Migration and Citizenship
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This report investigates the lives of Russians who emigrated after February 2022, based on longitudinal data from the OutRush project. The primary focus is on emigrants' adaptation processes, their political activity, and their connections with Russia. Findings indicate that emigrants—predominantly highly skilled specialists in IT, culture, and science—contribute to the economic and cultural life of their host countries, while simultaneously experiencing complex and ambivalent feelings toward Russia.

Despite reports about reverse migration, most emigrants do not plan to return to Russia without significant political changes. Host countries have varied approaches to managing the influx of emigrants: some provide stable conditions and low levels of discrimination, becoming hubs for secondary migration, while others are less successful in integrating new residents, prompting emigrants to seek alternative countries for relocation.

Despite progress in adaptation, many emigrants remain embedded in the Russian-speaking community, retaining political engagement and interest in Russia. However, an increasing concern for local environmental issues and domestic politics highlights a gradual shift in the relative importance of local events compared to those in Russia.

This study emphasizes:

  1. the "brain drain" from Russia is unlikely to be reversed without systemic political changes within the country;
  2. the necessity of simplifying legalization procedures for migrants to effectively leverage their potential in host societies.
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A research report on the fourth wave of the survey conducted in 2024.

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Ivetta Sergeeva
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This paper examines the impact of autocratic homelands on the subjective well-being of political emigrants. Drawing on unique survey data comprising 2,567 observations and in-depth interviews with Russian emigrants who left the country following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, we demonstrate that the actions of autocratic homelands contribute significantly to emigrants’ well-being, often surpassing conventional economic and social determinants. Specifically, fear of transnational repression from the Russian government is strongly associated with lower subjective well-being, with effects comparable to those of income loss and unemployment. Even more pronounced negative effects arise from experiences of discrimination and the anticipation of such discrimination due to host-country backlash against the actions of autocratic states. Additionally, feelings of guilt stemming from homeland’s aggression further exacerbate political emigrants’ distress. Autocratic regimes thus continue to exert influence over their citizens abroad by imposing “invisible costs” on political emigrants, contributing to depressive states and activist burnout.

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Post-Soviet Affairs
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Ivetta Sergeeva
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SURF Postdoctoral Fellow, 2024-25
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Ivetta Sergeeva specializes in comparative social science, focusing on political behavior, civil society, citizenship and migration. In her research, she employs a mixed-methods approach, emphasizing surveys, statistical modeling, experiments, and interviews. Apart from her research skills, she has eight years of experience supervising projects in civil society and human rights organizations within the challenging context of contemporary Russia.

In collaboration with Emil Kamalov, she co-founded and co-leads two research projects:

  1. OutRush: A panel survey of Russian emigrants, initiated as both a personal and professional response to the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Since March 2022, more than 10,000 Russian emigrants, now located in more than a hundred countries, have participated in the survey. The project has garnered substantial international media coverage and has drawn the attention of policymakers and experts. 
  2. Violence Monitor: A national survey on intimate partner violence in Russia that integrates UN methodology with experimental techniques.
     

She is expected to receive her PhD in Political and Social Sciences from the European University Institute in October 2024. She holds an MA in Sociology from the European University in Saint Petersburg.

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Encina Hall, E112
616 Jane Stanford Way
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

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Alain is a Social Science Research Scholar at CDDRL and a lecturer at the Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy (MIP), where he teaches classes in quantitative research methods. Before that, he was a lecturer in Political Science at Stanford, a lecturer in Economics at Santa Clara University, and a Visiting Scholar at Stanford’s King Center on Global Development.

Alain’s research interests include the study of cooperation and conflict among individuals and groups, with a particular focus on the role of reputation, cultural norms, and interpersonal and institutional punishment. In recent research, he also studies the relationships between immigrants and natives and the formation of norms and preferences.

Alain’s research has been published in journals in political science, economics, and biology, including the Journal of Politics, the Economic Journal, and the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. He received his PhD in economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, Spain.

Research Scholar
Lecturer, Ford Dorsey Master's in International Policy
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This eight-week multimedia course taught by The World House Project's Clayborne Carson and Johnny Mack will explore the enduring significance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of a global community where all people may realize the ideals of human rights in their lives. Its goal is to give students a comprehensive understanding of the critical concepts of human rights, nonviolence, and the “world house” and practical skills, action tools, and strategies for resolving conflict from the local to the global community.

