Anastasiia Poberezhna is a PhD Fellow at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA) at Leiden University, jointly affiliated with the War, Peace and Justice research group and the Governance of Crisis programme. Her doctoral research sits at the convergence of disaster studies and remittance studies, examining how wartime remittances function as everyday practices of care among Ukrainians displaced in the Netherlands. Her project is supervised by Prof. Sanneke Kuipers, Dr Matthew Hoye, and Dr Lydie Cabane.

More information about Nastya Poberezhna

Anastasiia Poberezhna is a PhD Fellow at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs (ISGA) at Leiden University, jointly affiliated with the War, Peace and Justice research group and the Governance of Crisis programme. Her doctoral research sits at the convergence of disaster studies and remittance studies, examining how wartime remittances function as everyday practices of care among Ukrainians displaced in the Netherlands. Her project is supervised by Prof. Sanneke Kuipers, Dr Matthew Hoye, and Dr Lydie Cabane.

Doctoral research

In the first year of Russia’s full-scale invasion, remittances to Ukraine matched the scale of Western military support. Just as strikingly, reverse remittances flowing from Ukraine to displaced relatives abroad have reached levels rarely seen in refugee contexts, where the conventional expectation is that displaced people receive rather than send support. Together these flows make the Ukrainian case an unusually rich site for rethinking what we know about migration and remittances during armed conflict, yet remittances themselves remain marginal in global justice and security studies. Poberezhna’s dissertation sets out to close that gap which connects her work to the broader concerns of the ERC-funded JustRemit project at ISGA. Her project asks how the work of sending money becomes a way for displaced Ukrainians to sustain relationships and renegotiate responsibilities across distance during armed conflict, and what this tells us about agency, care, and obligation under conditions of acute disruption.

Background

Before commencing her PhD in January 2025, Poberezhna held a research and teaching position at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences in Rotterdam (2023–2025), where she documented the stories, motivations, and shifting socio-political contexts of Ukrainian refugees in the Netherlands through a combination of desk research and ethnographic fieldwork in refugee centres. In parallel, she tutored on Academic Skills, Global Challenges, Organisations and Management, and Political Philosophy at Erasmus.

In 2023, she worked as a social connector for RefugeeHomeNL at the Netherlands Red Cross in The Hague, providing trauma-informed integration support and matching Ukrainian families fleeing the war with Dutch host households. In that role she coordinated and mediated more than forty successful matches and supported over a hundred and fifty displaced people through the early stages of their integration—work that developed her practical expertise in conflict mediation, expectation management, and building resilience in communities under duress, and which gave her the field knowledge on which her current doctoral fieldwork builds. Earlier in 2023, she conducted deliverable-based research for SeeD on the situation of precarious communities in Ukraine at the onset of the 2023 phase of the invasion—women, people living near the frontlines, Roma communities, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ+ Ukrainians—informing an internal UNDP policy report.

Poberezhna holds an MSc in Conflict Resolution and Governance (2022) and a BSc in Politics, Psychology, Law and Economics (PPLE) (2020), both from the University of Amsterdam. She works in Ukrainian and Russian (native), English (proficient), and Dutch (intermediate), and conducts fieldwork primarily in Ukrainian and English.

Public engagement

Beyond her doctoral research, Poberezhna is active in a wider conversation in The Hague on the humanitarian and academic dimensions of the war in Ukraine. With Students for Ukraine, and together with Dr Vlad Niculescu-Dincă, she helped organise an early-2026 panel at ISGA around the documentary Beyond Prayers: A Student-Led Humanitarian Mission to Kyiv, examining how grassroots and youth-driven networks coordinate with—and increasingly fill the gaps left by—institutional humanitarian frameworks as donor funding contracts. She also contributed to a companion event around Tobias de Saint Laurent’s documentary on student life in Ukraine during wartime, organised with the ABBA Student Association (Adriatic-Baltic-Black-Azov), reflecting on academic resilience, the meaning of education under conditions of conflict, and what Dutch universities and EU institutions can practically do to support Ukrainian higher education.

She engages critically with Dutch and European policy debates on Ukraine. In April 2026 she spoke at a GroenLinks-PvdA webinar discussing the Green European Foundation report New Idealism for a Disrupted Europe, alongside Thijs Reuten and the report's lead author Richard Wouters. Her contribution pushed back on the report’s values-first framing, arguing that democratic practice precedes democratic values rather than the other way around, and that Ukraine's experience under invasion makes this directionality particularly visible. Building on the same critical orientation, she presented at the GroenLinks-PvdA Europadag Festival in May 2026 on democratic participation and lessons from Ukraine as a 'democracy at war', there questioning resilience as an analytical frame, a concept she suggested risks recasting active political agency as passive endurance.

Teaching

At ISGA, Poberezhna teaches in the BSc in Security Studies, where she tutors Skills Lab 2, Skills Lab 3, and the tutorial component of War and Peacebuilding. She designs and leads weekly sessions, develops interactive activities and assessments, and has contributed to redesigning the tutorial format toward more participatory, discussion-based pedagogy.