The Russian Social Contract: Citizenship, Migration, and Xenophobia in the Russian Federation

• In Event: 4366 - Section on Global and Transnational Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 13. Race, Ethnicity and Identity in the Global and Transnational

Abstract

Drawing on the social contract work of Carole Pateman (1970, 2014) and Charles W. Mills (1997) and Pateman and Mills (2007) regarding the modern social contract through the lens of gender, race, and class, I take an intersectional approach to analyzing the nature of the modern social contract in the Russian Federation, focusing on the status of the migrant. Though Russia is typically analyzed through a post-communist comparative lens, here I select this case based on its tremendous and longstanding internal ethnic heterogeneity and its swift turn in recent years from one of the great sources of international emigrants to one of the largest immigrant-receiving nations in the world. Russia provides an exceptional case study for the development of a new social contract in the wake of a dissolved state that repeatedly faces economic upheavals and has developed a semi-authoritarian government. The ways Russia and Russians dominate and exploit migrants while fundamentally relying on them for good, services, and even demographic survival reflects the modern position of migrants globally: necessary but necessarily omitted from the social contract between citizens and the state.

Author

• Nicole M. Butkovich Kraus, Rutgers University