Talk with Eleanor Knott: Contextualising Crimea

The King’s Russia Institute invites to a discussion of: Contextualising Crimea: Fractured Majorities, Identity and Citizenship before Annexation with Eleanor Knott, London School of Economics & Political Science.

Drawing on a book manuscript comparing Crimea and Moldova, Knott talk examines the relationship between identity and citizenship in Crimea and in comparison to Moldova before 2014.

This research challenges the assumption that Crimea was a hotbed of Russian nationalism and growing Russian citizenry by arguing this is a simplistic view that ignores the diversity of meanings of Russian identification in the peninsula and the agency of Crimea’s residents who were far from being ‘passportized’.

By comparing to Moldova, where Romanian has become more prevalent, Knott discusses how unpopular and illegitimate Russian citizenship was before annexation and how unpopular and desirable engaging with Russia via the Compatriot policy was. In particular, the discussion examines the intersections of identity and citizenship examining for whom and why Russian citizenship and the Compatriot policy was undesirable.

In English