The embedding of ethnic and religious communities in a polycultural region of Russia: Trust, social justice and identification

The hypotheses of the research where the paper based on is taken from the theses of Robert Putnam who discovered that the increasing ethnic and religious diversity challenges social solidarity and inhibit social capital. Based on the example of Republic Tatarstan in Russia (qualitative and quantitative studies) where the half of population are Muslims, the paper shows which values and norms of social justice influence to embedding and localization of groups supported ethnic and religious identification, how do people radicalize their views of social justice in that groups and what how its corresponds with a level of trust to official and informal social institutes, which values of traditional society are taken to justify the opposition and localization of some ethnic and religious groups, how the new identification processes and forming social capital are influenced by media, everyday and official interactions.

I follow both the particularists and pluralistic approaches to social justice. Thus I believe that the concept of justice, there are only just “inside” of a particular culture (Walzer, Young, Fraser) and there is a huge differentiation among concepts of justice among communities (A. Sen). At the same time trust in particular social groups is based on mutual understandings of what constitutes "fair" and "unfair" acts, in addition, of course, and understanding of the rules of entry into certain relationships.

The new forms of social care which creates communities based on religious aspects are established in a Republic in recent 10-15 years. At the same time there are no permanent volunteer projects in Republic and there is no such perception of necessity of help as most of the population support individualistic neo-liberal concept of social justice, but these make small communities even more significant and attractive for marginalized groups of people.