This article asks how, in early post-World War II Canada, Syrian, Armenian, and Lebanese communities claimed whiteness in the context of Canada’s racially restrictive immigration regulations that defined them as “Asiatics,” and hence inadmissible. But, it also examines how Canadian politicians and immigration bureaucrats responded to those claims. Using so-far untapped archival records, this article shows that immigration authorities were unwilling to redefine the racial status of these groups out of fear that doing so would provide a wedge for other groups of “Asiatics” to press for the ability to migrate to Canada. In this case, Syrians, Armenians, and Lebanese could be regarded as experiencing collateral damage in the politics of whiteness. While Canadian immigration authorities seemed to privately accept the white/European identity claims of these groups, they were nonetheless unwilling to publicly grant them one of the privileges of whiteness – namely the ability to migrate to Canada on a basis equal to that of other white immigrants. Instead, the government used “merit-based” orders-in-council as an under the radar administrative mechanism to admit members of these groups. This allowed the government and the immigration department to avoid a larger public debate about racial discrimination against “Asiatic” immigrants.

Migrant residential concentration areas have been a significant focus for research, but academic attention has primarily centered on their effects rather than how they form. There is some research considering the discrete factors of such areas’ emergence, but these factors are rarely fused into a comprehensive explanation with a description of specific mechanisms in operation. Even less is known about the formation of migrant residential concentration areas in postsocialist cities. The few studies in existence leave the impression that such areas emerge around bazaars by default. In this article, based on a multicase study (N = 37) conducted in the 15 largest Russian cities, we argue that although there is a pattern of migrant residential concentration areas’ emergence in postsocialist cities, this process takes place only in the presence of a combination of seven factors. The article presents these factors and describes an ideal type of a migrant residential concentration area in a Russian city and mechanisms of its emergence. The article concludes with the comparison of the postsocialist pattern with other types of migrant residential concentration and hypothesizing on how the Russian case differs from the other postsocialist cases in Central and Eastern Europe.

When we study the Jewish-national historiography of the last quarter of the 19th century, there is a tendency to pass directly from Smolenskin’s doctrine to the Zionist-cultural approach of Ahad Ha’am and his students, omitting the works written in between. However, even before the emergence of Ahad Ha’am as a cultural icon in the Jewish national movement, some Hibbat Zion activists engaged in Hebrew cultural activities directed at shaping national Jewish consciousness. The main figures in this trend were Saul Pinchas Rabinowitz and Avraham Shalom Friedberg. Their world view was based on education that advocated proto-nationalism: Jewish solidarity, love of the Hebrew language, promoting Hebrew newspapers, and preserving Jewish tradition. To this they added settlement in Eretz Israel as a solution for the harsh conditions of the Jews in Russia. They edited literary and scientific collections in Hebrew and Jewish historiography and wrote historical monographs and biographies. In this way, they sought to introduce national historical protagonists instead of the Hasskala’s pantheon of historical characters to vividly illuminate periods of historical “golden ages” suited to the national ideology and teach the lesson of historical history—that Hibbat Zion is the solution to the plight of Jews and Judaism.

The goal of this article is to show Russia’s civilizational turn in the broader context of imperial nationalism. The “turn” is a manifestation of imperial nationalism that today feeds not only on political ideas and history but also on geography. In the mass perception, geography is seen as an objective, non-ideologized scientific discipline less prone to political manipulation. Because of this, it can be employed to influence the Russian self-identification process in a much more subtle and efficient way than references to the more abstract notion of civilization. This article presents the Russian Geographical Society (RGS) as an identity entrepreneur managed by the ruling elite with a well-developed regional structure. It functions as a community of imperial practice. With its discursive and material practices, the RGS contributes to reproducing imperial nationalism, including in its civilizational version. The RGS is the keeper of the imperial body. By referring to the imperial body, I mean not just the physical territory but also the ways it is imagined in discourse and made material in numerous practices.

Throughout the Cold War, Yugoslavia was the only socialist country that participated in the Western-led international refugee regime and acted as a transit zone for refugees hoping to reach the Western Bloc. Those transiting were mainly, but not exclusively, escapees from various countries in the Soviet bloc. A few refugee groups also settled in Yugoslavia against the backdrop of shifts in international constellations, tense relationships with neighboring countries, and transnational mobilizations. This article will first investigate the dichotomy between transit and the few instances of refugees integrating into socialist Yugoslavia. Next, it will investigate the ease of the resettlement process by exploring how the length of time spent in the country was influenced by hierarchies among different refugee groups based on ethnic origin, political allegiances, class, and which opportunities for resettlement were available to whom. Finally, it will reflect on how the changing role of temporary refuge or permanent haven that Yugoslavia ascribed to itself was constructed and challenged by the host society, potential countries of resettlement, and the refugees themselves.

Egor Lazarev has offered us a book of uncommon ambition and erudition. At its core, State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya explores how elites and ordinary citizens pursue their interests by weighing the costs and benefits of using alternative legal frameworks in postwar Chechnya. By describing how politicians encourage nonstate legal remedies to build political coalitions—and how everyday Chechens engage in forum shopping when trying to manage their own legal issues—Lazarev teaches us about the challenges associated with the extension of state legal institutions in the wake of prolonged, nationalist conflict. Although Lazarev treats his exploration of legal pluralism as the theoretical framing for the book, such a reading belies what I view as his primary empirical contribution: a meticulous exploration of gender politics in the North Caucasus. In this review, I describe Lazarev’s arguments about elite and citizen legal strategies, discuss his understanding of gender disputes in a postconflict Muslim society, and offer a provocation for future research that would situate the study of Chechnya in a broader literature on autocratic politics.

This is an important book. It is important because it connects the study of internal armed conflict to big questions in comparative politics. It is important because it pays attention to the perspectives of ordinary men and especially women who make complex decisions in the context of legal pluralism. It is also important because it offers a window onto one of the most difficult-to-access settings of state-building on the back of protracted political violence and war. In my commentary, I will highlight these contributions of Egor Lazarev’s State-Building as Lawfare: Custom, Sharia, and State Law in Postwar Chechnya and areas for further discussion that stem from these contributions.

Egor Lazarev has given his readers more of an epic story than a grand theory, and everyone who reads State Building as Lawfare will be the richer for it. The setting for this riveting tale is the war-torn Russian province of Chechnya. We quickly learn from Lazarev’s mise-en-scene that Chechnya’s famously mountainous terrain is as choppy and uneven legally as it is topographically. Three separate legal systems coexist and commingle in this single subnational domain: 1) customary law, or adat; 2) Islamic law, or Sharia; and almost as an afterthought, 3) state law, “courtesy” of Russian central authorities in Moscow.

I would like to thank the editors of Nationalities Papers for providing a forum for the discussion of my book and for facilitating the symposium. I would also like to express my deep gratitude to Lisa Blaydes, Anastasia Shesterinina, and Dan Slater for taking the time to read the book and for offering their insightful comments and questions. Their scholarship was an inspiration and a source of wisdom for my research in almost all its aspects, from the art of theory-building to their methodological input on survey research and qualitative fieldwork (Belge and Blaydes 2014; Blaydes 2018; Shesterinina 2019, 2021; Slater 2010). It was a wonderful feeling to read their engagement with my work. I believe that the ways the authors of the symposium presented some of the central ideas of my book were often better than the ways I did it myself. In this response, I’ll address some of the central questions and comments raised by the reviewers.