This article provides and discusses a typology of the self-identifications used by the post-2022 war-induced migrants from the Russian Federation, i.e., people who left Russia after it invaded Ukraine. We argue that this typology, which consists of three main elements—migrant/émigré (migrant/emigrant in Russian), refugee (bezhenets), and relocant (relokant)—is permeated by tensions between politicizing and depoliticizing one’s own migratory experience. We show that politicization dominated among those who self-identified as migrants/émigrés or refugees, while depoliticization dominated among relocants. In this way, we reveal the problem of politicality as central to how recent migrants from Russia shape their self-identifications, i.e., their ways of interpreting their migratory experiences as a whole. The article is based on the analysis of 110 semi-structured qualitative interviews with post-2022 migrants from Russia, conducted in nine European and Asian countries.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shattered the status quo in Russian and Eurasian studies. Along with numerous moral and security implications, it has raised questions about the validity and reliability of widely used research methods in the region, placing research on Russia and Belarus on par with studies of other closed, repressive authoritarian systems, and it has placed research on Ukraine on par with studies conducted in the context of war, civil war, and violent conflict. Drawing on existing research on autocracies and conflict, this article reviews ongoing debates on the methodological, ethical, and epistemological challenges of conducting research in repressive or unsafe environments and introduces contributions to this special issue. Leveraging expertise in computational methods, ethnographic and qualitative research, survey research, and other approaches, the authors address issues of access to the field; availability, validity, and reliability of data; and ethical challenges. Based on their own ongoing research projects, they reflect on how methodological and ethical constraints shape knowledge production on autocracies and in conflict zones while offering potential “work-arounds” to overcome these barriers. This special issue demonstrates that despite these challenges, there are opportunities for productive comparative studies of authoritarian regimes across different contexts and in-depth analysis of conflict zones. However, these opportunities must be balanced with careful consideration of methodological biases, risks, ethical dilemmas, and the need for ongoing awareness of the knowledge-power nexus, which inevitably elevates some scholarly perspectives while marginalizing others.
The article examines how the legacy of the Minsk Peace Process (MPP) (2014–22) has been invoked in official and expert discourses in Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany, as well as in the official discourse of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), in debates on peace negotiations and settlement options during the first three and a half years of Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine. It shows that, notwithstanding differences in discourse production contexts, the MPP has remained an influential point of reference for all negotiation participants, as they utilize the lessons they claim to have learned to support their positions in the new conflict and negotiation setting. Beyond its novel empirical focus on the discursive use of the MPP legacy, the article makes two conceptual contributions. First, informed by the concept of legacy and its discursive instrumentalization, it shows that even when negotiations collapse, past negotiations and processes continue to be utilized by conflict parties and mediators in new conflict and negotiation settings. Second, it offers a classification of the discursive lessons that parties and mediators claim to draw across four perspectives on peace processes—bargaining, process design (institutional), relational, and normative—and highlights the logical connections among them. Taken together, these insights underscore the importance for actors engaged in peace processes of recognizing how the legacies of previous negotiations and the (non-)implementation of peace deals serve as discursive tools that may influence negotiation dynamics and settlement options in new conflict and/or negotiation settings.
Following two terms of Eurosceptic right rule under Law and Justice (PiS), a new coalition government led by the Civic Coalition (KO) emerged in Poland in 2023. This election marked a unique case of a dominant radical-right populist party losing power through democratic means, despite extensive institutional advantages and media capture. This article investigates individual-level factors that played a role in shaping voters’ choices during this election. It first briefly surveys the political stances of the major parties and the programmatic coherence in the two alternative party setups. It then analyzes party electorates through sociodemographic, geographic, and attitudinal lenses. Finally, it employs regression analysis to pinpoint the variables that most inform vote choice. By analyzing individual-level determinants in this context, the study advances voter behavior theory, showing how classic factors—sociodemographic characteristics, religiosity, economic evaluations, and ideological self-placement—interact with context-specific concerns about democratic norms. The findings indicate that in critical elections, voters’ choices are shaped not only by material interests and social structure, but also by deeply held democratic values and perceptions of systemic threats, enriching our understanding of how electoral behavior can respond to the challenges of democratic consolidation.
