Imagining the West in the Context of Global Coloniality: The Case of Post-Soviet Youth Migration

• In Event: 2384 - Section on International Migration Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 16. Religion and Migration Aspirations

Abstract

Since the 1990s, the Russian diaspora tops as one of the largest in the world. While immigration from Russia in the 1990s has received scholarly attention (e.g. Kopnina, 2005), more recent migration from Russia has not been studied much. Particularly few studies exists on migrants belonging to the post-Soviet generation, i.e. Russians born after the collapse of the Soviet regime (however, Zemnukhova, 2017).

This paper focuses on the case of post-Soviet youth in their twenties who have migrated to Finland. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the capital city of Helsinki in 2014-2016, the paper argues that post-Soviet youth construct their migratory projects as an effort towards social distinction vis-à-vis post-socialist imaginary. It is the “West” – rather than Finland - that emerges as an essentialised image of the destination. Their migration is not an attempt to pursue a “normal life”, as previously argued in relation to early post-socialist and post-Soviet migration (Kopnina, 2005; King and Mai, 2008), but rather a search for distinctiveness and what is perceived as a ‘better’, i.e. more Western, lifestyle. Analysing their narratives from the prism of imagination, we demonstrate how young Russian-speakers vision the position of the post-socialist world in the global coloniality of power and claim their belonging to the Western project as educated young people with global cultural capitals. The article brings the case of Russian-speakers’ migration within debates on global coloniality (Quijano, 2000; Mignolo & Escobar, 2009) and offers a contribution to a maturing field of enquiry on postsocialist condition (Suchland, 2011; Tlostanova, 2012).

Authors

• Daria Krivonos, University of Helsinki

• Lena Näre, University of Helsinki