Elsevier

Geoforum

Volume 67, December 2015, Pages 1-3
Geoforum

Critical review
Post-Soviet governmentality and migration securitization in Russia

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.10.003Get rights and content

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Immigration to post-Soviet Russia

A new migratory system has emerged in post-Soviet Russia since the end of the Cold War. There were over 11 million international migrants in the country as of 2013, making it the second largest destination in the world, after the US (UN, 2013). The majority of immigrants come from former Soviet Union countries, which is reorganized into a more loosely structured Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported that CIS migrants accounted for

The Russian immigration regime

Russia’s immigration policies are a site of tension between an acute need for additional human resources and anti-immigrant public sentiments. The migration regime has experienced dramatic changes since the end of the Soviet regime, moving from a laissez faire approach in the early 1990s to restrictive immigration laws in the early 2000s, and more recently to an ‘open door’ migration policy with respect to CIS citizens since 2007. These radical shifts in the Russian migration regime within such

Migration securitization and its paradoxes

The disciplining of immigrants is not solely a matter of bans, restrictions, control, deportation, administrative barriers, and the use of force but also about the representations, world views, ideologies or discourses that rationalize those governmentality techniques and make them possible (Pécoud, 2013: 7). The securitization of migration is not unique to Russia but has become a global trend. Since the 1990s, major migration destinations in both the core and the periphery of the world

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