White Privilege and/or Contingent and Precarious Whiteness? Ukrainian Refugees in the ‘New Cold War’

Since the early phases of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in Winter 2022, several media and academic sources have commented on the highly generous refugee policies towards Ukrainian refugees in an international climate that is otherwise unreceptive and even hostile toward refugees. Comparing the radically different policies and reception of Ukrainians with treatment of refugees coming from the Global South, especially from Syria and Afghanistan, most critical analyses have placed the emphasis on the ‘whiteness’ of Ukrainians. Finding this interpretation insightful in some ways but insufficient in others, this paper complicates the analysis, arguing that rather than simplistic and general notions of whiteness, references to whiteness of Ukrainians would be analytically accurate, useful and relevant only through contextualized, qualified and contingent interpretations of refugee policies at the intersection of geopolitics and political economy. Historically, the ambiguities of whiteness for Eastern Europeans were partly transformed and further complicated during the Cold War. While the geopolitics of the post-Cold War and the ‘New Cold War’ helps to specify and clarify both the privileges and contingent limits of what ‘whiteness’ would mean for Ukrainians; the political economy of refugee flows reveal how refugee policies are partly informed by economic considerations treating some Ukrainian refugees as potentially highly skilled “talent” to be imported, and others as sources of highly exploitable, precarious care labour.