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Conceptualizing Nativism in Authoritarian Russia: From Nationalist Ideology to Antimigrant Riots
Abstract
Rejection of immigration has become a major political factor in many countries throughout the world. The notion of nativism can be used to analyze forms of this rejection insofar as it involves promoting the interests and way of life of “natives” at the expanse of migrants. This article adopts a twofold approach to conceptualize the nativist phenomenon in contemporary Russia. First, I consider discursive expressions of nativism as observed among ethnonationalist actors as well as in the rhetoric of the authorities (especially in the context of Russia’s war on Ukraine), against a background of widespread xenophobia. This reflection draws on interpretations of the slogan “Russia for the Russians.” Second, I consider popular expressions of nativism, including those linked to ethnic violence. I analyze a series of antimigrant riots since the 2000s based on surveys, analysis of the media, and field data. These riots, often supported by organized nationalist actors, involve claims that can be defined as nativist in that they concern protection of natives ( korennye ) from “foreigners,” understood in ethnic or racial terms and deemed to be the cause of social ills. Overall, this article contributes to comparative studies of nativism in countries that face mass internal or foreign migration.
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Russia’s post-1991 nation-building project has been torn between competing interpretations of national identity. Whereas the other former Soviet republics opted for nation-building centered on the titular nation, Russia’s approach to national identity was framed by the fact that the RSFSR had been defined not as a designated national homeland but as a multi-ethnic federation. This, coupled with Russia’s definition as the legal successor of the Soviet Union, suggesting continuity and a history of uninterrupted statehood, has enabled a range of rivaling understandings of how to define the “nation.” Focusing on top-down official nation-building, this article examines how, against a backdrop of shifting political contexts, structural constraints, and popular attitudes, the Kremlin has gradually revised its understanding of what constitutes the “Russian nation.” Four models for post-Soviet Russian nation-building are identified – the ethnic, the multi-national, the civic, and the imperial. Over time, the correlation of forces among these has shifted. The article concludes that, despite some claims of an ethno-nationalist turn after 2014, the Kremlin still employs nationalism instrumentally: National identity has undoubtedly become more russkii- centered, but, at the same time, the Kremlin keeps the definition of “Russianness” intentionally vague, blurring the boundaries between “nation” and “civilization.”
This edited volume systematically analyzes the connection between xenophobia, nativism, and Pan-Africanism. It situates attacks on black Africans by fellow black Africans within the context of ideals such as Pan-Africanism and Ubuntu, which emphasize unity. The book straddles a range of social science perspectives to explain why attacks on foreign nationals in Africa usually entail attacks on black foreign nationals. Written by an international and interdisciplinary team of scholars, the book is divided into four sections that each explain a different facet of this complicated relationship.
Section One discusses the history of colonialism and apartheid and their relationship to xenophobia. Section Two critically evaluates Pan-Africanism as a concept and as a practice in 21st century Africa. Section Three presents case studies on xenophobia in contemporary Africa. Section Four similarly discusses cases of nativism.
Addressing a complex issue in contemporary African politics, this volume will be of use to students and scholars interested in African studies, African politics, human rights, migration, history, law, and development economics.
The introduction of quarantine measures in connection with the coronavirus pandemic was accompanied by the blocking of cross-border communications and the restriction of the activities of enterprises in most sectors of the economy. Labor migrants and members of their families staying on the territory of Russia found themselves in a difficult situation. The decline in employment, primarily in those areas where migrants work, has made foreign citizens one of the most vulnerable social groups. The first layer of issues considered in the article is associated with an assessment of the situation in which migrants have found themselves in Russia. In what types of economic activity has the decline in employment become particularly painful for migrants? What is their financial situation? To what extent are they ready to leave Russia if transport communications are restored? What are their immediate and long-term plans related to work and life in Russia? The second focus of the study is on potential migrants who were unable to enter Russia after the severance of international transport links. What is their economic situation at home? How quickly are they going to leave for Russia if restrictions on international travel are lifted? What are their short-term and long-term plans related to their stay in Russia? This article is devoted to finding answers to these questions, based on an online survey of 2,695 foreign citizens (including 1,304 migrants located in Russia and 1,391 abroad), as well as a telephone survey of 300 labor migrants in the Moscow metropolis conducted in the first half of June 2020.
