CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Dravecky, Lukas |
|---|---|
| Title | Russia s Passportisation Policies in the Context of Post-Soviet De Facto Republics |
| Summary | The mas conferral of Russian passports to the populations of post-Soviet de facto republics, so-called passportisation, gained the scholar attention mostly after the 2008 Russo-Georgian war. The fact that the majority of the South Ossetian residents possessed Russian citizenship, which most of them acquired just few weeks before the outbreak of the war, served as the main justification for Russia to militarily intervene South Ossetia and subsequently even to mainland Georgia in order to protect its de jure citizens in the unrecognised republic. &# x09;Passportisa tion is regarded by nationalism literature as one of several instruments of kin-state politics that the regional hegemons employ in order to support the rights and the status of their ethnic minorities abroad. I argue though that in the cases of Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Transnistria, of Donbas, Russia´s passportisation policies were initiated and shaped mostly by Russia´s concerns over its own territorial integrity, the probability that a de facto state would be re-captured by its former domestic homeland, and the geographical proximity, respectively the possibility of open military access to the unrecognised territory. The thesis will also introduce the reader into the discourse over Russia´s identity concepts which undoubtedly shaped also Russia´s citizenship policies. Paradoxically, Russia´s geopolitical goals contradicted its own domestic discourse, what is properly reflected even in the Kremlin´s decision to distribute its passports to unrecognised states in large quantities despite the anti-immigration sentiment of the Russian public provoked by two Chechnyan wars in the late 1990s and early 2000s. |
| Supervisor | Jenne, Erin Kristin |
| Department | International Relations MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/dravecky_lukas.pdf |
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