An article by Dovilė Jakniūnaitė, on mobility in wartime and the role of railway infrastructure in Ukraine’s resilience has been published in a prestigious journal

An article by Dovilė Jakniūnaitė, professor at Vilnius University’s Institute of International Relations and Political Science (together with Marta Jaroszewicz and Peter Adey), entitled “Seeing like a train: the viapolitics of emergency mobilities during Russia’s war against Ukraine”, has been published in the prestigious journal “Mobilities”. The publication analyzes how, after Russia’s large-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, trains in Ukraine became not only a means of evacuation, but also a symbol of solidarity, resistance, privilege, and hope.

For many, images of the start of the war are inseparable from scenes of evacuation in train carriages. According to the researchers, this is what prompted the question of how a state-owned company with a criticized, massive, and outdated Soviet infrastructure managed to become one of the best-functioning institutions in the first weeks of the war – and what this says about the infrastructure itself as a tool of power, control, but also survival.

The article draws on mobility studies, postcolonial and post-socialist perspectives, and the chosen theoretical “tool” is viapolitics, which shifts the focus from the journey’s destination or the traveler(s) to the means of transport itself – in this case, the train. This approach allows us to see how the Soviet railway infrastructure, which for a long time symbolized imperial control, was transformed into a tool of survival and resistance for Ukraine during the war.

The study identifies four intertwined functions of the train: solidarity, rescue, privilege, and hope. The dimension of privilege is particularly highlighted: even when the train becomes a means of mass evacuation, the opportunities to use it are unevenly distributed; the mobility opportunities of older people, people with disabilities, and non-citizens differ. In other words, the train both saves and highlights inequality: who can actually move and who is left “behind the mobility barrier.”

To reveal the different sides of the phenomenon, several types of data are used: news reports, reports from human rights organizations, and personal testimonies from online war archives. The article also reflects on the inevitable limitations of such an analysis: with the war still ongoing, some of the data remains fragmentary, some disappears, and it isn’t easy to collect stories independently.

The authors emphasize that the value of the article lies not only in its “strategic lessons,” but in its very proposal to see war and movement differently. First, the train (like other spaces of movement) is revealed as a non-neutral, meaningful place where people learn to be again, to adapt to insecurity, to make decisions, and to act – like a moving social experiment. Second, the study reminds us that changing our analytical perspective sometimes reveals things we would not see by asking “usual” questions and allows us to see and understand the world in a slightly different way than we have been taught to do so far.