Through discussions of historic social justice movements, the course will challenge students to analyze the complex interrelationships of ideas such as universal rights and national sovereignty, civil disobedience, and the rule of law. It will offer critical reviews of their meaning and application to social change and social movement episodes throughout history and the new challenges emerging in this century, including threats to democracy and the rise of autocracy. The course will use digital, multimedia resources to reveal the religious and philosophical roots of human rights and struggles to overcome colonialism and authoritarian government and secure liberation from oppression through violence and nonviolent resistance strategies.

"We have inherited a large house, a great 'world house' in which we have to live together ... or perish as fools."
Martin Luther King, Jr.

The readings and discussions will focus on history, theory, and the intersection of the current practice of nonviolence and human rights. Course readings will include Martin Luther King Jr.’s Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, Stephen Hopgood’s The Endtimes of Human Rights, Upendra Baxi’s The Future of Human Rights, and Johan Galtung’s Human Rights in Another Key.

Stanford Continuing Studies has lowered the tuition for this course as part of our mission to increase access to education around diversity, equity, inclusion, and issues related to social justice and participatory democracy.

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Enrollment is open now for "Nonviolence and Human Rights in the World House: Realizing Martin Luther King Jr.’s Vision," which will run Thursdays from April 14 through June 2.

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The American Passport in Turkey
The American Passport in Turkey explores the diverse meanings and values that people outside of the United States attribute to U.S. citizenship, specifically those who possess or seek to obtain U.S. citizenship while residing in Turkey. Özlem Altan-Olcay and Evren Balta interviewed more than one hundred individuals and families and, through their narratives, shed light on how U.S. citizenship is imagined, experienced, and practiced outside of the United States. Offering a corrective to citizenship studies where discussions of inequality are largely limited to domestic frames, Altan-Olcay and Balta argue that the relationship between inequality and citizenship regimes can only be fully understood if considered transnationally. Additionally, The American Passport in Turkey demonstrates that U.S. global power not only reveals itself in terms of foreign policy but also manifests in the active desires people have for U.S. citizenship, even when they do not live in the United States. These citizens, according to the authors, create a new kind of empire with borders and citizen-state relations that do not map onto recognizable political territories.

The American Passport in Turkey has recently won the American Sociological Association, Global and Transnational Sociology Section, Best Book by an International Scholar Award.
 

Register Now


ABOUT THE AUTHORS

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Özlem Altan-Olcay
Özlem Altan-Olcay is an associate professor in the Department of International Relations and the associate director of the Graduate School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Koç University in Istanbul, Turkey. She is also an editor of Gender, Place, and Culture as well as an assistant editor of Citizenship Studies. She has a Ph.D. degree from New York University, Department of Politics. Her primary research interests include citizenship studies and gender and development. Her research has been supported by the New York University International Center for Advanced Studies, the UN Population Council, the Middle East Research Competition, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, the Turkish Science Academy, and the EU Marie Curie Individual Fellowship Program. Some of her recent articles have appeared in Development and Change, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Feminist Economics, Gender, Place and Culture, International Feminist Journal of Politics, Sociology, Social Politics, and Women’s Studies International Forum. She has recently co-authored (with E. Balta) The American Passport in Turkey: National Citizenship in the Age of Transnationalism, published by the University of Pennsylvania Press (2020).
 

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Evren Balta
Evren Balta is a Professor of International Relations and the chair of the International Relations Department at  Özyeğin University. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her articles have appeared in journals such as Party Politics, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Sociology, Gender Place & Culture. She is the author of The American Passport in Turkey: National Citizenship in the Age of Transnationalism (with O Altan-Olcay, University of Pennsylvania, 2020), Age of Uneasiness (İletisim, 2019), and Global Security Complex (İletisim, 2012). She is the editor of Neighbors with Suspicion: Dynamics of Turkish-Russian Relations (with G. Ozcan and B. Besgul, İletisim, 2017); Introduction to Global Politics (Iletisim, 2014) and Military, State and Politics in Turkey (with I. Akca, Bilgi University, 2010). Her research has been supported by the American Association for the University Women, Mellon Foundation, Bella Zeller Scholarship Trust Fund, the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, and the Fulbright Scholar Program. In 2018, she received the Distinguished Alumni Award of the Political Science Program at the CUNY-The Graduate Center. Balta is a senior scholar at Istanbul Policy Center, a member of Global Relations Forum, and co-editor of International Relations Journal. She is appointed as the academic coordinator of the TÜSİAD Global Politics Forum in 2021.

