Surviving in adverse environments: A political sociology of non-governmental organisations in autocratic regimes using the example of Russia
Empirical Social Research
Final Report Abstract
In 2012, the Russian parliament issued the so-called “foreign agent law” – or in full: the federal law “On the Regulation of the Activities of Non-profit Organisations Performing the Functions of a Foreign Agent” (121-FZ, 2012). The law is directed towards Russian non-governmental organisations and forces them to register as foreign agents with the Ministry of Justice if they receive foreign funding and conduct political activities. Due to the massive legitimacy effects of the (potential) stigmatization as a foreign agent and the arbitrary, hardly predictable implementation, the new law turned into an existential threat for Russian NGOs almost immediately after it had entered into force. The successive extensions of the law to mass media organizations, bloggers and journalists and, eventually, to any individual irrespective of his or her professional or political activities (since 2020) significantly aggravated the situation. Against this backdrop, the research project pursued a twofold goal: First, it investigated the adaptation strategies and the reaction and interpretative patterns that Russian NGOs and activists used to cope with their increasingly restrictive environments. Second, the project studied the implications of these repressive dynamics and civic responses for the form of autocratic rule that emerges in Russia under Putin. The analysis of the extensive qualitative data that was collected in the project (especially 65 semistructured interviews with individual activists and members of Russian NGOs and German politi- cal foundations working in Russia) suggests three key insights: First, the respondents unanimously perceived the foreign agent law not only as a simple increase of state pressure against civil society. Instead, it is considered a categorically new form of repression, which for the first time openly aims at and sanctions political activity. The stigmatization as a foreign agent not only impedes the access to financial and material resources, but literally withdraws the organizations’ and activists’ right to exist. Secondly, we could identify several strategical elements which the organizations used to avoid the categorization as a “foreign agent”: Formal dissolution, emigration, depoliticization, and commercialization. However, the availability of these strategies and thus the resilience of the organizations not only depended on organizational parameters (such as the type of aims and activities, spatial restrictions, access to the general public). It was also influenced by the ability of the organizations to adequately cope with the tension between local embeddedness and universalistic concepts. Third, it become obvious that the foreign agent laws must be considered a genuinely modern form of autocratic repression. They adapt to functional differentiation by letting societal subsystems superficially unaffected. At the same time, however, the exclusion of NGOs significantly restricts subsystem-specific public spheres and reflection processes. In doing so, this form of repression deprives the Russian society from a crucial instrument of self-observation and self-modernization.
Publications
- (2018): »Aktivistische Attacke. Nawalny, Putin und die Möglichkeit politischer Gegnerschaft in einer modernen Autokratie«, in: Leviathan - Berliner Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft 46 (3), S. 355-378
Moser, Evelyn
(See online at https://doi.org/10.5771/0340-0425-2018-3-355) - (2018): »Russian NGOs and their struggle for legitimacy in the face of the ›Foreign Agents‹ law: Surviving in small ecologies«, in: Europe-Asia Studies 70 (4), S. 591-614
Moser, Evelyn und Anna Skripchenko
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2018.1444145) - (2019): »Evaluating transparency of Moscow’s municipal government« (auf Russisch), Forschungsbericht, ANO Center for Anti-Corruption Research and Initiatives, Transparency International Russia, Moskau
Moroko, E. / Semyonov, N. / Byakov, N. / Akhatova, A. / Borisova, E. / Maltsev, K. / Martychenko, E. / Zaparenko, A. / Skripchenko, A. / Molchanov, M. / Pilipentseva, A. /Khavronenko, M.
- (2019): »Transparency issues of shopping centers: Who is responsible for customers’ safety?«, Forschungsbericht, ANO Center for Anti-Corruption Research and Initiatives, Transparency International Russia, Moskau
Ptichkina A. / Skripchenko, A./ Koryakovskaya V. et al.
