Psychological Experiences of Community as Building Blocks of Civil Society

This work explores civic engagement in Ukraine in 2022 soon after the full-scale Russian invasion. We collected responses from 998 Ukrainian citizens to understand their perspectives on civil society in the first year of the invasion, and more importantly, what motivated them to potentially act. Empirical findings support the relevance of psychological experiences of community as motivators in crisis management settings, that experiencing community can lead to prosocial behavior at various “levels” (macro, meso, micro) in the face of a national crisis, and that these experiences may be the building blocks of the development of a more formal civil society. This work helps integrate the literatures in community psychology and civil society, and also provides a mechanism for understanding the path from psychological experiences of community to individual action, informal networks, and formal organizing.