From rupture to meaning: Social trauma, state narratives, and everyday experiences of war in Ukraine

This article examines how meaning is produced from war trauma at both the collective and individual levels, and how these processes interact during an ongoing conflict. The interdisciplinary scholarship theorizes “collective” and “cultural” trauma as ruptures in social meaning while also recognizing trauma’s reconstructive dimension. Moreover, trauma operates at both individual and collective levels, with diverse individual experiences persisting even under strong state-led narratives. Focusing on Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, the article qualitatively analyses President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s wartime speeches and 50 in-depth interviews with Ukrainians inside the country and abroad. The discourse analysis shows how Zelenskyy’s addresses construct an official narrative that transforms the invasion into a morally ordered story of national unity, righteous resistance, and future victory, offering a coherent identity for the collective. The interview data, however, reveal three distinct pathways of individual meaning-making: strong alignment with the official narrative; ambivalent or pragmatic meaning-making grounded in personal continuity and practical concerns; and distance or resistance, marked by moral ambiguity, disillusionment, or exhaustion. Together, these findings demonstrate that pathways to meaning in the face of social trauma vary across individual and collective levels, reflecting multiple ways in which people and their communities re-establish continuity and significance amid traumatic rupture.