States Shaping Civic Activism: Animal Protection in Poland and Russia Compared

Resilience of social movements depends, in part, on how states respond to them. This paper offers a comparative study of animal rights and welfare activism in Poland and Russia, investigating how different state-society relationships affect the forms activism takes. The aim of the paper is to study how a liberal state, on the one hand, and a semi-authoritarian state, on the other hand, channel civic activism and how the particular forms of channelling at play affect the form and action orientation of two movements, which, in fact, have the same historical origin (the Russian Society for the Protection of Animals, 1865).

More specifically, the analysis aims at identifying the concrete institutional mechanisms by which channelling operates in the two cases, thus explaining some notable similarities between the movement in both countries, such as the focus on depoliticized animal welfare and non-contentious action, but also the differences. Although facing a more repressive context, the contentious radikal flank of the Russian movement is more active than the Polish one.

The paper thus provides a comparative analysis of pacifying, channelling and depoliticizing effects of East European democratic as well as Post-soviet semi-authoritarian regimes on citizens´ initiatives and nongovernmental organizations. The study is based on qualitative interviews with animal rights and animal welfare activists in Poland and Russia (conducted in 2010-12) as well as on information collected from the organizations’ websites, media reports and other secondary sources.