Crimea in Ukraine: Smoothing the Edges as Diversity Institutionalization

Abstract From the early 1990s, Ukrainian Crimea seemed to face the Russian majority’s separatist inclinations and far-reaching political claims of the formerly deported Crimean Tatars. Nevertheless, the peninsula’s autonomous status secured ethnopolitical stability for about 19 years, and the article considers how the established regime of diversity governance contributed to the autonomy’s endurance. The author concludes that this regime did not fit into an explanatory framework of inter-group balance, such as power-sharing. Among the factors securing durablity were the ambiguity of official narratives, loosely formalized participatory mechanisms encouraging opportunisic behavior and the maintenace of the elites’ and population segments’ expectations.