Feminist Anti-war Resistance in and Outside of Putin’s Russia,

• In Event: The Role of Masculinity in Conflict, War, and Militarism

Abstract

Since the start of Russian aggression in Ukraine on February 24th, the Russian feminist grassroots immediately reacted to this event and joined forces to protest against the war. On February 25th, a group of feminist activists published a manifesto, which outlined the anti-military and anti-Putin agenda of the Russian feminist grassroots movement and called for the international feminist movements to join the anti-war protest actions worldwide. As for today, they were able to attract supporters not only in Russia but received much international attention and support worldwide. Relying on the gendered opportunity political structure theory and the concept of the discursive eruption from the social movement studies, as well as literature on the outcomes and impacts of the movements, the presented paper aims to analyze the online and offline performances that made the movement visible and recognizable to the Russian and international public, their strategies and tactics of mobilization, and the preliminary impacts of the Feminist Anti-War Resistance (FAR). Thus, the research questions are posed: What explains the emergence of Feminist Anti-War Resistance and its visibility in the public media? How did social media and its affordances have shaped the strategies and tactics of FAR, including social media's impact on offline action? What are the preliminary outcomes of the movement, including national, multinational, and transnational levels? In addition, the paper reflects on their relations to other anti-war movements and initiatives in and outside of Russia through network analysis of social media and other publicly available sources. The study relies on the extensively rich online data from the Anti-War Feminist Resistance channel on Telegram, Instagram, and Facebook and supporting materials such as newspaper interviews, Youtube interviews, documentary movies, and personal reflections of activists from the semi-structured online interviews. In general, the study's results demonstrate how marginalized and vulnerable groups may find a way to resist the dictatorial regime to spread their anti-war messages and gain a voice within a very hostile environment, build a transnational (online) network of feminist anti-war cells inside and outside of Russia, form new identities and agendas within the feminist grassroots movements and impact political agendas of other anti-war initiatives and organizations sharing similar goals and claims.

Author

• Natalia Kovyliaeva, University of Tartu