Everyday Belonging in the Post-Soviet Borderlands

This book is a comprehensive ethnography of everyday belonging among Russian speakers in Estonia and Kazakhstan.

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This book examines the Russophone communities in peripheral cities adjacent to the Russian borders in Estonia and Kazakhstan. The research adopts a cross-disciplinary, space-sensitive approach that focuses comparatively on individual memories, narratives, and performances. Based on multi-layered ethnographic examples, this book reconstructs belonging as a complex dialectical relationship between ‘inclusion’ and ‘exclusion.’ This relationship, it is argued, manifests itself through a continuous spiral of boundary construction, appropriation, and transgression among different versions of Estonianness and Kazakhness, Europeanness and Cosmopolitanness, as well as Russianness.