States Shaping Civic Activism: Animal Rights Activism in Poland and Russia Compared

Resilience of social movements depends, in part, on how states respond to them. This article offers a comparative study of animal rights and animal welfare activism in Poland and Russia, investigating how different state-society relationships affect the forms that activism takes. The article compares how an East European democratic state, on the one hand, and a post-Soviet semi-authoritarian state, on the other hand, channell civic activism, and the effects on the forms and action orientations of the movements of the particular forms of channelling at play. The analysis thus aims at identifying the specific institutional mechanisms by which channelling operates in the two cases, thus explaining some notable similarities between the movements in both countries, such as the focus on depoliticized animal welfare and non-contentious action, but also the differences between them. Although facing a more repressive context, the contentious radical flank of the Russian movement is more active than the Polish one. The study is based on qualitative interviews with animal rights and animal welfare activists in Poland and Russia carried out in 2010-13 as well as on information collected from the organizations’ websites, media reports and secondary sources.