Many non-Russians in the Russian Empire were active members of imperial educated society (obshchestvo), and they often conceived of the colonial advance of Russia as part of the march of the progressive West and “civilization” itself into the backward lands of the East. Reformist empire builders who criticized the brutal wars and population transfers that marked the conquest of the southern borderlands also emphasized the civilizing mission of the empire on its eastern frontier. This article explores the conception of Russia and its empire in the work of the Azerbaijani publicist Hasan Melikov Zardabi. Zardabi was genuinely enthusiastic about Russia and the prospect of an enlightened imperial future for the lands of the former khanates on the frontier of the Iranian and Ottoman empires. The unusual circumstances of his life, however, which included exile to his remote and native village of Zardob, a small fishing village on the Kura River to the west of Baku, compelled him to re-evaluate his estimation of Russia and the benefits of imperial rule. Zardabi learned from his experience in Zardob, and grew to rethink his earlier views about civilization and the Russian Empire.

This article investigates a legacy of transnational activism in Polish-West German relations during the 1950s and 1960s, connected to the borderlands/expellee background of several of the early activists who initiated the relations. At a time when the Polish and West German states maintained no official diplomatic relations with each other, the importance of non-state initiatives and dialogue breaking with the antagonistic nationalism of the two world wars grew disproportionately. These individuals’ expellee background, bilingualism, cross-border networks and loosened national identities contributed to their effectiveness in Polish–German relations. Taking exception to the popular conceptions of expellees as necessarily identical with the negative or anti-Polish opinions commonly associated with the expellee organizations, the article also focuses specifically on how certain expellees and former borderlands inhabitants attempted to renegotiate their postwar roles, political stances and even identities by associating themselves with Polish–German relations. They challenged the dualistic and polarizing nature of media discussions about German expellees in politics. In addition, the article and these individuals pose a challenge to international relations/conflict resolution research to look to cross-border communities as key elements in postwar/post-genocide dialogues.

After first outlining the notion of anti-Semitism, the predominant survey method used for researching it, and the history of the presence and the current (near) absence of Jews in Poland, this article gives the results of different surveys of various kinds of anti-Semitism in this country, including the authors’ own, and discusses the findings of their qualitative study – focus group interviews with members of three different Catholic communities from three different cities. The qualitative study confirmed the hypothesis that imagined and stereotypical rather than real Jews are the objects of modern anti-Semitism in Poland, while real historical and stereotypically perceived Jews are the objects of its religious and post-Holocaust variants. The roots of religious anti-Semitism lie in the not entirely absorbed teachings of the Catholic Church on the Jewish deicide charge. Religious anti-Semitism supports modern and post-Holocaust kinds of anti-Semitism. Modern anti-Semitism is rooted in poor education, lack of interest in the Jewish history of Poland, lack of inter-group contact, and persisting stereotypes of Jews. Among the various Catholic communities of Poles, there are considerable differences in attitudes to Jews. The qualitative study also revealed a methodological deficiency in the standard survey questions intended to measure anti-Semitism, which are sometimes understood as questions about facts rather than about opinions.

Research on comparative authoritarianism has tended to neglect spatial approaches to the politics of non-democratic states. This article argues that spatial theory offers a useful framework for exploring extraterritorial security practices designed to counter political opposition among migrant and exile communities. A case study of Uzbekistan explores how the state responded to the perceived security threats posed by rapidly growing communities of labor migrants and the activities of many political and religious activists in exile. The security services developed a network of extraterritorial intelligence and security mechanisms – including surveillance, detention, interrogation and forced returns – to pre-empt or respond to any perceived threats to the regime emanating from abroad. These security practices extended the state in complex ways beyond its borders, resulting in new “state spaces” that reproduced elements of domestic repression in other jurisdictions. The article suggests that such extraterritorial practices are typical of contemporary authoritarian regimes, as such states seek to manage the spatial challenges produced by mass global migration, international financial flows, and transnational processes of knowledge production.

Since the end of the Cold War it has become common for Finnish academics and politicians alike to frame debates about Finnish national identity in terms of locating Finland somewhere along a continuum between East and West. Indeed, for politicians, properly locating oneself (and therefore Finland) along this continuum has often been seen as central to the winning and losing of elections. For example, the 1994 referendum on EU membership was largely interpreted precisely as an opportunity to relocate Finland further to the West. Indeed, the tendency to depict Finnish history in terms of a series of “Westernizing” moves has been notable, but has also betrayed some of the politicized elements of this view. However, this framing of Finnish national identity discourse is not only sometimes politicized but arguably is also too simplified and results in blindness towards other identity narratives that have also been important through Finnish history, and that are also evident (but rarely recognized) today as well. In this article we aim to highlight one of these that we argue has played a key role in locating Finland in the world and in formulating notions of what Finland is about, what historical role and mission it has been understood as destined to play, and what futures for the nation have been conceptualized as possible and as providing a source of subjectivity and national dignity.

This paper examines language policy and language use as identity technologies in the Republic of Tatarstan approximately 23 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although Tatarstan is an autonomous republic politically situated within the Russian Federation, it has its own language policy which was implemented in 1992 and which declares Russian and Tatar as the official state languages having equal status in all spheres of language use. Additionally, as a result of an education policy implemented in 1997, Tatar language learning was made a compulsory subject in schools for all nationalities. This research examines how these policies have legitimized the Tatar identity alongside Russian from the top-down perspective, but how these legitimacies are not reflected from the bottom-up perspective [Graney 1999. “Education Reform in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan: Sovereignty Projects in Post-Soviet Russia.” Europe-Asia Studies 51 (4): 611-632; Yemelianova 2000. “Shaimiev's ‘Khanate’ on the Volga and its Russian Subjects.” Asian Ethnicity 1 (1)]. The focus of this research was to find out how effective these language and education policies as top-down identity technologies have been in post-Soviet Tatar society. An empirical research was carried out in Kazan in 2013 and revealed that asymmetrical bilingualism still prevails in contemporary Tatar society: Russian is used for everyday purposes by all nationalities, whereas Tatar is used as an in-group marker among Tatars within informal settings.

In the summer of 1978, a Crimean Tatar man named Musa Mamut walked out of his home in a small village in the Crimea toward a policeman waiting for him at his front gate. He was to be taken to the station for questioning, and quite possibly arrested for “violation of the passport regime.” But Mamut had already drenched himself with gasoline and, lighting a match, was engulfed in flames. He ran toward the policeman, who ran the other way. A deliveryman tripped Musa, and two friends who had been passing by extinguished the flames. His friends took him to the Simferopol city hospital, where he died six days later, never expressing any regret for what he did.

The collapse of communism in the Soviet Union has opened up a Pandora's box of communal conflicts. In most Western analyses the majority of these conflicts are subsumed under the heading “ethnic.” This is often the case also with the conflict in Moldova between the national regime in Chišinàu and the insurgent regime in Tiraspol that controls the left bank of the Dnestr river. To be sure, there is an ethnic component to this conflict, but ethnicity clearly is not the main driving force behind it. While ethnic Moldovans make up approximately 70% of the inhabitants on the right bank, there is no ethnic majority on the left bank: 40% of the population are Moldovans, 25% Ukrainians, and 23% Russians. In fact, the Chišinàu leadership downplays the ethnic component in its standoff with Tiraspol. The values at stake, they insist, are basically political in nature.