Authors

Matthew Heneghan¹;  ¹ University of Glasgow, UK

Discussion

On the 10th October 2023, the Russian State Duma Chairman, Vyacheslav Volodin, declared that those who have voluntarily left Russia since the invasion of Ukraine will not be welcomed upon their return and that the former gulag city of Magadan awaits them. The quiet exodus of Russian citizens since the invasion of Ukraine now accounts for more than 1 million 'relokanty' dispersed across host states which did not initially adopt mobility sanctions as in Europe and North America, instead providing quasi-legal migratory pathways for self-exile. Unlike other waves of voluntary-cum-forced migration in the 21st Century, however, the international mobility of relokanty has been aided by the ruble's outperformance in comparison to other major currencies thanks to surging energy exports. 

As such, this paper takes interest in how different states have framed national opportunities for hosting footloose economic and knowledge capital vis-à-vis relokanty, and questions the extent to which state behaviour constitutes war-time rentierism. It focuses on the cases of Kazakhstan, Türkiye and Argentina, which have all emerged as major relokanty hosting states due to migration policies that have made longer-term settlement viable. Undertaking comparative analysis of strategic discourse concerning inward migration, it firstly investigates how the hosting of relokanty either folds into or distinguishes itself from broader, national-level migration narratives since the onset of the Russo-Ukrainian war. It pays particular attention to how changes to visa regimes have had differential implications for Russian relokanty within the context of state migration controls. Secondly, it explores how state-level discourse on the Russo-Ukrainian war and official foreign policy towards Russia have evolved over the same period, considering each state’s scale of strategic dependency on Russia in terms of bilateral and multilateral relationships. The paper then provides a multi-level analysis of the state incentives for hosting relokanty: from short-term financial, business and knowledge economy rewards, to longer-term opportunities for conditionalising the terms of remain and exercising leverage over the Russian state should it wish to bring relokanty back within regime authority.

Through investigating the ways that relokanty have emerged as a distinct migrant group vested with material and immaterial opportunities, this paper adds to emerging literature on the varying forms of conflict-related rentierism. It also accounts for social and political repercussions of the Russo-Ukrainian war in societies beyond Europe.