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Paper short abstract

This paper examines Russian war-induced migrant entrepreneurship in Armenia as a site where geopolitical fractures and post-imperial moral imaginaries are negotiated. Based on five ethnographic cases, it shows how business visibility becomes both a strategy of belonging and a source of vulnerability

Paper long abstract

This paper examines visible migrant entrepreneurship as a site where geopolitical fractures, moral imaginaries, and postcolonial tensions are negotiated in everyday life. Drawing on five ethnographic case studies of Russian-run businesses (restaurants, bars, board-game cafés, and cultural venues), the paper explores how entrepreneurial visibility becomes simultaneously a strategy of survival, a claim to belonging, and a source of vulnerability.

Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Armenia became a key destination for Russian war-induced migrants, producing what has been described as a “relocant effect” marked by rapid growth in self-employment, cafés, cultural venues, and small businesses in Yerevan. While often framed through economic indicators, these entrepreneurial practices unfold within a deeply ambivalent ideological landscape. Situated within Armenia’s contradictory positioning as both a refuge from Russian authoritarianism and a state maintaining close political and economic ties with Russia, Russian entrepreneurs find themselves navigating overlapping regimes of power. For many anti-war migrants, Armenia represents both protection and proximity to imperial reach, where public presence may expose them to transnational repression. At the same time, segments of the local population interpret these new businesses through post-imperial moral economies, framing Russian visibility as symbolic occupation, cultural appropriation, or the reproduction of unequal post-Soviet relations.

Rather than treating entrepreneurship as an economic activity alone, the paper conceptualizes it as a moral and ideological practice through which migrants negotiate responsibility, distance from the Russian state, and future imaginaries under conditions of uncertainty.