KINPOL: Observatory on Kin-State Policies

Eurasian Geography and Economics Special Issue: Diversity and sovereignty in the contested zone between the EU and Russia, Forthcoming 2020, David Smith

For many years, issues of diversity management in post-Cold War Central and Eastern Europe (including Russia) were viewed through the prism of the multilateral minority rights ‘regime’ developed through the OSCE, Council of Europe and EU. In so far as all OSCE participating states asserted the importance of the concept during the early 1990s, minority rights came to be considered as a shared political field with the capacity to transcend competing nationalisms within CEE. Inevitably, however, this field encompassed widely varying and competing definitions of ‘minority rights’ and was created in a context of unequal power relations between West and East. Over the past decade or more, Russia - never wholly embedded within this concept of normative space – has increasingly challenged the multilateral framework rhetorically and in policy practice, as part of a more general shift towards bilateralization of minority issues and their instrumentalization by ‘kin-state’ actors within the region. Using new empirical findings from a 2014-17 project on practices of national-cultural autonomy (NCA) within Russia, this article demonstrates how today’s Russian state – hailing its own approach to diversity management as superior to that of the West – increasingly seeks to coopt minority NCA bodies in Russia not only for domestic purposes but also in the service of external policy and geopolitical competition. Using data from interviews with NCA representatives, however, the article points to only limited success in this regard and assesses what implications this might hold for the future course of ethnic relations within Russia.

First published: 29 July 2020