Work group
Human Rights
Guzel Yusupova is a political sociologist specializing in nationalism studies and identity politics, with a focus on post-Soviet Eurasia. Her additional academic interests include memory politics, migration studies, and research methodology. She has held academic appointments in the UK, Canada, Sweden, and the Russian Federation. Her research has been published in a range of academic journals, including Post-Soviet Affairs, Europe-Asia Studies, Ethnicities, Nations and Nationalism, among others.
Research Project:
“Decolonization of Russia” as a universalist project or particularist claims?
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has sparked many discussions about the decolonization of Russia. However, both academic and lay understandings of decolonization remain vague, multilayered, and difficult to operationalize. Moreover, while pursuing universalist claims of equality and recognition, the global decolonial project also implies attentiveness to local authenticity—that is, to particularist interests, ideas, and conditions. This creates the necessity to unpack the term and its political meanings, as well as the nuanced claims surrounding its implementation.
This project will focus on public discourse about the decolonization of Russia, limited to three groups of public actors: (1) various Russian ethnic minority activists who make the decolonization of Russia their central project(s); (2) the Russian liberal opposition, who are rather compelled to address issues of diversity management in Russia by their Western critics; and (3) Western public figures who claim that decolonization of Russia primarily means refocusing global public and academic discourses away from Russia toward other countries. What does the decolonization of Russia mean for each of these groups? And, most importantly, how do their narratives relate to the universalist understanding of human rights and the particularist understanding of minority rights, as well as to the consequential political projects they support?