Petitioning from an Island: Negotiated Sovereignty and Ruhnu’s Incorporation into the Estonian State, 1919–1921; pp 27–71

This article examines how the Swedish-speaking island community of Ruhnu in the Gulf of Riga navigated the island’s incorporation into the Estonian nation-state through a sustained strategy of petitioning. From 1919 to 1921, Ruhnu’s inhabitants pursued parallel petitions submitted to Estonian authorities and to the King of Sweden with the aim of gaining confirmation of what they understood as historical local rights. At the same time, the island’s incorporation to the Republic of Estonia was contested by Latvia, which gave the islanders strategic leverage. Rather than treating the islanders’ petitions as peripheral expressions of a local grievance, the analysis frames them as an independent political strategy by which the community actively, and in part successfully, shaped the terms under which Estonian sovereignty came to be exercised over the island. It identifies in these texts a distinct privilege-based idiom of claim-making (‘privilege grammar’) focused on exemptions and confirmations, which stood in tension with the idea of modern uniform citizenship.