Cordial Containment: Transnational Activism and Authoritarian Hospitality Among Post-2022 Russian Migrants in Serbia

• In Event: Mobilization Under (Growing) Autocracy

Abstract

This article examines the paradox of Russian migration to Serbia after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. While Serbia projects itself as a welcoming “brotherly” refuge for fleeing Russians and cultivates public narratives of Slavic solidarity, it simultaneously deploys authoritarian logics to prevent and shut down liberal migrants’ political activism. The central research question asks: How does an illiberal host state manage politically oppositional migrants through strategies of symbolic welcome paired with institutional repression? Extending recent scholarship on post-2022 Russian migrants’ political non-engagement in their new host states, this article shifts focus from individual-level decisions to abstain from activism toward state-level mechanisms that actively produce political quietism. Responding to recent calls for better analyzing constraints on transnational political action of migrant populations, the paper theorizes how host-state governance actively forecloses rather than merely limits political participation. Building on literatures on authoritarian legalism, depoliticized hospitality, and transnational activism under constraint, I theorize what I term “cordial containment”—a migration regime that offers social welcome on the publicly-visible levels while systematically constraining migrants’ political subjectivity through deeper authoritarian hostility, including legal threats and document revocations, media stigmatization, and outsourced violence.

Author

• Liudmila Listrovaya, University of Michigan