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This article seeks to discover how this contemporary Finno-Ugric identity has been politically instrumentalized and negotiated in Estonia. First, we look at how the Estonian state engages with the concept of Finno-Ugric world and inscribes it into Estonia's foreign policy goals. Then, we delve into the role of Finno-Ugric traditionalism in Estonian populist and far-right discourses. Third, we discuss how local identity constitutes and cements community building initiatives and projects in the Seto region known for its local specificity and cultural peculiarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since emerging in the early 1990s, Estonian hip-hop has developed in line with other cultural and artistic projects in the country, reflecting attempts to foster a homogeneous society, yet ultimately cultivating one where diversity and multiculturalism prevail. As a genre where minority groups are frequently presented as "authentic," hip-hop and its visual and performative manifestations provide a valuable platform to examine expressions of identity. To this end, several Estonian hip-hop musicians have explored aspects of being "post-Soviet" in contradistinction to official hegemonic discourses, which outright reject the Soviet past and emphasize titular ethnicity as a cornerstone of national identity. This article uses Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Multi-Modal Discourse Analysis (MMDA) to examine the lyrics and accompanying video of popular hip-hop song "für Oksana" by "Nublu featuring Gameboy Tetris." Doing so highlights how the song's basic narrative acts as a metaphor for experiences of integration processes between ethnic Estonians and Russophones since Estonian independence. I argue that through a combination of linguistic and cultural codeswitching, "für Oksana" constitutes an expression, performance, and negotiation of Russophone Estonian identity from both insider and outsider perspectives, emphasizing the need to understand Russophone Estonians as more than simply "Russians who live in Estonia." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1925 Estonian cultural autonomy law is a rare example of the idea of nonterritorial national minority rights officially adopted in the interwar period. Scholarly interest in this legislation, however, has so far overwhelmingly concentrated on the case of the Baltic Germans. This article is intended to make a contribution toward a broader understanding of the 1925 law and the "cultural autonomy" discourse in Estonia altogether by examining the Estonian Swedish minority's political leadership's understanding of cultural autonomy: how it changed and developed up to 1925, and what the subsequent Swedish attitudes toward the 1925 Estonian cultural autonomy law were. I demonstrate that although the Swedish leaders had been closely involved in the long process leading up to the law's passing in 1925, it ended up seen as being of little substantive relevance from the Swedish perspective. Furthermore, by being strongly associated with the term "cultural autonomy," the law also deprived the Estonian Swedish national movement of an important slogan that had long functioned as the overarching goal of Estonian Swedish nationalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]