Steering Citizenship: Homeowners at the Boundaries of Russian Civic Inclusion, 1991-2000

Jeffrey Bilik, University of Michigan

How has the rising association of citizenship with private homeownership reshaped the boundaries of national membership? Citizen homeowners are a powerful and ubiquitous force in developed states, comprising a high proportion of national populations and exercising discretion over access to communities and homes. Scholarship, however, has largely elided homeowners’ role in governing civic inclusion and legal protections for migrants. Drawing from 12 months of multi-sited fieldwork on the understudied case of Russia, the fourth largest migrant host country in the word, this paper investigates how political and institutional shifts in the 1990s have allowed citizen-homeowners to define what it means to deserve inclusion in Russian society. Property owners in Russia act as civic gatekeepers: without their formal assent to provide a document popularly known as household “registration,” migrants face fines, police harassment, and deportation. I argue that registration has tied civic authority both to the market logic of renting and to the social rights of Russian citizenship. As more scholars become attuned to homeowners’ ability to shape local communities, this paper points to their power to define the boundary of the nation.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 132. Nationalism on the Ground: Migration, Inclusion, and Exclusion in Postwar Europe