Migrants are an easy, visible Other, seeming to fall neatly into the us-versus-them framework of nationalism. Nevertheless, much of the scholarly approach to migrant identity, with the partial exception of a largely separate literature on citizenship, has eschewed overt ties to nationalism studies. When us-versus-them language is used in relation to nationalism, the focus or nodal point is the identity of the seemingly homogenous “us” of the nation. However, when migrants are othered, the focus is not always the nation, and while othering migrants always creates exclusion, it is not always exclusion from a nation or identity group. This state of the field article analyzes the literature on populism, securitization, biopolitics, and other critical scholarship related to the issue of othering migrants. In each of these bodies of work, different sets of “us” are set against migrants, some of which evoke identity and others of which do not, elucidating the links (or the lack thereof) of each approach to the study of nationalism. In each of these frameworks, the migrant Other comes up against a different frame of reference, leaving migrants themselves (or any sense of migrant identity) somewhat lost amid the analytical frameworks, at continual risk of being re-othered as victims of circumstance without agency.
Field experiments have provided ample evidence of ethnic and racial discrimination in the labour market. Less is known about how discrimination varies in multi-ethnic societies, where the ethnic composition of populations is different across locations. Inter-group contact and institutional arrangements for ethnic minorities can mitigate the sense of group threat and reduce discrimination. To provide empirical evidence of this, we conduct a field experiment of ethnic discrimination in Russia with a sample of over 9,000 job applications. We compare ethnically homogeneous cities and cities with ethnically mixed populations and privileged institutional status of ethnic minorities. We find strong discrimination against visible minorities in the former but much weaker discrimination in the latter. These findings demonstrate how institutions and historical contexts of inter-group relations can affect ethnic prejudice and discrimination.
Olga Gulina contends that changes to Russian citizenship laws have been designed to strengthen (geo-)political influence and fix the country’s socio-demographic issues
Russia laid out its interest in certain groups of foreign citizens in its official migration policy guidelines for 2019–2025. According to that document, the policy aims to fix problems related to the country’s development “to protect the national labour market, to maintain interethnic and interreligious harmony, as well as to address issues in the sphere of protection and preservation of Russian culture, Russian language and heritage of the peoples of Russia, all of which are at the foundation of its cultural code and civilisation.” For the first time, the policy guidelines referred to migration policy, including the policy of granting Russian citizenship, as a tool to address Russia’s demographic, socio-economic and geopolitical challenges.
The term 'racism' is omnipresent in the current everyday discourse. It was conceptualized in different sciences but continues to raise debates and controversies. This paper is a contribution to the conceptual delineation regarding the racism and other phenomena associated with it, such as ethnocentrism and xenophobia, focusing especially on the term of 'cultural racism'. After outlining a framework for defining this term and depicting the main features of racialist thinking processes, such as essentialization, reductionism and absolutization, the paper gives particular attention to the discussions regarding the question if cultural racism is a new form of the 'classical', biological racism, or represents a different phenomenon, and this would be the reason why, in the scientific discourse, there should be used another, more adequate term, which should replace the problematic word 'racism'. The main arguments of the theoretical perspectives which sustain each answer are presented, thus highlighting the key aspects of the contemporary racism. Furthermore some remarks are made regarding the approach and research of this phenomenon and it is emphasized that emergent questions require further investigation both for the theoretical development and the practical application and anti-racist strategies.
