Authors

Magdalena Dembinska¹;  ¹ Political Science, Université de Montréal, Canada

Discussion

Focused on the effects of kin-state policies on their bilateral relations, the literature has little to say about minorities themselves. It also ignores cases where a minority is targeted by competing trans-sovereign policies. This paper seeks to fill these gaps by exploring the effects of the soft power of the kin-state on the strategies of minorities in the case of Poles finding themselves in a particularly complex context of Transnistria, the separatist region of Moldova. On the one hand, Poland clearly supports Chisinau against the rebellious republic and intervenes with its external minority by offering resources and quasi-citizenship (Karta Polaka). On the other side, Russia, the patron-state of Transnitria, exercises major counterbalancing soft power with its compatriot policies that include Polish residents. In dialogue with the literature on kin-states’ policies, the objective is twofold: to understand the changes induced by the adoption of trans-sovereign laws in the way minorities identify themselves, as well as in their political strategies; and to complicate the triadic relational geopolitical field in which they navigate by adding to the minority/state of residence/kin-state relationship an additional external actor, the patron-state. The degree of agency and the ability of minorities to adapt will therefore depend on their relations (1) with the (non)state institutions of the States of residence, (2) with those of the kin State but also (3) between the state of residence and kin-state and, in the cases that interest us, (4) between the latter and the patron-state. The paper presents preliminary results on Poles in Transnistria based on an extensive fieldwork in 2023 and 2024.