University of Toronto Press, one of North America’s largest publishers, has released the book “Identity as Weapon: Crimean Tatars and Their Struggle for Self-Determination” by researcher Mariia Shynkarenko. The author reported this on her Facebook page.
“Ten years ago I started a student project that then became a dissertation and later grew into a book,” the author notes. “It’s a huge stretch of time, with Covid and the war, many moves, new countries and jobs.”
According to the description, it is a study of Crimean Tatar resistance to Russian colonialism. Since the first Russian annexation of Crimea in 1783, Crimean Tatars have faced classic instruments of colonial violence: dispossession of land, deportations and assimilation.
Examining Crimean Tatar political activism, researcher Mariia Shynkarenko shows the continuity of Crimean Tatar claims to the right of self-determination. In the early years of the Soviet Union, Crimean Tatar activists adopted the language of “backwardness” to gain access to political resources made available to them by the Soviet policy of indigenisation.
After the collapse of the Soviet empire, Crimean Tatars alternately appealed to European, Indigenous, Ukrainian and Muslim identities. These identities, sometimes supported by the state but often not, became a powerful weapon in the Crimean Tatars’ struggle for self-determination.
Shynkarenko critically draws on the achievements of Indigenous studies to explain why Indigeneity became an important category in Crimean Tatar politics, while also questioning assumptions about the nature of Indigenous identity and politics shaped largely by examples from the Americas, Australia and New Zealand.
“The book places Crimea and its Indigenous people, the Crimean Tatars, within the broader picture of Indigenous peoples’ struggles for self-determination. It explains why Crimea must be liberated and what decolonisation will mean in this context,” the author adds.
University of Toronto Press is one of North America’s oldest and largest publishers.
Mariia Shynkarenko is a political science researcher focusing on nationalism, resistance and identity. She is an associate professor and head of a research project at the Institute of Political Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences.