What Is Left to Women’s Protest in Authoritarian Russia? Exploration of Opportunities for Mobilization

With the development and proliferation of new digital technologies, the hashtag movements appear in many different contexts and circumstances. Some of them (like #metoo, #янехотелаумирать, #янебоюсьсказать, #allisfinewithme, and others) have been actively used by the feminist and women’s groups and individuals in the post-Soviet countries such as Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan, etc. To understand the recent successful hashtag mobilizations (in terms of their visibility and recognizability) of feminist and women’s groups and give further explanations of that, there is a primarily need to describe the opportunities available for the feminist and women’s activists, i.e. which opportunities are left for their mobilization nowadays. Drawing from the existing theories about political opportunity, digital and discursive opportunity structures and the analysis of the Russian case, the study makes an empirical contribution to the field by investigating the rarely examined case – the feminist movement in an authoritarian post-Soviet setting. The political opportunities here refer, for example, to rights and threats to organize the offline protests while the digital opportunities relate rather to the digital rights in Russia. The analysis of discursive opportunities uses mainly the online data from social media platforms (posts with hashtags related to the topics on domestic violence, sexual harassment, etc.) that help to understand feminist and women’s access to the digital means of protest as well as the reception of recent mobilizations by society. The presented detailed analysis of opportunity structures for feminist and women’s movements in Russia is important first knowledge for anyone interested in the further analysis of the strategies or the use of the specific social media platforms by social movements in Russia.