Identity As Weapon : Crimean Tatars and Their Quest for Indigenous Self-determination

Identity as Weapon presents a study of Crimean Tatar resistance to Russian settler colonialism through the strategic deployment of identity. Since the first Russian annexation of Crimea in 1783, Crimean Tatars have been the victims of the classic tools of settler colonial violence: land dispossession, racialization, deportation, and assimilation.

In her investigation of Crimean Tatar political activism, researcher Mariia Shynkarenko shows the continuity of Crimean Tatar claims to self-determination. During the early years of the Soviet Union, Crimean Tatar activists embraced the language of “backwardness” to access political resources available to them through Soviet korenizatsiia (indigenization) policies. Since the collapse of the Soviet empire, Crimean Tatars have alternately invoked European, Indigenous, Ukrainian, and Muslim identities. These identities – sometimes state sponsored, but often not – have been powerful weapons of the Crimean Tatar struggle for self-determination.

Shynkarenko critically applies lessons from Indigenous studies to explain why Indigeneity has become an important category for Crimean Tatar politics, while challenging presumptions about the nature of Indigenous identity and politics that have been drawn predominantly from examples in the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand.