Eleanor Knott
Nov 2, 2022Kin Majorities
Identity and Citizenship in Crimea and Moldova
McGill-Queen's University Press 2022
In
Moldova, the number of dual citizens has risen exponentially in the
last decades. Before annexation, many saw Russia as granting
citizenship to-or passportizing-large numbers in Crimea. Both are
regions with kin majorities: local majorities claimed as co-ethnic by
external states offering citizenship, among other benefits. As
functioning citizens of the states in which they reside, kin
majorities do not need to acquire citizenship from an external state.
Yet many do so in high numbers.
Eleanor Knott's book Kin Majorities: Identity and Citizenship in Crimea and Moldova (McGill-Queen's UP, 2022) explores why these communities engage with dual
citizenship and how this intersects, or not, with identity. Analyzing
data collected from ordinary people in Crimea and Moldova in 2012 and
2013, just before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Eleanor Knott
provides a crucial window into Russian identification in a time of
calm. Perhaps surprisingly, the discourse and practice of Russian
citizenship was largely absent in Crimea before annexation. Comparing
the situation in Crimea with the strong presence of Romanian
citizenship in Moldova, Knott explores two rarely researched cases
from the ground up, shedding light on why Romanian citizenship was
more prevalent and popular in Moldova than Russian citizenship in
Crimea, and to what extent identity helps explain the
difference.
Kin
Majorities offers a fresh and nuanced perspective on how citizenship
interacts with cross-border and local identities, with crucial
implications for the politics of geography, nation, and kin-states,
as well as broader understandings of post-Soviet politics.
Joan
Francisco Matamoros Sanin is an anthropologist dedicated to Medical
Anthropology as well as public education and dissemination of
anthropological knowledge. He has
a MsC and a PhD in Sociomedical Sciences from Mexico's National
Autonomous University. Matamoros has ample ethnographic experience in
urban and rural areas in Mexico and Ecuador. You can find him on his
Spotify and YouTube Platform (AnthropoMX) and in New Books Network.
Currently he is a tutor in the Center for Regional Cooperation for
Adult Education in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as a
postdoctoral fellow in CIESAS-Unidad Pacífico Sur (acronym in
spanish for the South Pacific Center of Research in Advance Studies
in Social Anthropology).