Researchers of the “Caring to Survive, Surviving to Care” Project, Elizabeth Prügl, Agnieszka Fal-Dutra Santos, and Yuliia Soroka, have published an article The wartime care economy: insights from Ukraine.
Their goal is to make visible the way Ukrainians, and Ukrainian women in particular, ensure social reproduction, that is, the everyday survival and flourishing of people as well as the reproduction of society.
The authors note that existing accounts of war economies often focus on the way states restructure their economies to enable war and on illicit activities used either to sustain the fighting or to survive.
The wide range of social reproduction activities – everyday, non-illicit activities often predominantly carried out by women or feminized subjects and unpaid or underpaid – thus is made invisible, the authors note.
In their opinion, an understanding of war economies is incomplete unless it takes into account the often non-monetized value created in wartime care economies. They highlight the different kinds of labor performed in these spheres and the way they relate to each other.