Meskhetian Turks and the Regime of Citizenship in Russia

Abstract

An emerging regime of citizenship in Russia is analyzed with ethnographic data on people’s responses to the census and by examination of the Russian political imagination manifested in public discourse on ethnic others. Such a framework allows presenting citizenship as a dialectical interplay between various state structures and the subjects of the state (its people). Doing so highlights the paradox of Russia as a country of “immigration and emigrants” and offers an agenda for the study of “social citizenship.”