“Too immature for politics?” Political agency in the eyes of Russian adolescent protesters, 2011–20

Abstract

This paper bridges empirical research on children’s political participation and theoretical debates on the concept of agency in Childhood studies. It takes insights from the internal criticism of the essentialist conception of agency in Childhood studies and develops it further. Based on an analysis of in-depth interviews with adolescent participants of anti-regime protests in two periods of recent Russian history—i.e., 2011–13 and 2017–20—it compares how these two cohorts of politically active children constructed their political agency. It suggests that the authoritarian and depoliticized context of Russian society affects the construction of agency by child activists in ways we do not see in Western democracies. It thus challenges the main concepts of agency in Childhood studies, including the “critical” ones.

«Потому Что Я Не Могу Сидеть На Месте»: Анализ Агентности Современной Российской Молодежи На Примере Крафтовых Предпринимателей Санкт-Петербурга

“…Также в классических молодежных исследованиях распространена точка зрения, что агентностью обладает прежде всего та молодежь, которая критически и протестно настроена против власти социальных структур и пытается изменить социальный порядок, преодолевая собственную исключенность и маргинализированность, обретая право голоса и участия [Erpyleva, 2023]. При этом другая, непротестная молодежь рассматривается как менее агентная, пассивная, подчиняющаяся влиянию структур и других акторов [Coffey, Farrugia, 2014].…”

Editorial: Foresight for democratising Russia

“…By this illustration, he even needs not address the long-contested (Mellish, 2023) hypothesis of Russian servility (Rancour-Laferriere, 1995;Custine, 1843). However, the younger generation often did take to the streets (Erpyleva, 2023), including during the 2012 Bolotnya protests (Khlevnyuk, 2023;Snyder, 2018Snyder, , 2021 -but this bravery was overruled, seemingly because it did not echo broader consent and result in wider upheavals. In such self-reassured mono-paradigmatic climate, incapable of self-correction, "the war is an extreme example of the highly costly mistakes to which decision-making in this type of regime is prone" (Libman, 2023).…”