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Paper short abstract

Based on fieldwork with Russian war emigrants in Central Asia, I show how conflicting pressures to position themselves politically produce political detachment: a political and affective practice through which these mobile subjects are negotiating and reconfiguring themselves.

Paper long abstract

How does war anxiety produce political detachment? And what emotional work does it take to remain politically detached in the midst of war? This paper examines Russians who left their country after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. I show how emigrants, most of them relatively privileged young urban professionals, are held together by shared affects – fear of conscription and repression, relief at having left, longing for home. While some of them might appear “unpolitical” in comparison to political dissidents in exile, they constantly face conflicting pressures to position themselves politically – from host societies questioning their complicity in the war and in Russia's imperialist ideology, from fellow emigrants establishing moral hierarchies among those who left, and from family members who remained in Russia. Each positioning risks severing attachments that emigrants depend on. Faced with such pressures, many of these emigrants respond with political detachment. Yet this detachment is not apathy or withdrawal. It requires intimate knowledge of the political stakes one seeks to avoid, and intense affective labour to navigate relationships and attachments. My research shows that political detachment is itself a political and affective practice through which the mobile subjects produced by Russia’s war in Ukraine are negotiating and reconfiguring themselves.