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Paper abstract:

Millions of refugees have left Ukraine headed West since the beginning of Russia’s assault on February 24, 2022. Several hundred thousand have moved to Russia. While this number is smaller, coupled with an activist approach to citizenship and migration lawmaking in Russia it demonstrates Moscow’s efforts to legitimize ideas of Russkii Mir and points to expansionist aims. Recent proposals include legally claiming all Russian speakers abroad as compatriots and offering offer citizenship in cases where Russia’s borders change to include new populations. While these aims are playing themselves out in stark and horrifying detail in Ukraine, what are the implications for other countries in Russia’s sphere of interest? This paper looks south to Kazakhstan and other Central Asian states to analyze how Russia’s citizenship policies work in practice and how populations to the south are reacting to Russia’s expansionist aims. The article builds on legal analysis of citizenship laws, an original dataset of prosecutions for violations of dual-citizenship restrictions in Kazakhstan, and a process-tracing approach that provides a larger geopolitical context for these legal instruments. The paper argues that while Russia’s expansionist aims are often interpreted as an existential threat to countries like Kazakhstan, especially by outside observers, the domestic view is not always one of threat perception depending on the political framing and domestic legal instruments at play. We embed our analysis in an understanding of Russia as a continually imperializing power that can be decolonized only by taking seriously the view from the “periphery”. The need to take seriously not only the colonial aspects (relevant to Ukraine) but also the racial aspects (more relevant to Russia’s Southern neighbors) of Russia’s historical and continued influence drives the theoretical framing of this analysis.