Crafting Cosmopolitan Selves?: Wartime (Im)mobilities of Young Russian Men

• In Event: Russian Migration to Central Asia and the Caucasus: Shifting Narratives

Abstract

Based on 9 months of ethnographic fieldwork with Russian migrant men in Uzbekistan, the proposed paper will look at how they make sense of their forced mobility in the context of war. Russia’s war in Ukraine set thousands of people on the move and disrupted the temporalities of family cycles and young people’s social becoming. Many found themselves ‘stuck’ in unwanted destinations and put their lives on hold uncertain on how to proceed with their life trajectories. In this article, I will analyse how a group of my male interlocutors coming from different regions of Russia reframed their experiences of uprootedness and forced migration. Theoretically, this article will bring together recent literature on middle-class mobilities from West to East and the studies on co-constitution of class, masculinity and migration. By partaking in certain types of mobilities, my interlocutors positioned themselves as emergent cosmopolitan middle-class subjects and rejected the imposed identities of either ‘victims’ or ‘traitors’.

Author

• Elena Borisova, U of Sussex (UK)