In the first book to trace the Russian state’s citizenship policy throughout its history, Lohr argues that to understand the citizenship dilemmas Russia faces today, we must return to the less xenophobic and isolationist pre-Stalin period—before the drive toward autarky after 1914 eventually sealed the state off from Europe.

Beginning in the 1860s, the Russian Empire replaced a poll tax system that originated with Peter the Great with a modern system of income and excise taxes. Russia began a transformation of state fiscal power that was also underway across Western Europe and North America. States of Obligation is the first sustained study of the Russian taxation system, the first to study its European and transatlantic context, and the first to expose the essential continuities between the fiscal practices of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Using a wealth of materials from provincial and local archives across Russia, Yanni Kotsonis examines how taxation was simultaneously a revenue-raising and a state-building tool, a claim on the person and a way to produce a new kind of citizenship. During successive political, wartime, and revolutionary crises between 1855 and 1928, state fiscal power was used to forge social and financial unity and fairness and a direct relationship with individual Russians. State power eventually overwhelmed both the private sector economy and the fragile realm of personal privacy. States of Obligation is at once a study in Russian economic history and a reflection on the modern state and the modern citizen.

On cover & title page:European Commission for Democracy through Law

During the occupation and subsequent annexation of the Crimean peninsula, the Russian Federation announced all Ukrainian nationals living in Crimea its subjects. Residents of the occupied territory faced a difficult choice. On the one hand, by obtaining Russian passports, they formally took the oath of allegiance to the State which had committed an act of aggression against their sovereign-country. On the other hand, during a short period of time (in fact - 18 days) they could try to submit the “declaration about the willingness to retain the nationality of Ukraine” to one of the four offices which accepted such declarations in Crimea. In this case, they suddenly became foreigners at home and were severely limited in their rights. Using the imperfection of international standards in this ng situations of statelessness and resolving cases of dual nationality. Arbitrary change and imposition of a nationality became a new challenge to which the world was not ready. Having imposed its nationality, the Russian Federation «forced into loyalty» the population of the occupied peninsula under threat of criminal liability (see. Art. 275 of the Criminal Code «High Treason»).

Russia's international law persona is still in its infancy and it will take a while for the cycle to run its full course. However, significant changes have already occurred in some areas, thus offering an opportunity to analyze the trends here and track the process of emergence of successor doctrines and practices destined to replace the Soviet heritage. The quartet of topics selected for treatment in this volume - the relationship between international and domestic law; citizenship and state succession; the Sino-Russian boundary problem; and cooperation with China in policing crime - illustrates major shifts in Russia's international law policy in a bid to shed the corset of Communist ideology and the old regime's modus operandi and join the international community's mainstream culture. The test cases also attest to the difficulties encountered in the process of transition and show that progress on this front has by no means been uniform. The sample includes both instances where the break with the past looks quite pronounced and where greater distancing from precedent might logically have been expected, but, for reasons that are then explored, a sense of substantive continuity instead prevails, albeit made more palatable by an application of linguistic cosmetics. From Soviet to Russian International Law: Studies in Continuity and Change marks the occasion of the author's 65th birthday and the 40th anniversary of his publishing debut.

Includes statistics.

In Moldova, the number of dual citizens has risen exponentially in the last decades. Before annexation, many saw Russia as granting citizenship to—or passportizing—large numbers in Crimea. Both are regions with kin majorities: local majorities claimed as co-ethnic by external states offering citizenship, among other benefits. As functioning citizens of the states in which they reside, kin majorities do not need to acquire citizenship from an external state. Yet many do so in high numbers. Kin Majorities explores why these communities engage with dual citizenship and how this intersects, or not, with identity. Analyzing data collected from ordinary people in Crimea and Moldova in 2012 and 2013, just before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Eleanor Knott provides a crucial window into Russian identification in a time of calm. Perhaps surprisingly, the discourse and practice of Russian citizenship was largely absent in Crimea before annexation. Comparing the situation in Crimea with the strong presence of Romanian citizenship in Moldova, Knott explores two rarely researched cases from the ground up, shedding light on why Romanian citizenship was more prevalent and popular in Moldova than Russian citizenship in Crimea, and to what extent identity helps explain the difference. Kin Majorities offers a fresh and nuanced perspective on how citizenship interacts with cross-border and local identities, with crucial implications for the politics of geography, nation, and kin-states, as well as broader understandings of post-Soviet politics.

A succinct and comprehensive history of the development of citizenship from the Roman Empire to the present day Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference offers a concise and sweeping overview of citizenship's complex evolution, from ancient Rome to the present. Political leaders and thinkers still debate, as they did in Republican Rome, whether the presumed equivalence of citizens is compatible with cultural diversity and economic inequality. Frederick Cooper presents citizenship as "claim-making"--the assertion of rights in a political entity. What those rights should be and to whom they should apply have long been subjects for discussion and political mobilization, while the kind of political entity in which claims and counterclaims have been made has varied over time and space. Citizenship ideas were first shaped in the context of empires. The relationship of citizenship to "nation" and "empire" was hotly debated after the revolutions in France and the Americas, and claims to "imperial citizenship" continued to be made in the mid-twentieth century. Cooper examines struggles over citizenship in the Spanish, French, British, Ottoman, Russian, Soviet, and American empires, and he explains the reconfiguration of citizenship questions after the collapse of empires in Africa and India. He explores the tension today between individualistic and social conceptions of citizenship, as well as between citizenship as an exclusionary notion and flexible and multinational conceptions of citizenship. Citizenship, Inequality, and Difference is a historically based reflection on some of the most fundamental issues facing human societies in the past and present.

Citizenship policies are changing rapidly in the face of global migration trends and the inevitable ethnic and racial diversity that follows. The debates are fierce. What should the requirements of citizenship be? How can multi-ethnic states forge a collective identity around a common set of values, beliefs and practices? What are appropriate criteria for admission and rights and duties of citizens? This book includes nine case studies that investigate immigration and citizenship in Australia, the Baltic States, Canada, the European Union, Israel, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and the United States. This complete collection of essays scrutinizes the concrete rules and policies by which states administer citizenship, and highlights similarities and differences in their policies. From Migrants to Citizens, the only comprehensive guide to citizenship policies in these liberal-democratic and emerging states, will be an invaluable reference for scholars in law, political science, and citizenship theory. Policymakers and government officials involved in managing citizenship policy in the United States and abroad will find this an excellent, accessible overview of the critical dilemmas that multi-ethnic societies face as a result of migration and global interdependencies at the end of the twentieth century.

In February 2022, Russian missiles rained on Ukrainian cities, and tanks rolled towards Kyiv to end Ukrainian independent statehood. President Zelensky declined a Western evacuation offer and Ukrainians rallied to defend their country. What are the roots of this war, which has upended the international legal order and brought back the spectre of nuclear escalation? How did these supposedly “brotherly peoples” become each other’s worst nightmare? In Russia and Ukraine: Entangled Histories, Diverging States, Maria Popova and Oxana Shevel explain how since 1991 Russia and Ukraine diverged politically, ending up on a collision course. Russia slid back into authoritarianism and imperialism, while Ukraine consolidated a competitive political system and pro-European identity. As Ukraine built a democratic nation-state, Russia refused to accept it and came to see it as an “anti-Russia” project. After political and economic pressure proved ineffective, and even counterproductive, Putin went to war to force Ukraine back into the fold of the “Russian world.” Ukraine resisted, determined to pursue European integration as a sovereign state. These irreconcilable goals, rather than geopolitical wrangling between Russia and the West over NATO expansion, are – the authors argue – essential to understanding Russia’s war on Ukraine.