and Demography, University of Rostock

Current migration theories offer little insight into the potentially negative aspects of scholarly migration as a form of high-skilled migration, with high-skilled migration being largely viewed in a positive light. Yet scholarly migration is not always a tale of freedom, choice, and innovation, as the labels "researchers at risk", "scientists in exile", or "refugee academics" demonstrate. We document the problematic aspects of scholarly migration by investigating the case of Ukrainian and Ukraine-based researchers and the effects of the conflict since 2014. We draw on two large-scale, rich bibliometric datasets, Scopus and OpenAlex, which allow us to identify both internal and international scholarly migration at the subnational level from 2009 to 2022. Results suggest that after 2014 there was significant internal and international outmigration from Eastern Ukrainian regions, with well over 50 per 1,000 scholars leaving the Eastern oblasts of Donetsk and Luhansk to both internal and international destinations in the first three years after the start of the conflict. These results highlight the importance of monitoring how science systems change during armed conflict, and complicate current treatments of scholarly migration in the literature as solely driven by economic intentions and exercising one's freedom to move.

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 Presented in Session 92. Flash Session International Migration