Des Suds vers le Grand Nord : recomposition des mobilités et des identités urbaines post-soviétiques

Abstract

The Russian Arctic accounts for about 40% of the world’s Arctic population and indigenous peoples now account for only 5% of its total population. Russia is the most advanced in terms of urbanization of the whole Arctic. The settlement process has been marked by Soviet history and its paradoxes but they are also transformed into a transnational logic. This complex story of the construction of the most populated cities of the Arctic invites to decipher the urban identities, by investigating history of mobilities and urbanity’s construction with populations coming from different regions and formely Soviet republics, including Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus.This paper analyzes the link between recent mobility and that experienced during the Soviet era is shaped and embedded into reticular ties and how these new mobilities participate in the construction of multicultural identities. It shows how these economic migrants, mostly from former Soviet Muslim countries, will take advantage of the end of Sovietism and of de-secularization to reshape their religious identity around the community in a region which until now had not experienced this meeting.

Keywords

• Russian arctic cities
• mobilities
• migrations
• migrant trajectories
• identities
• islam