The Annexation of Populations: A New State Strategy?

Research problem
In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea. For many of us this was a land grab, pure and simple. A big state gobbled up neighbouring territory and populations changed hands. My MSc research demonstrated that something different was going on. Russia was more interested in laying claim to the Crimeans than Crimea; the people not the land. Long before the conflict, Russia had distributed passports to Ukrainian nationals and offered them the benefits of Russian citizenship. I argued that this was an example of an emergent political phenomenon: the annexation of populations: where states claim non-nationals beyond their borders. This strategy consequently complicated claims regarding legitimacy and self-determination and resulted in a strengthening of Russia's claims to the territory using population co-optation as a vehicle to reach these ends (Wrighton, 2016).
While we have long viewed governments as solely concerned with their own land and people, under conditions of advanced globalisation we may be seeing a different approach:
where states compete for the loyalty of non-citizens in far distant lands. This thesis will aim to contribute to contemporary debates in the field of critical geo-politics by asking: How and
why do states annex populations? How do these policies compliment and contrast with their efforts to govern domestic citizenries, immigrants and diaspora? What do these findings tell
us about the changing nature of contemporary forms of state sovereignty and territory?
As global and cross border mobility have become a permanent and increasingly pervasive feature of our political landscape, governments can no longer focus all their attention on governing domestic populations. Most research explores how states guard their borders and prevent immigrants from coming in. A smaller body of literature reveals how states 'go transnational', continuing to govern their citizens when they go abroad. This dissertation will explore a different dynamic; States seek to re-naturalise former citizens, open up access to citizenship for the children of their nationals abroad, re-animate historical and in some cases long forgotten linkages to settler and colonial polities and offer talented
and wealthy migrants and asylum seekers generous incentives to immigrate and naturalise.
Methodology
My research will take the objects of state practices and policies, civilians as agents, capable of producing change in state practice, resulting in an innovative research design uncovering the implications and products of states' engagement in extra-territorial governance of populations. Practically speaking, this will involve qualitative research techniques that focus on how civilians initiate and tactically respond to annexation policies. I will take a processtracing
approach to understanding how and why states annex populations, using policy documents and interviews with officials and new citizens as sources. By employing this methodology, it becomes possible to "identify a causal chain that links independent and dependent variables" (Checkel, 2008, p. 116), by searching for "theoretically predicted intermediate steps" (ibid.). Given this methodology is essentially determining whether our prior theoretical understandings about the causal mechanisms are valid; it is therefore necessary to map out what conventional theory on extra-territorial and trans-territorial governance of populations suggests and compare this with a variation on this process.
Process tracing relies on the gathering of large amounts of data from a wide range of sources, primarily through the examination of "histories, archival documents, [and] interview transcripts" (George & Bennett, 2005, p. 6). To gather and interpret data on state's annexation of populations, certain empirical indicators will be taken as proxies, which in turn will contribute to an overarching process tracing methodology as mentioned above.