Early Warning and Minority Rights in Russian Federation

The article provides a critical commentary to current use of the concept "minority" in Russia, particularly in academic and political discourse. The direct borrowing of the concept as it exists in internationallaw or western social sciences is prevented by a number oflimitations inherent to its meaning, the main limitation being that Russia could not be properly characterised as a democracy. The usage of the tern1 "minority" in the context of the so-called "transitional societies" could be misleading, as the position of a particular group in a power hierarchy as well as its influence on political decision-making process here is not a function of a group's numerical strength, but depends on such resources as the group's wealth, access to education, and position in administrative institutions, security and army, effective monopoly of important sectors of social life and economy, group's solidarity etc. Moreover, the conceptual field of in which the concept is situated is markedly different from its western analogues, wherein such political concepts as "a titular nation", "an indigenous ethnos", "a state-founding people" remain virtually unknown and normally does not belong to semantic field of "minority". As the concept "minority" in Russia is firmly tied to ethnic reality interpretations, the current paradigms of ethnicity research are outlined. Finally, a description of contemporary attempts of minority rights monitoring within the framework of an early warning research is sketched.