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

ABSTRACT

This article offers a comparative study of animal rights and animal welfare activism in Poland and Russia. It investigates how an East European democratic state, on the one hand, and a post-Soviet semiauthoritarian state, on the other hand, steer civic activism and how different state–society relationships affect the forms that activism takes. The analysis aims at identifying the specific institutional mechanisms by which steering operates in the two cases, thus explaining some notable similarities between the movements in the two countries, such as the focus on noncontentious animal welfare issues, 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Animals and society
• collective behavior and social movements
• political sociology

Funding

The research has been funded by the Swedish Research Council (grant nr 421-2010-1706).

Notes

1. Both authors contributed equally to this article; the names are in alphabetical order.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christian Fröhlich

Christian Fröhlich is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the National Research University Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia. He has recently published articles on urban movements and other forms of civic activism in Russia.

Kerstin Jacobsson

Kerstin Jacobsson is a Professor of Sociology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Recent publications include Animal Rights Activism: A Moral-Sociological Perspective on Social Movements (with Jonas Lindblom, Amsterdam University Press, 2016) and several edited volumes on social movements in Central and Eastern Europe.