AWRIR - Anti-War Resistance in Russia (AWRIR) after 24.02.2022

In contrast to an extensive body of research on protest in Putin's Russia over the past twenty years, academic research on Russians' ongoing resistance to the war in Ukraine in Russia since 24.02.2022 is still nascent.

The proposed project Anti-War Resistance in Russia (AWRIR) at Aberystwyth University aims to fill this empirical knowledge gap by providing insight into citizens' individual acts of everyday resistance and fill the conceptual gap in the literature on resistance and civil society in Russia regarding the role and power of individual acts by conceptualising individual resistance in authoritarian regimes.

Following an interdisciplinary approach, AWRIR explores the variety of actors (RO1), their motivations (RO2), forms (RO3) and locations (RO4) of protest examining the gendered and intersectional elements of anti-war opposition and theorising individual resistance in authoritarian regimes (R05).

As field research in Russia is currently not possible, the research data will be collected via publicly available reports on individuals' acts of resistance in regional newspapers in Russian, international newspapers in Russian, English, and German, social media channels and interviews with protesters who have fled Russia.

AWRIR will increase our understanding of citizen resistance in authoritarian regimes, contribute to the theoretical understanding of "everyday resistance" and provide a foundation for the development of more effective mechanisms to support democratisation processes in Russia and elsewhere.