This paper examines the question of long-distance nationalism and Armenian youth in contemporary Russia. It contributes to existing debates on diasporic cultural identities and shows that long-distance nationalism is not simply an elitedriven phenomenon, but involves complex cultural, political, and symbolic processes and practices. Drawing on data obtained during six months of ethnographic fieldwork amongst Armenian youth in the city of Krasnodar, Southern Russia, it will be shown that young Armenians exhibit aspects of diasporic long-distance nationalism in different ways. While young Armenian men hold on to cultural traditions and practices that are formed in the past, female research participants have started to challenge them. Ã Ulrike Ziemer is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Centre for East European Language Based Area Studies (CEELBAS) at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. She received her Ph.D. from the Centre for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham. Her research focuses on accounts of local-global relations experienced outside the West, especially the study of diasporic youth cultural identities and practice in Russia. Her most recent research explores questions of transnationalism and Armenian diasporic youth cultural identities in Russia. She has published articles in Europe-Asia Studies and Nationalities Papers.Ulrike Ziemer: Belonging and Longing

This article examines the impact of global change and post-Soviet political transformation on diasporic youth cultural practices and experience in Krasnodar, a city in southern Russia. While young Armenians' leisure spaces are characterized by inclusive notions of ethnic plurality and tolerance, sometimes individuals are racialized or ethnicized when they pass through public spaces. Young Armenians' leisure spaces are ethnically structured, but not ethnically exclusive. This article challenges the view that young people from ethnic minorities are passive recipients of everyday racism. Instead, it is suggested that young Armenians have routinized their responses to racism and xenophobia in their everyday practices, and so are able to undermine the dominant political discourse.

Research on diasporic youth identities in the British and American context has stressed hybridity, heterogeneity and multiplicity. This paper draws upon ethnographic research undertaken with Armenian girls to explore some of the tensions and ambivalences of negotiating diasporic identities in the Russian context. Diasporic identities are constructed through gender, and this paper illustrates how research participants negotiate their identities in relation to both belonging to the Armenian community and wider Russian society. At the same time, this paper examines how research participants draw differently on diasporic identifications in order to overcome tensions and ambivalences in their everyday lives. The paper shows that research participants are not inclined to reject their cultural roots in favor of new hybrid identities, but are able to recognize and appropriate different cultures in their identity negotiations.

The findings presented here are based on ethnographic research and are concerned with subjective definitions of ethnic belonging of young Armenians in Krasnodar krai. It is demonstrated that Armenian ethnic identifications are not 'fixed' but rather entwined within a complex web of diverse cultural attachments, involving many 'routes' of translocation, dislocation and location. It was found that most of the research participants saw themselves as Armenian while drawing occasionally on cosmopolitanism as an identity resource. This enabled them to construct a sense of belonging both in terms of ethnicity and of multicultural location. THIS ARTICLE OUTLINES THE RESULTS OF ETHNOGRAPHIC research undertaken inKrasnodar, the capital of the southern Russian region of Krasnodar krai (territory). The main argument is that most young Armenians are inclined to see themselves as Armenian and keep a strong sense of their culture. They are not creating a new hybrid culture, but rather draw occasionally on cosmopolitanism as an identity resource, which denotes a stance toward diversity that enables them to construct belonging in terms of ethnicity as well as multicultural location. Background and research methodology