Authors

Discussion

This contribution to the BASEES 2026 conference presents work in progress of a two-year research project, funded by the European Union through the Horizon Europe programme. The study addresses a gap in research on the everyday integration of young Russophones in Latvia by foregrounding their subjectivities and agency navigating state-centric narratives and hegemonic discourses.

The annexation of Crimea in 2014 and Russia’s full-scale aggression in Ukraine in 2022 renewed concerns about the allegiances of Latvia’s Russian-speaking community and possible security threats. Some scholarship attributes integration challenges to Russia’s influence and its “compatriot” policy, while critical research argues that Latvia’s ethnocentric, assimilationist approach since independence in 1991 has marginalizsed local Russophones, casting them as “policy objects rather than policy makers” (Cianetti, 2019, p. 176). Both academic and public discourse often portray Russophones as passive, caught between Kremlin propaganda and Latvia’s assimilatory nation-building, thus denying their agency in shaping their sense of self and developing their own life trajectories.

This project highlights young Russian speakers’ everyday, informal, and agentic practices of integration. Youth occupy a transitional position, negotiating inherited pro-Russian (or Soviet) references and emerging European, pro-Latvian orientations. This ambivalent positioning makes them a key site for exploring integration as self-making within Latvia’s complex social context.

The study asks: Where does agency reside in the integration process of young Russophones? How do they enact integration beyond grand narratives? What meanings do they assign to integration, and how do they negotiate or contest hegemonic discourses? By focusing on everyday navigation across social boundaries, the research challenges dichotomies such as self/other, center/periphery, and top/bottom in Latvia’s spatialised society.