| Summary: | This article deals with the mechanism through which individuals or groups become geopolitical actors in distant conflicts, i.e. conflicts that do not take place on the territory where these people live. Cases like this are not much studied in geography, because geopolitics and political geography often equate the space where people live with the space where people fight and the space which they fight for. Some mobilizations nonetheless follow this model, from diaspora politics to environmental movements on global issues. Unlike geographers, sociologists and political scientists have been studying transnational social movements for a long time, but without necessarily pointing out the spatiality of the studied phenomenon. Therefore, this article builds on the rich literature on diaspora politics and political transnationalism, but completes it with a geographical approach. Drawing on French social geography – which studies spatiality rather than space – I answer the following question: how individuals can become stakeholders of conflicts that do not take place in the space of their everyday practices? The case chosen here is the engagement of Ukrainians living in France in the political events of their homeland since 2014 - Maidan Revolution, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the Russian-Ukrainian Donbas war. The article is based on a fieldwork conducted between October 2017 and December 2019 in four French cities, and secondarily in three Ukrainian cities. It combines participant observations among pro-Ukrainian groups, biographic interviews with Ukrainians living in France (n=70), interviews of their acquaintances and partners in Ukraine (n=25), study of association reports, and non-participant observations on social networks. First, I show that long-distance political action is possible only if the distant conflict is constructed as a political issue or, in other words, if a political socialization around this conflict takes place. This happens first when people living in the host-country engage in virtual communications with politically-engaged acquaintances in the homeland. But, besides this network-based mode of socialization, the constitution of political groups is only possible through place-based interaction in particular locations in the host-country. The second part of the article shows that long distance political action is possible when mobilized groups produce a “space of engagement”, constituted by different places in the host-country and in the homeland, where they can either advocate for the cause or unfold military and humanitarian networks. I show that both the weight of social capital in the homeland (offering Ukrainians abroad the possibility to expand networks of financial and material support to people in need in Ukraine) and the socio-economic positions in the host-country (enabling Ukrainian to advocate for the cause and reach strategic actors in France) explain the scope of long-distance mobilization. In conclusion, I emphasize the interest for political geography to import approaches and methods from social geography. It will help the former, first, to adopt an individual-based analysis attentive to socio-spatial practices and representations and second, to pay attention to the impact of socio-economic position on political action.
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