Looking at mediated, political and wider public discourses on immigration in Poland since 2015 and exploring these in the context of the country’s right-wing populist politics, the paper develops a multi-step normalisation model which allows analysing how radical or often blatantly racist discourse can not only be strategically introduced into the public domain but also evolve into an acceptable and legitimate perspective inperceptions of immigrants and refugees. The paper highlights the strategic as well as opportunistic introduction of anti-immigration rhetoric in/by the political mainstream in Poland in recent years, often on the back of the so-called post-2014 European “Refugee Crisis”. It explores normalisation as part and parcel of a wider multistep process of strategically orchestrated discursive shifts wherein discourses characterised by extreme positions have been enacted, gradated/perpetuated and eventually normalised as an integral part of pronounced right-wing populist agenda. The paperfurthers a view that normalisation entails the creation and sustainment of a peculiar borderline discourse wherein unmitigated radical statements are often married with seemingly civil and apparently politically correct language and argumentation. The latter are used to pre-/legitimiseuncivil or even outright radical positions and ideologies by rationalising them and making them into acceptable elements of public discourse.
Based on more than 100 interviews in European Russia, this article sheds light on the bottom-up dynamics of Russian nationalism. After offering a characterization of the post-2012 “state-civilization” discourse from above, I examine how ordinary people imagine Russia as a “state-civilization.” Interview narratives of inclusion into the nation are found to overlap with state discourse on three main lines: (1) ethno-nationalism is rejected, and Russia is imagined to be a unique, harmonious multi-ethnic space in which the Russians ( russkie ) lead without repressing the others; (2) Russia’s multinationalism is remembered in myths of peaceful interactions between Russians ( russkie ) and indigenous ethnic groups ( korennyye narodi ) across the imperial and Soviet past; (3) Russian culture and language are perceived as the glue that holds together a unified category of nationhood. Interview narratives on exclusion deviate from state discourse in two key areas: attitudes to the North Caucasus reveal the geopolitical-security, post-imperial aspect of the “state-civilization” identity, while stances toward non-Slavic migrants in city spaces reveal a degree of “cultural nationalism” that, while sharing characteristics with those of Western Europe, is also based on Soviet-framed notions of normality. Overall, the article contributes to debates on how Soviet legacies and Russia’s post-imperial consciousness play out in the context of the “pro-Putin consensus.”
According to Ernest Gellner's celebrated definition, nationalism is a political principle that holds that the political and the national unit should be congruent. Based on this definition, Alexander Motyl has declared that ‘nationalism and imperialism are polar types’. Even so, dozens of books and articles have used the concept of ‘imperialist nationalism’ without any qualms. Is this just a matter of terminological confusion, or does it reflect a deeper disagreement on what the phenomenon of nationalism actually is? In the lecture, I discuss the concept of ‘imperialist nationalism’ as used in the standard literature and find that numerous historical actors take pride in being both nationalists and imperialists. I distinguish between overseas colonial empires and contiguous land‐based empires and demonstrate that in both cases, ‘imperialist nationalism’ can be found. In the latter case, nationalism can take the shape of either ‘nation‐building imperialism’, in which nationalists strive for cultural homogenisation throughout the state, or ‘ethnocratic imperialism’, in which the distinction between ‘the imperial nation’ and other national groups is retained. In overseas colonial empires, I find only ethnocratic imperialism. As a case study, I analyse how Russian nationalists have related to the fact that Russia has historically been an Empire.
This chapter cannot present an overview of a developed and stable contemporary Russian approach to minority language rights, even if that was the objective. The reason is that from 2016 there has been a very significant shift away from special status for “national”, ethnic, languages in the context of an asymmetric federation. While Russia has a developed hierarchy of norms, consisting of international obligations which are part of Russian law, the Constitution of the Russian Federation of 1993, and relevant legislation, the latest fundamental changes have been brought about without amendments to the Constitution or to the relevant legislation. In order to engage with the issues posed by the dramatic events of the last few years, I outline a history of the development of minority language rights.