The “Resist America, Aid Korea” movement was the PRC’s inaugural deployment of sustained anti-foreign propaganda to secure domestic legitimation and drive social transformation. This article, grounded in theories of autocratic legitimation, identity studies, and scholarship on China’s myth of national humiliation, argues that RAAK’s demonization of the American Other—tied to internal adversaries—served to rally public support through patriotic indoctrination and justify repression of regime opponents. These functions proved essential not only for prevailing in the Korean War but also for cementing the nascent PRC regime and propelling its revolutionary agenda. The evidence is drawn from a rich corpus of CCP documents, media, and textual and visual propaganda. Especially from early 1951, as the war reached a stalemate and the Party shifted focus inward, RAAK and domestic campaigns of class struggle and political purges became increasingly intertwined through shared organizational networks and unified messaging. At its core lay a “grand conspiracy” narrative that leveraged the “black sheep effect” in social psychology to frame internal foes as US collaborators, thereby legitimizing their suppression or reeducation. This study underscores the CCP’s deliberate fusion of foreign and domestic enemies to maximize mobilization and control during a pivotal phase of PRC state- and nation-building. It provides critical insight into contemporary CCP rhetoric, which revives this earlier strategy by casting domestic dissidents as agents of “foreign hostile forces.”
Bazaars, street trading, and secondhand car marts accompanied the implosion of the communist economies throughout Central and Eastern Europe during the early 1990s. In Poland, due to the longtime agony of the country’s economy under late socialism, informal markets spread earlier than elsewhere in the region. While acknowledging the crucial role of this homegrown market economy in shaping vernacular imaginaries of capitalism in the transformation period, this article argues for caution with romanticizing it in retrospect. Contemporaneously, the extraordinary expansion of informal markets continued to be contested on various grounds. The emergent spirit of capitalism did not blend easily with the social fabric of the time, and it was left to municipal governments to regulate what was seen as chaotic and unwelcome proliferation by many—not least because it introduced a tangible transnational dimension into post-socialist lifeworlds. Based on empirical case studies from Warsaw and the industrial town of Starachowice in southeastern Poland, this article analyzes the struggles over liberalizing and then regulating informal markets. Considering them as tangible expressions of ongoing renegotiations of economic and social imaginaries during the early transformation years, the article complicates linear narratives on the impact of grassroots capitalism on post-socialist transformation.
While authoritarian regimes are typically seen as prone to secrecy and restricting access to data, individual autocracies differ greatly from each other—some are better in terms of data accessibility and quality than others. The preference of autocracies for secrecy is likely to depend on a large number of scope conditions. One particularly likely condition is the perception of external and domestic threats, which ought to make the preference for secrecy stronger. From this perspective, we look at how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine affected the data availability preferences of the Russian authoritarian regime. Whereas before the invasion, Russia belonged to autocracies with relatively high data availability, the war led to decreasing data availability and quality. At the same time, even after the full-scale invasion, Russia continues to publish a large number of datasets and allows data collection by independent pollsters. We discuss the implications of this development for Russian studies..
The Russian state under Vladimir Putin envisions children as objects in its war against Ukraine, which has a wider nexus of geopolitical control in former communist countries. However, young people in the digital age resist, adapt, and re-use scripts in everyday private and civic practices. This introduction argues that Russia’s war against Ukraine is reshaping how young people across the former communist space understand themselves, shape their identities, and are being shaped by fluid geopolitical forces embodied in a range of such practices. We use Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of becoming/being and Hanson’s notion of the “been” to describe youth as subjects formed by past legacies, present pressures, and imagined futures. The war circulates through a mediatized, always-on environment in which participation is routed through and between platforms, algorithms, and attention. Contributions examine Central Asia, where linguistic activism and decolonizing claims have intensified and media literacy, education, and social context shape interpretations of the conflict; Ukrainian children’s creative agency in responding to war; and the ambivalent affordances of social media for authoritarian mobilization of youth in Russia. Together, the articles demonstrate that the attempt to restore imperial influence through conflict has produced unintended effects: powerful processes of identity reconfiguration among youth. The collection offers comparative evidence and a clear conceptual toolkit for studying the effects of Russia’s war against Ukraine on generational formation and cultural politics across the region today.
