Narratives of Justice among Russian Wartime Migrants

• In Event: Text-as-Data Approaches to Studying Exclusion & Inclusion Strategies in Authoritarian Regimes

Abstract

This study examines the narratives of Russian wartime migrants towards the issue of transitional justice through the computational grounded theory framework. By leveraging structured qualitative analysis of migrants’ interview testimonies and natural language processing techniques the paper digs into justifications behind migrants’ advocacy for retaliation tools targeting Russian state officials for wrongs committed against Ukraine and Russian civil society and their reluctance for the idea of holding Putin’s regime supporters accountable. The preliminary results show that the desire of transitional justice manifesting itself in advocacy for such retaliation techniques as lustration, purges, and trials as twice as more popular than the reconciliation approach targeting Putin’s regime backers as actors lacking political agency or justifying the reluctance to holding regime representatives accountable for wrongs on the basis of the fear of backfire.

Author

• Mikhail Turchenko, Northwestern U