Browsing by Author "Adgamova, Kamilla"

In recent years the world has experienced an unprecedented rise of social movements in both democratic and authoritarian states, starting from Spanish Indignados and Occupy Wall Street in the United States to Arab Spring movement for democratization, rights defence movement Wei Tu An in China, or Russian protests for fair elections and democratization of political system in 2011-2012. Despite various goals pursued by these and other similar social movements, locations and means of achieving these goals, all of them shared common features, such as loose horizontal network structure of informal nature, grassroots civic engagement, and extensive use ICT technologies and new media. This new forms of civic engagement, whether successful or not in pursuing their goals, present an interesting case of how technological advancements and other factors affect the development of civil society and the way grassroots political participation is being formed. This work intends to explore theoretical implications for new ways of civic engagement by reviewing it in the perspective of civil society development and placing it in the framework of new social movement theory and organizational theory of network society. Another important aspect that is being explored is the question of how the development of ICT technologies affects the nature of civic engagement in both authoritarian and democratic states. The argument developed in this thesis stipulates that the ICT and the effects of network society contribute to development of new, untraditional forms of political participation. This new forms of civic engagement function on a network basis, feature predominantly grassroots nature and have loose informal structure of horizontal networks. The proposed hypothesis is supported by a descriptive case-study of online-based anticorruption project Rospil in Russia, which includes analysis of how network society features are intertwined in the civil society formations of modern Russia and how it creates prerequisites for an appearance of new forms of civic engagement, despite the growing authoritarian nature of its political regime.