This article explores how Russian sociologists contributed to the moral framing of economic reform during the post-Soviet 1990s. Drawing on opinion polls conducted by the famous Russian poll center VTsIOM between 1993 and 2000, it argues that these surveys operated not only as descriptive instruments but also as prescriptive texts promoting a normative model of the ideal capitalist worker. Sociologists advanced a trinity of traits—motivation, self-reliance, and risk affinity—as essential to overcoming a perceived “Soviet deformation” of the workforce. While these ideas reflected global neoliberal currents, they were also deeply rooted in late Soviet concerns with labor productivity. By tracing the genealogy of these discourses from the 1960s through the perestroika era, the article challenges the notion of a sharp post-1991 rupture and highlights the continuity of reformist thinking that added to the urgency of the reform agenda after 1991. It further contends that sociological expertise became a tool of governance, shaping public perceptions of work and economic success while pathologizing specific social groups—particularly women, rural populations, and older workers. In doing so, the article offers a nuanced reading of post-socialist neoliberalism as both transnationally informed and locally embedded. It contributes to ongoing debates about the role of intellectual elites in transition contexts and the cultural politics of economic reform in post-communist societies.
While contemporary scholarship on post-Soviet informality typically frames informal networks as either adaptive (survival) or parallel (subversive forces undermining formal governance) mechanisms, this ethnographic study demonstrates their dual nature as both. Focusing on Uzbekistan’s transitional context (2020–24), the article reveals how informal business networks construct hybrid governance by actively reshaping formal institutions through the influence of their cultural dispositions (collectively internalized informal ideological frameworks and normative practices). Employing a socio-legal perspective, the research examines the complex interplay between formal and informal institutions to better understand the dual functionality of informal business networks in the post-Soviet context. By combining top-down institutional analysis with a bottom-up ethnographic approach, the study shows how informal Uzbek business networks (categorized in the article as analytical ideal-types, termed Western-style, Islamic-style, and Soviet-style) simultaneously respond to state regulatory frameworks while developing their normative orders through everyday business practices. The study draws on Douglass North’s institutional theory and the theory of legal pluralism to analyze the abovementioned processes. The findings of this article offer new insights into state-society relations in post-communist contexts by redefining the “network state” as a dynamic interplay of formal and informal governance.
This article explores how people who engaged in small-scale private enterprise under late socialism and early capitalism in the 1990s retrospectively construct their business activities as legitimate. Based on a set of oral history interviews with Czech small-scale and micro entrepreneurs, the article seeks to understand how the “spirit of capitalism” (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007), recognized by early 1990s policymakers as a new moral system, met the field of (post)socialist small-scale business whose actors were shaped by a range of pre-understandings emerging from the late socialist informal economy. To this end, it adopts a moral economy perspective and analyzes the vernacular means through which informants expressed moral judgment of entrepreneurial activities under socialism and capitalism by focusing on three categories: work ethic, entrepreneurial spirit, and honesty. While the particular character traits, abilities, and virtues invoked by informants remained stable, they acquired new meanings across the break of 1989 dependent on the political context. What characterizes the entrepreneurial field as opposed to other sectors of the labor market is the ubiquity of illicit and unlawful practices that informants either encountered or engaged in themselves, subjecting such practices to moral judgment. The article argues that while the political discourse of the 1990s placed high hopes in entrepreneurs as guarantors of the new moral system, embodying this ideal proved unattainable for many small-scale entrepreneurs, fostering feelings of disillusionment with postsocialist developments among some of the informants.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent “wild 1990s” are increasingly portrayed in Russian public discourse as a traumatic experience. This framing contrasts the perceived chaos and lawlessness of the 1990s with a nostalgic idealization of the Soviet past and the narrative of restored state strength since Putin’s second presidency. This pervasive framing often implicitly imposes a role of disempowered subjects upon individuals who lived through the upheaval. Drawing on biographical interviews conducted in 2018 with 12 former market traders across Russia, this article challenges these instrumental trauma narratives. The analysis explores how people who worked as “shuttle traders” in the 1990s retroactively construct their pasts by asserting their active participation and rejecting externally defined victimhood. Their narratives point to alternative frameworks that reconcile Soviet-era moral economies with emerging neoliberal values, emphasizing resilience, entrepreneurial acumen, material gains, and self-reliance. They assert themselves as capable agents who actively shaped their trajectories and broader social relations amid systemic collapse. Their life stories offer counter-narratives to the streamlining of the memory culture of the 1990s and demonstrate how moral justifications for capitalism are negotiated among ordinary people. Ultimately, these women’s accounts reveal the 1990s as a contested moral terrain encompassing a broad range of experiences that go well beyond a framing of the era solely through trauma and treachery.
How do grassroots feminist movements convert moral shock into sustained resistance under war, repression, and exile? This article examines the diasporic wing of the Feminist Anti-War Resistance (FAR/FAS), a transnational network of Russian feminists formed in response to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Drawing on 56 in-depth interviews with activists in 25 countries, it conceptualizes FAS as an affective infrastructure that joins affect, meaning, and materiality to enable emotional survival and political resistance. Extending Ward’s micromobilization model, the article advances the concept of productive mediation—a feminist process that transforms morally charged emotions into politically meaningful action and sustained participation. FAS’s repertoire—symbolic performances, embodied signals, grief activism, and care-based practices—creates an emotionally resonant, low-threshold path into and back to collective action in diasporic and authoritarian settings. The analysis shows how alignment of ideology, horizontal and decentralized structure, and ritual lowers entry costs, supports withdrawal and return after burnout, and renders dissent durable. The article contributes to three literatures: affect theory and micromobilization; feminist scholarship on exile and forced migration; and research on transnational feminist infrastructures under authoritarianism. It argues that FAS does not treat emotional labor as ancillary to politics but centers it as a generative force. Rather than merely enduring the emotional fallout of war, FAS channels difficult emotions—grief, guilt, and fear—into collective feminist action, making participation emotionally bearable and sustainable over time.
The Russian online sphere today is subjected to sophisticated forms of control, including self-censorship, legal repression, and the shutdown of global platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, leaving state-controlled Russian platforms as the primary means of digital communication for the public. In this article, we explore the potential and limitations of using social media data to study cultural processes and societal dynamics within a non-transparent authoritarian context of wartime Russia as the government attempts to censor all explicit forms of political communication. Specifically, we discuss data provided by social media listening (SML) platforms and argue that, despite methodological and organizational challenges, SML in an authoritarian context offers unique opportunities to gauge cultural and social trends, particularly through the identification of micro triggers (signals) and macro patterns of online discourse. The huge volume of data extracted from SML enables scholars to explore deeper layers of information beyond mere text, including metadata from platforms such as author details and engagement metrics, and provides AI-driven analytical tools, such as sentiment analysis, topic modeling, and named entity recognition.
New evidence suggests that the gender protest gap—the difference between male and female participation in protest events—has decreased in Russia prior to February 2022, despite the patriarchal, authoritarian regime. Following the comparative literature, we rely on a survey experiment to show that women strategically participate in activism that have limited risk of state violence or social sanctions. Distinctions between the nature of protests and protest grievances as well as strategic opportunities to choose among protest repertoires and frames allow women to engage in activism without significant costs. There are two important exceptions. First, women are still less likely to participate in overtly politicized actions that challenge the regime. They are also less likely to participate in state-sponsored actions or actions in support of traditional family values voluntarily, although they are often coerced to do so. To explore the mechanisms that support these patterns in women’s activism, we rely on two additional types of evidence: a narrative of recent developments in women’s activism and interviews with Russian women activists in exile. These data illustrate the pathways to activism that underpin the activism against Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine that is reported in the articles in this special issue.
The full-scale war in Ukraine has had a wide-ranging impact on the nation's children as they have been displaced, wounded, and even killed. In the context of the Russia-Ukraine war, Ukrainian children found ways and created spaces that allowed them to express their agency, ranging from narrating their experiences in diaries, poems, and art to engaging in political activities related to war. This study explores the potential of arts-based programs to empower children affected by armed conflict, with a focus on the Behind Blue Eyes initiative, implemented following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. By distributing disposable cameras, this program encouraged children affected by war to document their lives through photography, subsequently sharing their visual narratives on the Behind Blue Eyes initiative's social media account on Instagram. Through thematic and semiotic analyses of these digital stories, this research investigates how children express agency, engage with geopolitical discourses, and navigate their traumatic experiences through their photographs during the Russia-Ukraine war. The study also examines how adults mediate children's narratives through digital storytelling, revealing the complex dynamics of children's agency within armed conflict contexts. The research addresses these questions and contributes to the scholarly discourse on children's experiences in conflicts beyond Ukraine, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia. This research also advances the understanding of how arts-based programs offer a medium for children to express and transform their experiences of war, which also challenges narratives of children as passive actors in contexts of large-scale political violence.
