The Violence of Inclusion: The Shifting Stakes of Compatriotism for Immigrants to Russia

The Moynihan Institute’s Central Asia and the Caucasus Initiative welcomes Lauren Woodard from Syracuse University's Anthropology Department.

Russian officials have weaponized Russian compatriots (sootechestvenniki)—a legally ambiguous term encompassing not only ethnic Russians but also Russian speakers and those who are “spiritually and culturally” tied to Russia—to justify military intervention and extend citizenship.

Drawing on 17 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Almaty, Kazakhstan, and Moscow and Vladivostok, Russia, this talk examines how migrants and officials use the Resettlement of Compatriots Program to pursue diverse goals. Woodard will show how the program’s flexibility produces unexpected outcomes for new citizens, particularly in the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine since 2022.

Lauren Woodard is an assistant professor of anthropology whose research explores migration, racialization, borders, settler colonialism, political anthropology, multiculturalism, liberalism and climate change, with a regional focus on Russia and the former Soviet Union.

Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Moscow and Vladivostok, her book project, Ambiguous Inclusion: Transforming Migrants into Compatriots on Russia's Border with China (under advance contract with University of Toronto Press), examines how migrants and officials negotiate Russia’s migration and diaspora policies. Her work has been published in Cultural Anthropology and PoLAR, and supported by fellowships and grants from the Kennan Institute, Wenner-Gren Foundation and Fulbright.

Before joining Syracuse University, she was a postdoctoral associate in Russian, East European and Eurasian studies and a lecturer in anthropology at Yale University. She earned a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2019.