The article analyzes the role of religion in the context of the contemporary Finnish migration system. The European migration crises have become a national challenge for Finnish society. The integration of (im)migrants, whose ethnic and/or religious affiliation is often opposed to the value-based and ideological foundations of Finnish civic identity, is accompanied by a number of problems. The most significant of them is the escalation of racism and discrimina-tion against migrants by Finns and social structures. The Finnish Immigration Service (MIGRI) has been confronted with an unprecedented number of religious conversions from Islam to Christianity by Muslim migrants who use religious conversion as a way to gain asylum or avoid deportation to their home countries on the grounds of a risk of religious persecution. The Ecumenical Council of Finland has criticized the ambiguity of the methods for assessing the credibility of religious beliefs of newly converted Christians. At the same time, the in-creasing number of decisions to deport aliens to unsafe areas has divided the Finnish public into those who support accepting asylum seekers from Muslim countries and those who support anti-immigration movements. An analysis of statistical data and empirical material in the works of Finnish researchers shows that religious conversion is a popular migration strategy despite its low efficiency, the manifestation of Islamophobia in Finnish society to-wards migrants with Muslim background and the possible negative consequences of religious conversion from Islam to Christianity. The authors conclude that religion is an important as-pect of social consolidation and integration of foreign cultural migrants, but the formation of religious identity in school education largely contributes to the opposition of ‘us’ and ethno-religious ‘others’ in Finnish society
The modern understanding of representative democracy includes not only the rule of the majority, but also the protection of the rights of minorities. One such minority is indigenous peoples, including the Sámi population that lives in four European countries, namely in the northern territories of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. In these countries, the Sámi, as a minority, find it difficult to achieve an adequate level of representation in traditional political structures that are responsible for articulating interests (parties, parliaments), therefore special mechanisms were found that allowed this indigenous people to participate in political decision-making processes more actively. The purpose of the article is to study the evolution and features of the political representation of the Sámi in Norway, Sweden, and Finland. The choice of countries is dictated by the cross-border nature of the Sámi settlement and the practice of diffusion of institutions of political representation. The methodology is based on neo-institutionalism and constructivism theories. It is concluded that after World War II, global transformations of the institutional environment took place in developed countries, and they were expressed in the rejection of the racial paradigm, the establishment of the supremacy of democracy and human rights. In the countries of Northern Europe at the end of the XX — beginning of the XXI centuries, the concept of “Arctic identity” was formed instead of identity through the construct of the “Nordic race”, which was characteristic of the first half of the XX century. At the center of it is the concept of indigeneity. From the beginning of the XX century, the Sámi that were subjected to forced assimilation in all three countries (discriminatory policies of “swedification”, “norwegianization” and “finnization”) and that were forced to fight for their rights with minimal chances of winning over the dominant discourse of racial inferiority, became beneficiaries of the changes, received special status, collective rights, and opportunities for political representation in modern conditions. However, several problems and discriminatory practices against the Sámi remain relevant and require solutions at the level of public policy.