Published on: July 23, 2026 at 10:40 am
By Nick Keppler
The conflict in Ukraine—sparked by Russia’s invasions in 2014 and 2022—has not only shaped the lives of those within its borders. It has also profoundly impacted the global Ukrainian diaspora, a group that includes as many as 20 million people. For those with roots in Ukraine, the war—the largest and deadliest in Europe since World War II—is not just a distant geopolitical event.
This includes Academy of Management Scholar Andre Havrylyshyn of Binghamton University. All four of his grandparents were born in Ukraine, were displaced during World War II, and eventually resettled in North America.
“I grew up in Maryland but was heavily immersed in the Ukrainian American diaspora community,” he said. This included church services, a Boy Scouts troop, and Saturday school providing education about Ukrainian language, history, and culture, all tailored to families of Ukrainian descent.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991 enabled his family to reconnect with relatives. Several of his family members relocated to Ukraine in the 1990s and 2000s, further strengthening his ties to the country.
After Russian aggression intensified with the occupation of the Crimean Peninsula in 2014, Havrylyshyn considered going to the country “to reconnect with my roots, do some work with Ukrainian Catholic University, teach some courses, and try to be of use in that way.”
Since the start of the 2022 invasion that led to the ongoing war, that “didn’t feel like enough.”
The Russia-Ukraine war and a diagnosis of a rare blood cancer sharpened of purpose of his life into focus. Havrylyshyn considered how he could retool his scholarship to be of use to the cause of Ukraine in its struggle to retain its sovereignty.
Social sciences, including sociology, business administration, management, and organizational psychology, have a long relationship with war. Many military leaders have been eager recipients of scholars’ insights into collective behaviors and group-driven results.
Havrylyshyn considered writing a paper for Ukrainian military leaders and managers, drawing from such enduring sources of military strategy as Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian army officer and military theorist, Chairman Mao Zedong, and Sun Tzu, a Chinese military general, strategist, philosopher, and writer. Journal editors pushed back on the idea. Situations and objectives change rapidly during war, and the academic publication process is slow. The resulting work might be inactionable by the time it arrived, they told him.
From this feedback came a few broadly defined projects that Havrylyshyn has undertaken with collaborators at Binghamton University.
“We’re taking an interdisciplinary approach and trying to think about that massive project of rebuilding Ukraine: What do we know? What do we not know? What can we think about?” he said.
They are also investigating how multinational companies respond to the war, the efforts of charities and aid organizations, and the experiences of other people who—like Havrylyshyn—endure the strife of watching from a distance as their family’s country of origin is attacked repeatedly by an invader.
The ultimate goal is to match his work to the sense of urgency he feels daily.
“In addition to what the war there represents for the countries involved, the region, and the world, this is personal,” he said. “It’s my history, and it’s a place where there are many people who are both family and close friends.
“Every day, there’s some degree of concern I have, particularly the question: Am I going to get a call being told that somebody was killed by a missile strike?”
