Paper short abstract:

Drawing on engagement with post-Soviet polity formation in Latvia, I examine the social fabric that has emerged within the divided Latvian polity and ask whether and how it enables “everyday modes of diplomacy”, especially in relation to the widely perceived threat of Russian invasion.

Paper long abstract:

Since Russia's interventions in Ukraine, tensions between Russian-speakers and Latvians have taken on new dimensions. On the one hand, there is a palpable sense of fear within Latvian publics that Russia is planning local provocations by mobilising Russian-speakers in Latvia's eastern borderlands and in the media. On the other hand, Latvia's Russian-speaking publics are outraged that they are suspected to be Russia's "fifth column".

Tensions between Russian-speakers and Latvians as two "categories of difference" are shaped by historical and contemporary power relations that extend beyond the boundaries of the Latvian state and the current historical moment. In fact, these tensions are at the foundation of the Latvian state. The state's political institutions, governing mechanisms and practices of knowledge production rely upon and reproduce the distinction between Russian-speakers and Latvians in most spheres of life.

Drawing on more than a decade of engagement with post-Soviet polity formation in Latvia, this paper will examine the social fabric within the divided Latvian polity and ask whether and how it enables or forecloses "everyday modes of diplomacy"? Where and how do individuals appear to each other as produced through diverging histories and memories, yet without reproducing the "categories of difference" deployed in national and international politics alike? Can such appearances rework the transnational political field that depends on the distinction between Russian-speakers and Latvians? In posing these questions, the paper will engage the concept of "everyday modes of diplomacy" and scholarship that seeks possibilities for political action in understanding, sociality and everyday life.