The Stayer framework encompasses various situations where people maintain rootedness in homeland and community while their world transforms around them. Occupation represents an extreme or threshold case of this condition – where staying occurs under hostile control and severe isolation from one's original community.
Such cases remain understudied and often silenced. Not only are occupied territories often inaccessible to scholars, journalists, or public institutions, but those who stay under occupation are frequently misrepresented or dismissed, treated with suspicion, assumed to have betrayed or adapted, blamed for enabling the occupation, or simply forgotten.
What makes occupation a threshold case is the split between physical location and cultural belonging. Native cities of those who stay are flooded with incoming populations from the aggressor state, and many of the locals adopt the imposed regime. They are bombarded by the aggressor’s propaganda and paralyzed by fear of being imprisoned or murdered for using their native language or saying a word against the regime. Their sense of belonging becomes divided or broken: being estranged and isolated within their current social world, they preserve the bonds to their original community outside – through contact with friends or relatives in the unoccupied territories or through language, values, and memories if direct contact is limited or absent.
Methodology: In-depth interviews, analyzed through my interpretive framework of Social Phenomenology of Disruption that inverts classical phenomenology's assumption of a stable lifeworld to examine how meaning emerges when disruption becomes the baseline of experience. The thematic coding focuses on the phenomenologically salient aspects of the staying suggested by this framework: forced epoché (constant conscious deliberation about previously automatic actions), ambivalent normality (merging the boundaries between what is considered normal and abnormal), and ambivalent belonging (simultaneous groundedness and alienation within the disrupted homeland). Additionally, the coding focuses on how identity and belonging are maintained when physical location and cultural attachment are split, exploring the specific mechanisms through which Stayers preserve community bonds across hostile territorial boundaries.
Significance: This extreme case tests the boundaries of voluntary staying and illuminates the role of identity maintenance under hostile conditions.
Please view the full description in the project's repository at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18376568