Governing and living through failure : Russian speakers in ethnocentric nation-building projects of Estonia and Latvia

Abstract

This article contributes to nationalism studies by demonstrating how states use failure as a governance tool to regulate national belonging and by showing how people experience and reinterpret failure in ways that unsettle dominant national imaginaries. Drawing on ethnographic research with Russian speakers in Estonia and Latvia, we explore how individuals cast outside ‘communities of value’ as ‘failures’ negotiate such experiences differently across generations. We show that while state discourses frequently frame Russophones as failing national cohesion, their mundane withdrawal or occasional refusal of dominant discourses, frequently dismissed as passive or disobedient, can be read as subtle acts of care and agency that sustain alternative modes of life. Situating these experiences within literature on failure, we argue that failure is not merely deviation from national norms but a historically sedimented, affective and generative condition that illuminates the contradictions of ethnocentric nation-building while opening space for reimagined forms of national membership.