Smart war: mobile phone as a civic resilience tool in Ukraine during the Russian war of aggression

The proposed study takes an interdisciplinary approach at the crossroads of civil society and ICT studies – namely, the use of the mobile phone and mobile applications for civic resilience under the conditions of the foreign armed aggression. Taking the Russian war against Ukraine as a case study, we explore how ICT – more specifically, mobile phones and mobile applications, empowers the Ukrainian civil society in its resilience and resistance to the Russian invasion. We depart from the viewpoint of “distributed” ICT, which assumes that “a multitude of applications at citizens’ disposal empowers them with new decision-making capabilities which enable them to act accordingly to their individual goals as they gain “artificial spatial intelligence” (Gath-Morad at al 2017, p. 193). We are thus concerned with the following questions: How did mobile applications contribute to civic resistance to the Russian war in Ukraine? Which effects and side effects did mobile applications have for the consumers? How did the applications influence their users’ behavioral strategies? The proposed research fills an important gap in the literature on the ICT side of civic resistance. So far the published research could be broken down in the following thematic categories: 1) the research on social networks and civic resistance (e.g. the Arab Spring, Russian war against Ukraine) (Boichak 2019, Ronzhyn 2016, Al-Ani et al. 2012, Lotan et al. 2011, Wulf et al. 2013); 2) mobile phones as tools for the military and the veterans during and after the war respectively (Shklovski and Wulf 2018, Horbyk 2022, Gardner 2019, Tkach and Williams 2018, Schejter and Cohen 2013); 3) and ICT in urban emergency, where the focus is on the tool (ICT) rather than on the agent (Gath-Morad at al 2017, Pataro and Trippi 2013). The proposed research belong to none of these, exploring the ICT use by civil society in an unusual role – that of security provider. Moreover, the case study is rather unique due to two factors: paramount role of the digitalization (Fedoriv 2022) and the crucial role of civil society (The Economist 2022) in Ukraine’s resistance. The data has been collected quantitatively, running an online survey comprising 1000 respondents in September 2022, and triangulated by 10 semi-structured interviews with civil society representatives in the course of autumn 2022. The collected data will be presented in the form of descriptive statistics. Inductive coding and social network analysis.