We sit down with Eleanor Knott to discuss her new book, Kin Majorities: Identity and Citizenship in Crimea and Moldova live on Facebook and YouTube, with members receiving an invite to join on Zoom.

About Kin Majorities

In Moldova, the number of dual citizens has risen exponentially in the last decades resulting in over 1 million, or one third of Moldova’s population, becoming Romanian citizens. Before annexation, many saw Russia as granting citizenship to–or passportizing–large numbers in Crimea. Why do communities engage with citizenship from an external state? And how does engagement with dual citizenship intersect, or not, with identity? Leveraging a bottom-up, interpretive and comparative approach, Kin Majorities (McGill University Press, 2022) analyzes data collected from ordinary people in Crimea and Moldova in 2012 and 2013, just before Russia’s annexation of Crimea, to explore the intersections of identity and citizenship in these cases.

As the book is quite expensive, if anyone would like any help getting a copy the author is happy to be contacted at e.k.knott@lse.ac.uk.

About Dr Knott

Eleanor Knott (she/her, @ellie_knott) is a political scientist and Assistant Professor in Qualitative Methodology in the Department of Methodology, LSE. Her current research interests include the politics of identity and citizenship (predominantly in post-Soviet space) and qualitative research methods, primarily ethics of research. She has published in Perspectives on Politics, Qualitative Research, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Citizenship Studies and Democratization, among others. Her first book—Kin Majorities: Identity and Citizenship in Crimea and Moldova—was published with McGill University Press in 2022.