First I present Russia’s unusual federative, ethnic and linguistic complexity. Second, I sketch developments in the Russian Empire and the USSR. Third, I trace the consequences of the collapse of the USSR and the “parade of sovereignties” of 1990 to 1992. Fourth, I introduce the Constitution of 1993 and its rather radical provisions. Fifth, I present the last report of the Advisory Committee for the Framework Convention for the Protection of Minority Rights (FCNM) in 2012, a continuing process. Sixth, I engage with the beginning of the present era. President Putin has now been in power since 2000, 18 years, and is just commencing a further six years in office. Finally, I discuss the dramatic events of the past few years, and how matters stand at the time of writing.
This article investigates mechanisms underlying anti-immigrant sentiment in post-socialist Russia in particular, and in societies undergoing a search for new national identity borders in general. We argue that when the borders of national identity are drawn and redefined, the forces that drive anti-immigrant attitudes differ meaningfully for members of the ethnic majority group and for members of the minority population. Our empirical analysis utilizes data obtained from a representative sample of the Russian population by the European Social Survey (2006-2012). Descriptive data reveal that the level of anti-immigrant attitudes among ethnic Russians (the majority population) is higher than among non-ethnic Russians (ethnic minority group), reflecting the fact that the crisis of national identity in post-socialist Russia has undermined, primarily, a sense of group position of ethnic majority. Our main findings demonstrate that in post-socialist Russia, as a society undergoing the critical period of the reconsideration of national identity, the anti-immigrant attitudes of the ethnic majority group rely mostly on perceptions of collective (state) vulnerability, while the anti-immigrant attitudes of ethnic minority groups rely to a greater degree on individuals’ vulnerable socioeconomic position, and conservative views and ideologies (i.e., self-interests).
Russian nationalism after Crimea is commonly depicted as aggressive and expansionist – but few Russian ethno-nationalists would accept this description. Quite the contrary: they would argue that ethnic Russians as the majority population find themselves under “under siege” from ethnic minorities. A case in point, they hold, is Stavropol Krai in the North Caucasus. In local ethno-nationalist circles this region is depicted as “Russia’s Kosovo,” a glaring example of the Kremlin’s betrayal of ethnic Russian interests. This article presents a case study of the under-researched regional dimension of Russian nationalism. The purpose is twofold: to map regional ethnonationalist discourse and, drawing on survey data, to explore to what extent this discourse is reflected in general attitudes toward the influx of migrants and plans for own migration. We find that local ethno-nationalists have succeeded in mobilizing support at the national level, but that, despite increased ethnic tensions in Stavropol Krai, few Russians contemplate leaving.
http://www.e-ir.info/2017/04/30/beyond-attitudes-russian-xenophobia-as-a-political-legitimation-tool/
For several years, various nationalist groups and the Russian state have been competing over nationalism as a political concept and for popular support to nationalist claims. This paper analyzes the relationship between the state and anti-government, ethnocentric nationalistic groups that gather annually in an event called “the Russian March.” Emphasis is on the change in that relationship that happened in 2014, when the state added efforts to channel and mobilize the nationalists to its previous repressive and controlling measures. The article conceptualizes the competition over the nationalist argument in contemporary Russia as a case of dissentful and consentful contention in hybrid regimes, and shows how the dissentful nationalists have been forced to make way for the more consentful ones. Until recently, the room for maneuver for the radical nationalists was relatively wide. The events in Ukraine, however, divided the nationalists, and since 2014 radical nationalists have faced increased state repression. At the same time, pro-government nationalist actors have strengthened, and new players have appeared in the field. These developments tell us not only about the Kremlin’s diminished tolerance for dissentful contention, but also about the importance of the nationalist argument in Russian politics today.
