Everyday Belonging in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: Russian Speakers in Estonia and Kazakhstan

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.