Persistent statelessness in Post-Soviet Latvia and Estonia
Journal: Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
Year: 2019

Following independence from the Soviet Union, Latvia and Estonia enacted strict citizenship regimes that resulted in over a million residents holding no citizenship by late 1991. Today, the non-citizen populations number nearly 350,000. These are largely Russian-speakers who migrated to the countries during the Soviet period. I present an argument for why modern Latvia and Estonia still have such a large number of stateless residents. I look at how institutional pressure during the EU accession