Classic theories of nationalism, whether modernist or ethnosymbolist, emphasise the role of elites and spread of a common imagined community from centre to periphery. Recent work across a range of disciplines challenges this account by stressing the role of horizontal, peer-to-peer, dynamics alongside top-down flows. Complexity theory, which has recently been applied to the social sciences, expands our understanding of horizontal national dynamics. It draws together contemporary critiques, suggesting that researchers focus on the network properties of nations and nationalism. It stresses that order may emerge from chaos; hence, ‘national’ behaviour may appear without an imagined community. Treating nations like complex systems whose form emerges from below should focus research on four central aspects of complexity: emergence, feedback loops, tipping points and distributed knowledge, or ‘the wisdom of crowds’. This illuminates how national identity can be reproduced by popular activities rather than the state; why nationalist ideas may gestate in small circles for long periods, then suddenly spread; why secession is often contagious; and why wide local variation in the content of national identity strengthens rather than weakens the nation's power to mobilise.
This chapter pursues three aims: it provides a literature synopsis on the study of Russian nationalism in Western scholarship; offers a brief historical overview over the development of Russian nationalism; and outlines in broad terms the trajectory of Russian nationalism from statist to ethno-centrist positions. In the first decade after the Soviet collapse, nationalist sentiment in Russia continued to be dominated more by empire-nostalgia than by ethnonationalism. The new turn towards ethnonationalism came only after the turn of the millennium, spurred by two issues in particular: concern for Russian co-ethnics abroad, ‘stranded’ in the other former Soviet republics; and the influx of non-Russian migrants from the Caucasus and Central Asia into Russian cities. The chapter concludes that the ethnification of Russian nationalism seems to stem from below, driven by opposition activists rather than by the regime, but that it also to some extent reverberates in official Russian rhetoric.
The chapter employs the ‘sons of the soil’-theory which Myron Weiner developed in the 1970s and applies it to three former Soviet political units: Kazakhstan, Bashkortostan, and Tatarstan. In the Soviet Union, each federal unit was named after a particular ethnic group, the ‘titulars’. During perestroika and after independence, these groups presented themselves as ‘rooted’ in the territory: Since they allegedly ‘arrived there first’ they are in a sense the ‘owners’ of the state. This seems to have been a successful strategy which gave the titulars considerable legitimacy and power. The titular elites managed to a surprising degree to dominate public life and prestigious sectors of the job market, also when their share of the population was low (even down to one third). All the while, political stability and social peace was retained. ‘Rootedness’ was successfully applied to provide the titular population with political hegemony and a competitive edge on the labour market – but, in contrast to cases of ‘sons of the soil’-conflicts elsewhere – without unleashing any violence. An important reason seems to be that the ‘non-rooted’ part of the population accepted, albeit often with fists clenched in the pockets, that the state did indeed ‘belong’ to the locals.
This article reviews the current scholarship around racism and nationalism, two of the mostly hotly debated issues in contemporary politics. Both racism and nationalism involve dividing humanity into groups and setting up some groups as innately superior to others. Until recently, racism and nationalism were both widely seen as unpleasant relics of times past, destined to disappear as the principles of equality and human rights become universally embraced. But both concepts have proved their resilience in recent years. Scholars have been devoting new attention to the “racialization” of ethnic and national identities in the former Soviet Union and East Europe, the regions that are the main focus of this journal. The article examines the prevailing approaches to understanding the terms “racism” and “nationalism,” which are distinct but overlapping categories of analysis and vehicles of political mobilization. Developments in genomics have complicated the relationship between perceptions of race as a purely social phenomenon. The essay explores the way racism and nationalism play out in two self-proclaimed “exceptional” political systems – the Soviet Union and the United States – which have played a prominent role in global debates about race and nation. It briefly discusses developments in other regions, such as the debate over multiculturalism in Europe.