Online via Zoom. Register here.

Özlem Altan-Olcay Koç University
Evren Balta Özyeğin University
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Hoover Fellow, Hoover Institution
CDDRL Affiliated Scholar
CDDRL Postdoctoral Scholar, 2021-22
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I hold a PhD in Political Science from Stanford University. My research seeks to understand the causes and consequences of inequality in political representation across different political contexts. I am currently working on a book project that links inequality in representation and rising societal and political polarization to domestic migration. The book project focuses on contemporary Germany and combines household surveys with comprehensive data on domestic migration, voting in national and local elections, civil society organizations, political campaigning, and political recruitment. In a separate, co-authored book project, I research inequality in political participation among domestic migrants in sub-Saharan Africa. My other research asks how citizens can influence policy-making in non-democratic regimes, where political inequality is extreme by construction, and how unauthorized immigrants in the United States navigate life while being marginalized. My work has been published in the American Political Science Review, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the Journal of Politics, Democratization, the Journal of Economics, Race, and Policy, and the European Political Science Review, among others. Before coming to Stanford, I spent two years as Visiting Assistant in Research at Yale University and obtained BA and MA degrees in Political Science from Heidelberg University in Germany.

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For three and a half decades following the end of the Maoist era, China adhered to Deng Xiaoping’s policies of “reform and opening to the outside world” and “peaceful development.” After Deng retired as paramount leader, these principles continued to guide China’s international behavior in the leadership eras of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. Admonishing Chinese to “keep your heads down and bide your time,” these Party leaders sought to emphasize that China’s rapid economic development and its accession to “great power” status need not be threatening to either the existing global order or the interests of its Asian neighbors. However, since Party general secretary Xi Jinping came to power in 2012, the situation has changed. Under his leadership, China has significantly expanded the more assertive set of policies initiated by his predecessor Hu Jintao. These policies not only seek to redefine China’s place in the world as a global player, but they also have put forward the notion of a “China option” that is claimed to be a more efficient developmental model than liberal democracy.

While Americans are well acquainted with China’s quest for influence through the projection of diplomatic, economic, and military power, we are less aware of the myriad ways Beijing has more recently been seeking cultural and informational influence, some of which could undermine our democratic processes. These include efforts to penetrate and sway—through various methods that former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull summarized as “covert, coercive or corrupting”—a range of groups and institutions, including the Chinese American community, Chinese students in the United States, and American civil society organizations, academic institutions, think tanks, and media.

Some of these efforts fall into the category of normal public diplomacy as pursued by many other countries. But others involve the use of coercive or corrupting methods to pressure individuals and groups and thereby interfere in the functioning of American civil and political life.

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**To RSVP, please email Jessie Brunner at jbrunner@stanford.edu.**

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Abstract

As the protracted and chaotic conflict in Syria continues into its fifth year, Syrians of all backgrounds are being subjected to gross human rights violations. A growing number of parties to the conflict, including the Government and the Islamic State, display disregard for international legal conventions and employ tactics such as sexual violence, murder, and torture that have resulted in mass civilian casualties, large-scale displacement, and the destruction of Syria’s cultural heritage.


Peter Bouckaert

Peter Bouckaert is Human Rights Watch’s emergencies director, coordinating the organization’s response to major wars and other human rights crises. A Belgian-born Stanford Law School graduate, Bouckaert has conducted fact-finding missions around the world, including currently documenting Syrian refugees in Europe.

Sareta Ashraph

Sareta Ashraph specializes in international criminal, humanitarian, and human rights law and has served since 2012 as the Senior Analyst on the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic, investigating and reporting on violations of international law in the context of ongoing events in Syria.


To RSVP, please email Jessie Brunner at jbrunner@stanford.edu.

Peter Bouckaert Director, Emergencies, Human Rights Watch
Sareta Ashraph Senior Analyst, UN Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic
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