Justifying Civic Activism in Russia and Finland

ABSTRACT

In this article, we present a novel way of researching civil society in a comparative perspective and illustrate it through a detailed analysis of public disputes concerning urban building construction projects in St. Petersburg and Helsinki in 2008–2009. In our illustration, we use justification theory, a line of thought developed by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot in the early 1990s, but until now little used in comparative civil society research. Moreover, we use a variant of Public Justification Analysis, a new method for analysing media data. Our focus is on moral justifications, that is, on arguments which are presented against or in favour of the proposed projects and which draw on shared moral principles. Clear differences were found in referrals to these principles by urban activists in Russia and Finland. We argue that justification theory enables both international comparisons as well as inclusion of specific features of national political cultures.

KEY WORDS:

• Justification theory
• public justification analysis
• civil society
• comparative studies
• activism
• Russia
• Finland

Notes

1. See also Kleman et al. (2010), Krasnopol'skaya et al. (2011), Obshchestvennye dvizheniya v Rossii (2009) and Kulmala (2011).

2. For recent studies of local activism in Russia, see e.g. Lonkila (2011), Zakirova (2008) and Koveneva (2011).

3. By political culture we understand, following Ylä-Anttila (2010), to be ‘an entity consisting of common habits of doing politics, interpretations given to these habits and of institutional arrangements which build on these habits and render them stable’.

4. Uplotnitelnaya zastroika is derived from Russian verb uplotnit (squeeze up). It denotes construction of new buildings in an already built city block or park. Often this overdense building exceeds the capacity of the local infrastructure (water, electricity, etc.) and—as in the case of KP40—results in the deteriorating of the living conditions in the neighbouring blocks of flats.

5. These case descriptions draw from Gladarev and Lonkila (2012).

6. The law of St. Petersburg no 430-85 ‘O zelenykh naszhdeniyakh obshchego pol'sovanie’.