Based on an original definition of modern populism as “democratic illiberalism” and many years of meticulous research, Takis Pappas marshals extraordinary empirical evidence from Argentina, Greece, Peru, Italy, Venezuela, Ecuador, Hungary, the United States, Spain, and Brazil to develop a comprehensive theory about populism. He addresses all key issues in the debate about populism and answers significant questions of great relevance for today’s liberal democracy, including: • What is modern populism and how can it be differentiated from comparable phenomena like nativism and autocracy? • Where in Latin America has populism become most successful? Where in Europe did it emerge first? Why did its rise to power in the United States come so late? • Is Trump a populist and, if so, could he be compared best with Venezuela’s Chávez, France’s Le Pens, or Turkey’s Erdoğan? • Why has populism thrived in post-authoritarian Greece but not in Spain? And why in Argentina and not in Brazil? • Can populism ever succeed without a charismatic leader? If not, what does leadership tell us about how to challenge populism? • Who are “the people” who vote for populist parties, how are these “made” into a group, and what is in their minds? • Is there a “populist blueprint” that all populists use when in power? And what are the long-term consequences of populist rule? • What does the expansion, and possibly solidification, of populism mean for the very nature and future of contemporary democracy? Populism and Liberal Democracy will change the ways the reader understands populism and imagines the prospects of liberal democracy.
The article aims to compare the conditions of migrants from Central Asia into Russia with that of migrants from the Maghreb into France. Despite many similarities in conditions (related to the experience of social exclusion), there are deep differences. The precarious legal status of the majority of Central Asian newcomers in Russia has prevented them from embarking on an effective struggle for public recognition; this is in sharp contrast with North African newcomers in France who have been engaged in such struggle since the 1980s. In addition, Islam plays different roles in the migrants’ perceptions by host societies and in identification of the migrants themselves. Whereas Islam has become a marker of overarching collective identity among the Maghreb migrants’ descendants, this is not the case with Central Asians in Russia, for whom Islam remains part of their individual identity, rather than the basis of social consolidation and political mobilization.
Migration management in Russia is a window into how public policy, the federal system, and patronage are used to manage conflicting demands. This multi-level balancing act demonstrates the importance of high-level politics, institutional interests and constraints, and the conditions under which government actors at all levels can pursue their own interests as the state seeks political equilibrium. Why Control Immigration? argues that a scarcity of legal labour and the ensuing growth of illegal immigration can act as a patronage resource for bureaucratic and regional elites. Assessing the legal and political context of migration, Caress Schenk blends a political science approach with insights from the comparative immigration literature. Using this framework, she also engages with attitudes on populism and anti-immigration, particularly in terms of how political leaders utilize and employ public opinion in Russia. © University of Toronto Press 2018 Toronto Buffalo London. All Rights Reserved.
This paper asks a simple question: why did Western and other European politicians become so alarmed and, in some cases, downright apocalyptic at the rise of asylum seekers in 2014–16, especially compared to the previous refugee crisis in the 1990s? This paper argues that in 2014/2015, a “perfect storm” developed, bringing together factors that in the past had been largely unrelated and then converged with new ones. Peeling the onion of societal discontent with migrants and refugees has revealed five necessary and sufficient conditions: (1) discomfort with immigration and integration of colonial and labour migrants from North Africa and Turkey (1970–80s); (2) growing social inequality and widespread pessimism about globalization (1980s–); (3) A growing discomfort with Islam (1990s–); (4) Islamist terrorism (2000s–) and (5) the rise of radical right populist parties (2000s).
Contemporary radical right-wing populism is generally associated with nativism, usually defined as an intense hostility to anything deemed alien and threatening to national cohesion. This article explores the origins and evolution of nativism in three major nineteenth-century populist movements – antebellum Know Nothingism and post-civil-war agrarian populism in the United States and late nineteenth-century Boulangism in France. All of them advanced nativist propositions to bolster their populist agenda, yet not of the same nature and to the same extent. These differences can largely be explained by the targets of populist mobilization and the constituency at which it was aimed. The cases suggest that nativism plays an important role in populist mobilization, not least because it allows populist movements to transcend differences between social groups and gives them an opportunity to promote themselves as the champions of collective identity – a concern central to the contemporary radical populist right.