This article explores the phenomenon of language activism in Kazakhstan, examining its roots and contemporary manifestations within a decolonial framework. Despite Soviet colonialism not being traditionally classified as typical colonialism, it resulted in significant sociolinguistic inequalities, particularly between the Russian and Kazakh languages. The research highlights how modern Kazakh language activists challenge this imbalance by promoting the use and prestige of Kazakh, addressing issues of linguistic justice and national identity reconstruction. The study emphasizes the impact of nation-building policies and the role of grassroots activism in navigating the complexities of bilingualism and ethnic identity. It argues that the current wave of activism not only reflects decolonial sentiments but also contributes to a broader discourse on linguistic justice in a multiethnic society. The analysis is grounded in the sociopolitical context of (post-)Soviet Kazakhstan, with particular attention to recent geopolitical shifts and their influence on language dynamics.
This study examines how media literacy influences the perceptions of young people in Uzbekistan regarding the Russia-Ukraine war. With the media’s pervasive role in shaping public understanding of global events, this research explores the extent to which media literacy, defined as the ability to critically analyze and evaluate media messages, affects the views of Uzbekistani youth on this conflict. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study combines qualitative interviews and a quantitative survey involving 927 participants under 35 years old. The findings showed that higher levels of media literacy among Uzbekistani youth correlate with more critical perspectives on the war, a greater capacity to identify bias, and a reduced susceptibility to propagandistic narratives. Conversely, lower levels of media literacy indicated a correlation with strong support for one-sided, particularly, Russian-aligned narratives without questioning or minimal critical judgment. These perceptions are further shaped by sociocultural factors, including family opinions, social environments, and educational attainment, as well as the influence of broader geopolitical events, such as the Israel-Palestine conflict. The study also stresses the need for developing comprehensive media literacy programs in Uzbekistan that are specifically designed to reflect the unique sociocultural contexts of the youth. This research contributes to global discussions about media literacy, political awareness, and youth engagement in contested information environments by drawing insights from Uzbekistan’s post-Soviet context.
This article examines the reactions of young people and, more specifically, youth activists in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Specifically, we demonstrate how online involvement bleeds into the offline political activity of young people related to the war in complex ways. While Central Asians rely on online activity to discover and interact with news about the war, the war has catalyzed a variety of political activities both online and offline, though the war is but one of many political traumas that have elicited responses from society. Our interviews with young activists reveal common themes across Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. In both cases, the war brought about conflicts within the activist community and vibrant discussions in the arenas of language politics and decolonization. This newfound youth activism may not result in increased formal political participation (e.g., voting, protesting), but it could have a lasting impact on the everyday contribution and efficacy of young people in their societies.
Despite Russia's relatively low ranking on gender equality, recent emigrants who left the country after February 2022 exhibit significantly higher levels of gender egalitarianism compared to their counterparts in Russia. This study investigates whether these attitudes are attributable to socio-demographic factors such as education and urban residence, or if deeper ideological and political factors play a role. Using data from the OutRush project on Russian emigration after 2022 and the World Values Survey, we analyze two key questions: Do recent emigrants demonstrate more egalitarian attitudes than socio-demographically similar Russians? Does gender equality of host countries influence emigrants' attitudes? Our findings suggest that emigrants exhibit higher levels of gender egalitarianism than comparable groups in Russia, even after controlling for socio-demographic predictors. These differences persist after controlling for socioeconomic predictors, reflecting deeply ingrained values that were probably developed by the pre-migration experiences of political opposition actions and social activism. The results challenge theories of rapid acculturation and highlight the role of self-selection as a key factor underlying gender egalitarian attitudes.
