Dialogue Series: Learning with Ukraine for German Civil Protection

Social-science disaster research, which emerged in Germany and the United States after the Second World War, has its origins in research on the behaviour of populations in war that was commissioned during the war itself — above all the US Strategic Bombing Surveys (1944–46). During the Cold War, comparable studies were also conducted in Germany, producing a body of social-science civil-protection research that is in part not publicly accessible. Lars Clausen, the founder of German disaster sociology, conceives of civil protection as a social question that touches on structural societal dimensions: social inequality, trust, volunteering, democratic participation, and the relationship between state and population.

The seminar introduces key perspectives from social-science disaster research and asks what it means to conceive of civil protection as a social question, and what this might imply for establishing social-science civil-protection research as a field.

Civil protection is a historically evolved institution: its structures, self-conceptions, and systems of knowledge have emerged from specific political, social, and security policy contexts and have undergone significant transformation over the past decades. The seminar reconstructs the development of German civil protection from the Imperial Era to the present day and examines which historical influences explain today’s system.

The seminar covers early state protective measures in the context of World War I, the instrumentalisation of air-raid protection in National Socialism and its institutional aftermath, as well as the differing civil protection traditions in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and the German Democratic Republic (GDR). With German reunification and the end of the Cold War, the political significance of civil protection changed considerably; in many areas, there was downsizing, reinterpretation, and a shift towards a broader understanding of population protection.

The historical perspective reveals the dependencies that shape the current structure and culture of German civil protection. At the same time, it raises the question of which historical knowledge becomes relevant again in contemporary debates about resilience in civil protection, civilian defence, and population protection.

Note: This seminar takes place in two parts on two separate dates.

Part I provides a new approach to civil protection through the lens of resilience, while Part II turns to the practice-based perspective on the same guiding questions.

The seminar addresses how state and societal resilience can strengthen civil protection/civil defence. Particular attention is paid to the municipal level and to the role of local self-government, hromadas, civil society actors, and international partners in civil protection and support structures under wartime conditions. How can synergy be achieved in interaction?

While Part I approaches civil protection through the lens of resilience, Part II shifts the focus from theoretical and institutional perspective to lived practice. At its centre is the State Emergency Service of Ukraine / Derzhavna sluzhba Ukrainy z nadzvychainykh sytuatsii (DSNS/SESU) as the key state institution within Ukraine’s civil-protection and disaster-management system.

How do DSNS/SESU responders, municipal administrations, and civil society organisations coordinate their work in the everyday reality of war? Practitioners report which forms of coordination have proven effective under wartime conditions, where frictions arise between central coordination and local capacity to act, and what lessons can be drawn for German civil protection.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the importance of cooperation between municipalities, civil society organisations, volunteers, and businesses for societal resilience has become increasingly evident. This presentation explores how local communities respond to the multiple and overlapping crises caused by war and examines the forms of collaborative governance that have emerged in this context. It focuses on how different actors pool resources, share information, coordinate assistance, and work together to maintain their communities’ ability to function under extreme conditions. The presentation highlights the networks, platforms, and digital tools that enable such cooperation, as well as the role of businesses and NGOs in addressing the diverse crises triggered by the war. Drawing on research on Ukrainian municipalities, it traces the evolution of these collaborative arrangements since 2022 and compares them with local crisis-management practices before the full-scale invasion. In doing so, it shows how relationships between institutions and society have evolved, what challenges and tensions have emerged, and what lessons can inform building resilient communities amid complex, overlapping crises.

Sexual violence and rape are deliberately used as methods of warfare. In Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, conflict-related sexual violence has been documented in occupied territories and in contexts of detention and torture, and is described as part of a systematic practice. The seminar asks how such acts are documented, classified under international criminal law and addressed in transitional-justice proceedings and reparations — and what knowledge about patterns, perpetrator structures and consequences this yields for civil protection.

Building on this, the focus is on dealing with affected persons in the civilian population: responders encounter them during evacuations, in emergency shelters, in initial care and in support for refugees. What does first contact demand in terms of communication, confidentiality and protection against re-traumatisation? Which referral structures into medical, psychosocial and legal care must be in place? Questions of reproductive health under wartime conditions also arise: access to care, pregnancies resulting from rape, and care for pregnant and breastfeeding women in situations where infrastructure has failed.

Responders, volunteers, and civil-society support structures in Ukraine have been confronted since 2022 with strains characterised by intensity, duration, and simultaneity: injury and death, repeated threat, personal affliction, loss of loved ones, exhaustion, and the necessity to remain capable of acting even under uncertain and life-threatening conditions. The seminar examines these experiences from a social-scientific and psychosocial perspective and presents the results of a nationally representative panel study on the prevalence of PTSD and complex PTSD among those exposed to war.

At its centre are questions of strain, grief, moral distress, care work, family role conflicts, and sustained availability under continuous pressure. How does readiness to serve change when helpers are simultaneously affected themselves? Which support structures can contribute to stabilisation? And where do the limits of individual resilience and organisational duty of care become visible?

This talk examines how everyday underground spaces like basements and metros across Ukraine transitioned into grassroots venues for solidarity and non-violent resistance during the initial months of Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion. By discussing Ukrainians’ artistic expressions and spatial politics within these subterranean areas, the talk highlights how civilian shelters can function as more than spaces of protection during times of conflict, and even be reinterpreted as sites of solidarity and non-violent resistance.

Complex and cascading disaster situations present emergency response organisations with challenges that go beyond traditional disaster response operations. The number and simultaneous occurrence of such situations are on the rise: heat waves, floods, infrastructure failures, and hybrid scenarios—such as the deliberate destruction of dams through acts of war—raise questions for which existing routines and response strategies do not yet have proven answers. Added to this are capacity issues: What does it mean for an organisation when it is expected to simultaneously support the Bundeswehr and carry out traditional disaster response tasks elsewhere?

The Ukrainian experience since 2022 offers a point of reference for what such situations mean for organisations, their members, and their culture. Families with children, as well as the elderly and sick, are particularly affected. Heat stress compounds the impact on critical infrastructure (electricity, water) that has already been structurally weakened by targeted military attacks, causing even traditional heat protection measures (cooling, access to drinking water, medical care) to fail. The focus is on questions of organisational culture, self-perception, and the resilience of emergency responders and volunteers: Who bears the burden of cascading crises? What challenges arise when organisations operate in scenarios for which they are not sufficiently prepared?