Et si, derrière la « poussée des populismes » en Europe, se cachait une puissante vague nationaliste ? Au cours des trois dernières décennies, des mobilisations nationalistes et identitaires ont donné naissance à des formations politiques perturbatrices, désormais solidement installées. Pierre-André Taguieff ne voit pas en elles l’expression d’une « fièvre populiste » ni l’indice d’un « retour du fascisme », mais le surgissement d’un nouveau type de contestation des démocraties représentatives et pluralistes. Cette vague nationale-populiste s’est radicalisée sous les effets conjugués d’une opposition virulente à la construction européenne, d’une diabolisation croissante de l’immigration et d’une hantise de « l’islamisation ». S’y ajoute une profonde méfiance vis-à-vis de la mondialisation, dont les élites transnationales seraient les agents et seuls bénéficiaires.Ce faisceau de peurs, d’hostilités et de rejets explique pourquoi le thème majeur du discours nationaliste est aujourd’hui celui de l’identité collective menacée. Son efficacité symbolique, traduite par des scores électoraux impressionnants, tient au triple fait que l’État-nation est en crise, que les systèmes représentatifs produisent une insatisfaction croissante et que, dans les opinions publiques, l’islam est synonyme de menace.Ce n’est pas le moindre des paradoxes de ces partis nationalistes et xénophobes que de partir à l’assaut d’une Europe dont ils récusent le processus de construction.
This essay defines three categories of Russian nationalist actors: nonstate actors, whose agenda is anti-Putin; parastate actors, who have their own ideological niche, not always in tune with the presidential administration’s narrative, but who operate under the state umbrella; and state actors, in particular, the presidential administration. In the future, the Russian ethnonationalism embodied by nonstate actors is the main trend that could pose a serious threat to the regime. However, the Kremlin is not “frozen” in terms of ideology, and its flexibility allows it to adapt to evolving situations. One of the most plausible scenarios is the rise of a figure inside the establishment who would be able to prevent the polarization of Russian nationalism into an antiregime narrative and could co-opt some of its slogans and leaders, in order to gradually channel the official narrative toward a more state-controlled nationalism.
Since the 1990s, there have been striking changes in racial ideas, practices, exclusions and violence in Russia. By showing how the processes of globalization and racialization are interrelated, Zakharov seeks to demonstrate and explore the roles these play in Russia's new nationhood project. The book employs a new threefold theoretical elaboration of racialization, examining the process in terms of 'making', 'doing', and finally 'becoming'. These three elements are considered through discussions of a wide variety of aspects of Russian identity and nationalism, from the analysis of subcultures to explorations of nation-building.
Nativism and xenophobia refer to the preference for native-born people of a given society and the fear of foreigners or “others” considered to be outsiders based on racial, ethnic, or national origin or religion. Such dynamics often emerge among those individuals who consider themselves to be the original inhabitants or rightful citizens of a given region or nation. Nativism and xenophobia can be directed at immigrants who are newcomers to a country but can sometimes be expressed towards anyone (regardless of nativity or immigrant status) who is perceived to be an outsider, based on physical features/appearance or cultural distinctiveness (in style of dress, language, or religious practice).
Keywords:
cultural diversity;
ethnic conflict;
racism;
ethnocentrism
Launched at the end of 2012, the Izborsky Club stands as a symbol of the ideological hardening of Vladimir Putin's third presidential mandate. This paper argues that for the first time, a large group of self-identified nationalists or anti-liberals has united under a single structure with the objective of influencing the authorities. The Club confirms the progressive structuring of a field of “think tanks” in Russia whose function is to occupy different ideological niches and offer a range of “products” that the authorities can sample, make official, or reject. This paper first explores the context of emergence of the Club, and maps its main figures, and their connections to higher decision-making circles. Second, it investigates how the Club encapsulate its main ideological precepts–a reconciliation between Red and White, the imperial debate, and the economic aspect of Russian Great-Powerness. Third, it briefly debates the successes and failures of the Club's positioning in Russia's contemporary ideological landscape.