Subaltern citizenship: naturalization and belonging for New Russian citizens from Central Asia

Abstract

This article explores the perils of belonging among recently naturalized citizens in Russia from Tajikistan. As citizenship in Russia becomes accessible to ethnicized migrant workers, it becomes subalternized, a process broader than citizenship’s neoliberalization. A racialized understanding of ethnicity, itself a legacy of the Soviet empire, shapes understandings of political membership in Russia. This has influenced both Russian migration legislation, as well as Russian citizenship, as former migrant workers become Russian citizens en masse. This article also explores how recently naturalized citizens embrace the ambiguity of new political forms of belonging within the deeply charged politics of new citizens’ inclusion. Former migrant workers construe their belonging in both Russia and Tajikistan, claiming their transnational lives and rights to motherland/s as active political agents. Ideas of ‘motherland’, however, are not strictly national or territorial: motherland is understood through localized and spatial experiences and memories. At the same time, former migrant workers’ inclusion as political subjects in Russia has heightened the fragility of Russian citizenship itself, whereby citizenship can now be revoked and annulled with as little as a court order.