Governing and Living Through Failure: Russian Speakers in Ethnocentric Nation‐Building Projects of Estonia and Latvia
Journal: Nations and Nationalism
Year: 2025

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 stat