The panel serves as a platform for discussion about entrepreneurial mobilisation in the context of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine.  In our study, which included extensive desk research and 30 in-depth semi-structured interviews with business leaders, consultants and government officials mostly from CEE, we firstly aimed to map out the types of entrepreneurial responses to the humanitarian and recovery processes for Ukraine in a transnational context. We observed a growing potential market for 'venture philanthropy' and social-impact driven enterprises, yet this social or civic approach seems to be in its infancy. The second aim of the research was to analyse changes within modes of doing business from a humanitarian to recovery footing, including the development of partnerships and the challenges thereof. Finally, our respondents' reflections on the Ukrainian nation-building process from an entrepreneurial perspective help to understand and frame the varied end-goals of entrepreneurial mobilisation and Ukraine's future in Europe.

Meet the speakers and chair

Karolina Czerska-Shaw is a sociologist and assistant professor at the Insitute of European Studies at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland. Her research interests include migration and asylum policies and politics on the EU and national levels, as well as local migrant integration. She is a researcher in several international projects, including a Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Action project entitled RECLAIM: Reclaiming Liberal Democracy in a Postfactual age, where she studies the development of migration, asylum and border policies in Poland and on the EU level and postfactual discourses that have helped or hindered their development. Within the PeaceRep project, she has been involved in researching transnational mobilisation and civic responses to the war effort in Ukraine, and more recently, civically-minded entrepreneurial mobilisation. She is a member of the Jagiellonian Centre for Migration Studies and has advised local and regional authorities in developing strategies for the integration of migrants and refugees.

Roch Dunin-Wąsowicz is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Sociology at the UCL Social Research Institute (IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society) and a Research Associate at the Conflict and Civicness Research Group at LSE IDEAS. He has a track record of academic evidence-based research in the field of sociology with a focus on civil society, migration and European integration. In the past, he studied the social organization and civic identity of Polish migrants in the UK post 2004, the political mobilisation of Ukrainian migrants in Poland after the EuroMaidan, the social repercussions of Brexit in the UK, and grassroots civic activism across Europe. Roch’s academic training is in political sociology. He graduated from the New School for Social Research in New York City and obtained his PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science. He currently researches transnational business-oriented mobilisation in support of Ukraine'. He is also researching the geographical aspects of populist Euroscepticism.

Volodymyr Artiukh is is a postdoctoral researcher on the ERC-funded project ‘Emptiness: Living Capitalism and Democracy under (post-) Socialism’ (University of Oxford) and an editor at Commons: Journal of Social Criticism. 

Sophie Gueudet works as PeaceRep Ukraine’s post-doctoral researcher. An historian of war and conflict, she’s specialised on separatism and secession, contested states and unresolved territorial conflicts, and civil-military relations in intra-state wars in Southeastern and Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. Her current research agenda deals with the effects of the war against Ukraine on Russia's constellation of client de facto states.

Ukraine in global context is an online event series run by PeaceRep’s Ukraine programme.

The LSE Conflict and Civicness Research Group (@LSE_CCRG) is part of LSE IDEAS, the foreign policy think tank for the London School of Economics and Political Science. Through sustained engagement with policymakers and opinion-formers, LSE IDEAS provides a forum that informs policy debate and connects academic research with the practice of diplomacy and strategy. 

This event is organised as part of our work for the Peace and Conflict Resolution Evidence Platform (PeaceRep), an international research project on peace and transition processes in the 21st century led by the University of Edinburgh Law School and funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO).