From national identity to state legitimacy: Mobilizing digitally networked publics in eastern Ukraine

Introduction

Since the late 1990s, activists have adopted digital technologies into their repertoire of contentious action (McAdam et al., 2001). A strand of social movement scholarship has focused on the infrastructural role of social media in facilitating protests and revolutions (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012; Juris, 2012; Margetts et al., 2015; Tufekci, 2017; Wolfson, 2014). Social media enable activists to bypass heavy-handed state action, circumventing corporate gatekeepers or countering state efforts to disrupt opposition movements. In many instances, social media were central to the symbolic work happening within movements due to their ability to mobilize broad and diverse publics around a shared identity and group solidarity (Lokot, 2018; Milan, 2013, 2015). In this article, we critically interrogate the scale and boundaries of this digitally mediated mobilization. How do online activist communities mobilize local publics around an issue?

In this study, we use social movement literature and studies of peace and conflict to foreground the role of platform-mediated communication and narratives in creating (or, rather, recreating) a national identity. We argue that, by affording activists with the possibility of public-yet-anonymous interactions, social media may become instrumental in facilitating efforts to support state legitimacy during a violent conflict. Investigating the case of Mariupol, Ukraine, where a small group of citizens employed social media to support and legitimize the Ukrainian state among the city population, we illuminate the use of affordances provided by digital media to construct a national identity among the networked publics. During the first six months of the military conflict that started in 2014, thousands of people in Mariupol were mobilized around a shared political identity in support of the state in times when the level of state legitimacy hit a historical low.

Although technology can hardly be considered culturally and politically neutral (Pacey, 1983), there is nothing intrinsic to social media that turns them into ‘infrastructures of resistance’ to state and other powerful actors (Milan, 2015), but prevents them from becoming infrastructures for generating support for institutions that might be fragile or threatened. Yet, there is a dearth of evidence of social media being used for such support outside of formal political channels (Snow et al., 2007). In this study, we present a collection of such evidence to highlight social media’s capacity to be used by collective agents to generate support for, rather than dissent from, the state. Our theoretical contribution builds on the concept of collective identity, demonstrating how its creation extends from generating group solidarity to bolstering state legitimacy in a period of political instability. Contributing to the strand of scholarship that explores the role of mediated communication in contentious politics (e.g. Milan, 2015; Tufekci, 2017), we use this empirical case from 2014 to investigate a range of platform-mediated practices aimed at constructing a national identity in a fragile state. We argue that local political actors can capitalize on social media affordances to promote beleaguered state power by strengthening the symbolic component of state legitimacy.

The study consists of five parts: part 1 presents a review of peace and conflict literature to understand the role of state legitimacy in fragile states; part 2 examines existing scholarship about the use of social media in mobilizing publics around a group identity; part 3 provides context on state legitimacy and national identity in Eastern Ukraine prior to the conflict; part 4 analyzes platform-mediated activism in Mariupol and illuminates the use of social media for the formation of national identity; and, finally, part 5 discusses theoretical implications, arguing that activists strategically benefit from the affordances of social media as they work to bolster state legitimacy during a violent conflict.

Fragile states, legitimacy and national identity

Legitimate state authority is an essential component of political stability in fragile states across the world (Higashi, 2015; Lake, 2010; Tellidis and Kappler, 2016; Themnér and Ohlson, 2014). In this context, state legitimacy comprises reciprocal approval and accountability between the state and its citizens. Peace and stability are highly contingent on society’s perception of the political system, constructed through repeated interactions among the state and its constituents (Krampe, 2016). This subsection grounds our theoretical approach to the relationship between national identity and state legitimacy, whereby publics can be mobilized around national identity to prevent the spread of a violent conflict in their communities.

There are two sources of state legitimacy: input legitimacy, which stems from procedural fairness of state institutions, and output legitimacy, based on citizens’ evaluations of substantive effectiveness of state authorities and institutions in place (Higashi, 2015). This highlights the twofold role civil society actors play in a fragile state: first, in advocating for procedural fairness and ensuring the accountability of the government (the link between civil society and the state), and second, by influencing public opinion regarding trust and the effectiveness of public institutions (the link between civil society and the public). As such, both scenarios present ample opportunities for social media engagement on the part of civil society.

Crucially, though, state legitimacy also stems from symbolic sources, especially the political identity of citizens of the state. Collective identity may become a pillar of legitimate state authority even in the absence of perceived fairness and effectiveness. Scholarship has shown that political actors use symbols for a range of purposes, including supporting the political communities to which they belong (Billig, 1995; Fox and Miller-Idriss, 2008; Kong and Yeoh, 1997). Identity can thus become a symbolic source of state legitimacy, giving citizens a sense of a political community represented by the state.

In wartime, input legitimacy can provide citizens with a sense that their views matter and that the state is responsive to their interests despite conflicting commitments. Output legitimacy, on the other hand, provides a crucial rationale for citizens to believe that the state is worth improving and defending when threatened. In the context of a military conflict, the identity affiliated with the political community that the state claims becomes a particularly important way for citizens to support the state: while citizens may not be able to supplement the input and output components of legitimacy during conflict, they can rally around the symbolic component as a way of responding to threat. As we demonstrate below, if a fragile state lacks both input and output legitimacy, citizens may mobilize around their national identity, supplementing the state’s legitimacy despite it failing to fulfill expected functions.

National identity incorporates a range of strategic components that define self-perceptions of the group in question: language, culture and traditions, history, territory, citizenship and ideology (Korostelina, 2014). It may also emerge in juxtaposition to outgroups, which includes a history of relationships with other nations, the reverberated identity (‘this is who we are not’), and an outgroup image, which reflects attitudes and stereotypes about other groups (Korostelina, 2014). During crises, prominent episodes of conflict in the nation’s history can become powerful aspects of national identity. If sufficiently strong, national identity can also encourage citizens to undertake risky behaviour to defend contested state authority against external and internal threats (Smith, 2003; Tufekci, 2017). Members of the political community engage in activities that reinforce group solidarity and bolster a sense of national identity: placing national symbols like the flag on car bumpers, clothing, and in public spaces; championing existing national rituals (such as holiday celebrations or sporting events) or creating new rituals; and decrying those who don’t adequately express the national identity as giving aid to the enemy (Billig, 1995; Bonikowski, 2016; Bonikowski and DiMaggio, 2016; Fox and Miller-Idriss, 2008; Koch, 2013; Kolstø, 2006; Kong and Yeoh, 1997).

In this study, we examine an instance of a small group of citizens who mobilized the population of Mariupol, Ukraine to resist foreign-backed separatists. Conceptualizing social media as a ‘networked public’ (Baym and boyd, 2012), we next draw upon social movements literature to explain how social media can be used to facilitate state legitimacy in the face of an existential threat.

Mediated narratives in contentious politics

Digital media have reconfigured the temporal and spatial dimensions of the contemporary public sphere (Baker, 2011; Baym and boyd, 2012; Margetts et al., 2015; Papacharissi, 2010). The growing popularity of social networking websites, combined with the proliferation of mobile devices and applications to access them, created conditions for the emergence of ‘networked publics’ – networks of people who strategically use digital technology to propagate their ideas among wider audiences (Baym and boyd, 2012). Blurring the boundary between public and private, author and audience, in-person and virtual, personal and mass communication, the web sphere became a place for mediated communication among citizen networks. Networked publics are constituted by the emergent social arrangements that fluctuate between visibility and obscurity – which means that they can be used for overt as well as covert organizing and activism.

The idea that state legitimacy can be shaped through public media is not new. Social media do not provide radically new means for identity construction – historical records indicate that printed media were astutely used in ancient Rome to enable a shift from tribal identities to a single national identity across a vast and scattered geographic area (Anderson, 2006). Digital media expand opportunities for identity formation not due to their publicness per se, but due to unprecedented scale of this publicness, afforded by the wide adoption of digital technologies. This feature turns digital technologies into a double-edged sword for state legitimacy – platform-mediated interactions may help activists cultivate a common identity in order to define themselves in juxtaposition to the other groups and regimes, and transform themselves into collective agents by producing a strategic narrative of resistance to violence and injustice (Milan, 2013). As our case below demonstrates, the common identity built around this strategic narrative may be employed to either undermine or bolster state legitimacy.

In conventional scenarios, state legitimacy often ends up challenged by platform-mediated groups that use social media in contentious politics (Margetts et al., 2015; Rahimi, 2011). Dozens of social movements across the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and the Americas have used social media for mobilization, helping activists to channel frustration and express discontent with regressive policies and oppressive regimes (Agarwal et al., 2014; Lawson, 2015; Margetts et al., 2015; Milkman et al., 2013; Schneider, 2013; Tufekci, 2017). Importantly, while some of the popular pro-democracy movements (for example, the Euromaidan in Ukraine and the January 25 Revolution in Egypt) were at least partially successful in reaching their political goals of changing the political leadership of their countries, they did so at the detriment of state legitimacy, destabilizing power structures and leading to political violence (as in the case with Egypt and Syria (Margetts et al., 2015)).

In this study, we turn our attention to the features of the mediated environment that enable and structure communication within the networked publics. While cultural context undoubtedly plays a role in defining the risks and benefits of political mobilization in the digital age (Schock, 2003; Tufekci, 2017), so do the architecture and affordances of digital platforms – perceived features of social media that facilitate a certain mode of engagement, providing activists with a range of possibilities for action (Bucher and Helmond, 2018; Lokot, 2018). The interactive character of digitally-networked engagement transforms audiences into collective agents by blurring the distinction between public and private communication in networked publics (Baym and boyd, 2012). Importantly, platform-mediated activism expands opportunities for citizens to play roles traditionally fulfilled by governments. For example, social media were used for launching online donation campaigns to benefit victims of natural disasters such as Hurricane Harvey in the United States in 2017 (Erb, 2017).

Social media create a ‘virtual stage’ – technologically enabled communicative spaces which provide opportunities for collective storytelling, fostering the development of communities of action (Fayard, 2013; Riessman, 1993; Shklovski and Valtysson, 2012). As Zizi Papacharissi (2016: 5) asserts, ‘technologies network us but it is narratives that connect us to each other, making us feel close to some and distancing us from others’. In addition to connecting individuals to each other, narratives also serve to bridge individual experiences to a larger historical and sociopolitical context, constructing and interpreting the meaning of the events that take place in a person’s lifeworld (Mills, 1961). Social media participants may therefore construct and circulate personalized narratives of political events, which serve to mobilize networked publics around group solidarity (Lokot, 2018) – a key element of national identity. This solidarity may be based on civic or ethnic categories (e.g. ‘people of Ukraine’ vs ‘ethnic Ukrainians’), and rest on beliefs and myths from the past, or a common vision of a future. A narrative that is widely circulated and adopted among many individuals in a political space of a state becomes the national narrative, a cornerstone of national identity formation (Korostelina, 2014). As we proceed to demonstrate in this study, social media may afford co-creation of the national narrative by the publics in the conditions of crisis.

A structural–functional model highlights two main functions of a national narrative: the development of national identity and its meaning, and the legitimization of state power (Korostelina, 2014). This model highlights the importance of studying narratives in understanding the dialectic relationship between national identity and state legitimacy. We argue that, in the times of threat and uncertainty, networked publics can engage in national identity formation, which may be strategically employed to legitimize and bolster state authority. Next, we ground these claims in the broader political, social, and cultural context that shaped the emergence of platform-mediated collective actors in Mariupol, Ukraine.

State legitimacy and national identity in eastern Ukraine

How can citizens use social media to construct national identity, legitimizing a fragile state and its actions in the wartime? This section investigates the first year (2014–2015) of the ongoing military conflict in eastern Ukraine. Drawing upon evidence from Mariupol, a city in Donetsk oblast with a population of more than 500,000, we examine how local actors articulated and legitimated their political goals online despite substantial risks posed by forces opposed to the Ukrainian state. We start by analyzing the historical and cultural context in which national identity construction took place, and identify the recurring themes used by Ukrainian activists to legitimize the actions of the Ukrainian state in the military conflict with Russian-backed separatist groups. We argue that residents of Mariupol strategically engaged in digitally-mediated identity building, resisting involvement in a military conflict while increasing support for the Ukrainian state. We conclude with a discussion highlighting the specific social media affordances utilized by the activists.

The Constitution of Ukraine (1996) defines the Ukrainian people, rather than ethnic Ukrainians, as the source of sovereign power. Affirming a Ukrainian national identity as distinct from Russia served in the interests of political elites, for whom dissociation from Russia was a strategic expedience – an attempt to consolidate state power and assert sovereignty for a new nation (Yekelchyk, 2015). Yet, apart from this civic definition, the efforts to promote a united national identity in Ukraine since its independence in 1991 were scarce and inconclusive (Korostelina, 2014). Language gradually became a contentious issue: while the majority of the Ukrainian public associated Ukrainian language with state-building and democratic values, others met it with contempt (Korostelina, 2014; Yekelchyk, 2015). Following the first tumultuous decade of Ukraine’s independence, older generations in the industrialized southeastern parts of the country were becoming increasingly nostalgic for Soviet paternalism – as we demonstrate below, this sentiment had been aptly exploited to serve Russian interests in 2014.

In November 2013, thousands of Ukrainians in many cities mobilized to protest then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision not to sign the Association Agreement with the European Union – these were the Maidan protests that turned violent after the state’s heavy-handed attempt to suppress them (Onuch, 2015; Wilson, 2014). As studies show, the subsequent chain of events known as the Revolution of Dignity, which led to the ousting of the President and establishing a provisional government in Kyiv, changed public attitudes toward Ukrainian statehood: protest participants admitted experiencing a greater pride in being Ukrainian, a sense of unity with other Ukrainians regardless of the language they spoke, and a stronger attachment to national symbols that were all attributed to the Maidan (Kulyk, 2016; Onuch, 2015). An old greeting used by the Ukrainian nationalist underground in 1930–1940, ‘Slava Ukraini!’ (‘Glory to Ukraine’), came to symbolize the resistance to foreign claims to Ukrainian territory and a tribute to the heroes who died fighting for the cause (known as the ‘Heavenly Hundred’ – Yekelchyk, 2015).

Russian state-controlled media portrayed the Maidan events from a different angle, as ‘a coup by Ukrainian neo-Nazis bent on eradicating Russian culture in Ukraine’ (Yekelchyk, 2015, p. 104). This resurgence and reinvention of Ukrainian national identity that distinguished it from Russia became a formal reason for a military intervention on the part of Russia, in an alleged attempt to protect the Russian speakers of Ukraine from discrimination. On 27–28 February 2014, Crimea was annexed by the unidentified forces belonging to the Russian army; by the end of March, there was a 40,000 to 50,000-strong Russian military buildup on Ukraine’s eastern border (Wilson, 2014). Once again, promoting a Ukrainian national identity became a strategy for those resisting separatism. As in 1991, Ukrainian national identity became a cornerstone of state legitimacy that could help mobilize support for the Ukrainian state and foster solidarity in the face of a military conflict.

Mariupol’s geopolitical location turned it into the frontline of the military conflict since early 2014. Its capture would allow the Russian army to build a land corridor between the occupied Donetsk and Luhansk territories and the annexed Crimea (Center for European Policy Analysis, 2015). The political apathy of its predominantly Russian-speaking population made Mariupol a viable candidate to join the separatist ranks of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). Yet, the separatist military campaign that started in the region in spring 2014 was never complete due to unprecedented resistance by the local population.

On 6 April 2014, the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) commenced its existence, which fueled tensions between the Ukrainian Mariupol residents and the Russian-backed separatist groups. The local authorities’ slow response to separatist networks allowed the latter to occupy the city on 13 April 2014. For two months, until 13 June 2014, the government buildings in Mariupol were held by the rebel separatist groups of the DPR. On 13 June, after a long battle that involved military and civilian casualties, the city was recaptured in a special forces operation by the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Afterwards, thousands of Mariupol residents marched through the streets, waving national banners to celebrate their city’s liberation. Despite the continued heavy fighting in the surrounding areas, citizens of the second largest city in Donetsk oblast had maintained a defiant stance in supporting the Ukrainian state, using social media to produce a counter-narrative to separatism and mobilize the local population around helping the Ukrainian army counteract an impending threat. This support for the Ukrainian state and opposition to pro-Russian separatism came as a surprise, given the region’s political history and demographics.

Home to two large steel manufacturers (Ilyich Iron and Steel Works and Azovstal), Mariupol had been a stronghold of the pro-Russian Party of Regions. Residents of the city exhibited comparatively low levels of political engagement (National Democratic Institute, 2015; Wilson, 2014): in the five years preceding the 2014 events, the only instance of political mobilization in Mariupol was in 2012, when thousands of city residents were protesting against the ongoing environmental contamination by the metal processing plants (Ukrainian Pravda, 2013; Wilson, 2014 ). Prior to the beginning of the military conflict in 2014, the city was home to only 30 registered non-governmental organizations, most of them catering to disadvantaged population groups (special needs children and adults, HIV patients, World War II veterans, and worker’s unions (Mariupol City Council, 2014). These statistics portray Mariupol residents as reserved and generally indifferent toward civic activism, which presented difficulties in mobilizing them to support secession by joining the Donetsk People’s Republic.

According to the country’s most recent population census, 48.7 percent of Mariupolians self-identified as ethnic Ukrainians, closely followed by 44.4 percent of ethnic Russians, and the remaining 7 percent belonging to other ethnic minorities (Ukrainian Census by Regions, 2001). As a longstanding industrial center, the region has been known as a multicultural melting pot, reluctant to support a particular view of a national identity (Wilson, 2014). Throughout 2000–2010, the population of Mariupol was 89.5 percent russophone, which was the highest proportion of Russian speakers in Donetsk oblast (Ukrainian Census by Regions, 2001; Wilson, 2014). A nationwide survey administered by the International Foundation for Electoral Systems in 2014 found the perception of the Ukrainian state in the Donbas area to represent significantly different trends from the rest of Ukraine (Key Findings – IFES September 2014 Survey in Ukraine, 2014). Only 16 percent of the population of Donbas believed the country was headed in the right direction, compared to a national average of 36 percent. At the same time, Donbas residents were dramatically less concerned about the possibility of the war with Russia than was the population of Ukraine overall (67% vs 15%). The majority (51%) of Donbas residents expressed a lack of confidence in the President, Parliament, and the governmental institutions, and 54 percent lacked confidence in the Ukrainian military. These statistics demonstrate that, in 2014, the Ukrainian state was facing a blatant lack of legitimacy in the southeast, which created favorable conditions for externally-backed separatism.

One other factor allowed for the rise of militant separatism in eastern Ukraine: up to 2014, the Ukrainian east had no access to independent mass media (Wilson, 2014). Mariupol had no local radio stations, and the only local TV station was rebroadcasting a Russian TV channel due to the lack of production capacities (‘Ministry of Information Policy of Ukraine’, 2014). Prior to 2014, Russian social networking sites had the largest audience among the Ukrainian users – according to an annual Yandex report, 27 million Ukrainians had a VK account (vkontakte), followed by 11 million that were registered with Odnoklassniki, another Russian social network (Yandex, 2014). Facebook had 3.2 million users, most of whom resided in large urban areas such as Kyiv, Lviv, Kharkiv, and Odesa (Kostiuchenko, 2014). The few available TV and radio channels were national corporate-owned media, which either did not cover the war, expressed anti-Ukrainian sentiment, or rebroadcast Russian television. The combination of these factors (lack of local broadcasting plus access to a narrow pool of pro-Russian media) contributed to a lack of state legitimacy across the Donbas region, particularly in the largest cities of Donetsk and Mariupol. Given this context of low levels of Ukrainian state legitimacy in eastern Ukraine, how were the Mariupolians able to encourage resistance to Russian-backed separatism in their region?

‘Mariupol is Ukraine’: Social media and the construction of a national narrative

Evidence presented in this section comes from an in-depth semi-structured interview conducted in August 2016 with a prominent local activist who was a key figure in mobilizing the Mariupol public against Russian-backed separatism in 2014. Initially part of the first author’s dissertation research, the interview lasted 112 minutes and was conducted in Ukrainian language via Skype. The informant narrated their activism and indicated two digital sources of information (public Facebook groups) where the community chronicled their engagement. To ensure long-term accessibility of these textual and visual materials, we have created digital copies of posts shared in the two groups indicated by the interview participant. To protect the group members’ privacy, in this study we refer to these groups as Group 1 and Group 2. Group 1 was the core group through which organizing took place – at the time of data collection (August 2017), it had 6,571 members and a large volume of posts. Group 2 was created six months after Group 1, in September 2014, with an explicit focus of informing the city residents about current events and supporting the Ukrainian army troops stationed outside Mariupol. It was organized as an activist-run public page and was followed by 1,850 Facebook users at the time of data collection. The data in this section is complemented by information from Mariupol 2014 (Ivan Bohdan, 2016), a memoir written by a Mariupol resident who was a retired Ukrainian Security Service officer, providing a detailed, day-by-day account of the local resistance against the Russian occupation. Notably, this memoir has been published under a pseudonym in Russian language – the Mariupol resident’s native tongue.

The interview has been transcribed and translated into English by one of the authors who is a native speaker of the language. The Facebook posts were analyzed in the original language to complement the personal narrative presented by the informant. In total, 8,901 posts from Group 1 and 987 posts from Group 2 were analyzed, which represents the whole population of posts shared between March 2014 and August 2015. The memoir written by a Mariupol resident has been translated from Russian into English, and then excerpts were used to provide additional insight and perspective into how residents of the city responded to separatist activity. Comparing and contrasting narratives across three sources – an interview, social media, and a memoir – we reconstructed the timeline of events that took place between March 2014 and August 2015, to better understand the social and political context underpinning our study. In light of the national narrative being central to both legitimizing the state and the construction of national identity, we analyzed the textual and digital first-person accounts of the events in Mariupol as stories (Riessman, 1993). Scholars highlight the significance of individual narratives in connecting the speakers in communities of action (Papacharissi, 2016; Riessman, 1993). Approaching narratives as performances of identity, we focused our inquiry on how social media affordances were strategically utilized to manifest different aspects of national identity.

A study by the International Foundation on Electoral Systems asserts that, due to their greater accessibility, Ukrainians were increasingly using social media to ‘build cohorts around people with like-minded opinion’ (Youth Engagement: Social Media’s Impact in Ukraine, 2015). As a wave of protests known as the Euromaidan swept across the country in the winter of 2014, demanding that the Ukrainian President follow through on his commitment to pursue closer ties with the European Union, a small cohort of about 20 activists started organizing demonstrations in one of the Mariupol city squares (Ivan Bohdan, 2016). These demonstrations of solidarity with the Euromaidan protesters were largely ignored by the local population; occasionally, representatives of the political minority in the region (forces outside the majority Party of Regions) joined the protesters to get media attention and show solidarity. As a Mariupol resident recalls:

If one were to describe those protests, one would write about a small group of people, who would demonstrate against corruption, propagating the rule of law, changing the predatory policies of then-president Yanukovych and his team, improving social security for the Ukrainian citizens, etc. … there was nothing new about their demands … But these activists’ statements were … very firm, while at the same time laden with emotion … People that came to those demonstrations felt the freedom and ability to speak in front of friendly faces about the problems they were facing and their possible solutions. (Ivan Bohdan, 2016: ch. 1)

In spring 2014, a few Mariupol residents adopted Facebook to communicate their support for the Ukrainian state and search for like-minded individuals in the city. That was the beginning of the emergence of a social arrangement that fluctuated between visibility and obscurity (Baym and boyd, 2012), where, on the one hand, the emergent actors made themselves visible through posting information on public pages and walls, but on the other, social media affordances allowed these individuals to keep their identities private, minimizing possible personal risks, and opened a channel for private communication between themselves. The activists replaced their avatars with Ukrainian flags and other national symbols and changed their usernames to pseudonyms, reminding their neighbors of their national identity, which implicitly bolstered the symbolic component of Ukrainian legitimacy in Mariupol.

The activists used publicness afforded by Facebook to coordinate their campaigns and invite potential supporters to their rallies. Korostelina (2014) asserts that characteristics of fellow citizens are an important component of national identity, and activists were operating a set of criteria for including fellow Mariupol citizens in their networks. As an activist explained:

It was a deliberate process – we were consciously looking for people who we could cooperate with. For instance, a friend of mine … had more time on his hands, so he browsed around on Facebook looking for users who articulated a similar position to ours, and connected all of us together. Following those initial searches, we created a public group called [Group 1]. (interview excerpt, 2016)

Due to the overwhelmingly passive political views across the region, separatism and willingness to be part of Russia had not been part of the local political discourse prior to the events of 2014 (interview excerpt, 2016; see also Wilson, 2014). The annexation of Crimea in February 2014 and the occupation of significant parts of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts made local residents wary of discussing their political views in public (interview excerpt, 2016). Understanding that the political future of Mariupol was uncertain, citizens were reluctant to demonstrate allegiance to any state, whether Ukraine, Russia, or the separatist Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), which signified a lack of a coherent national ideology within the group. As a city resident reflected, during those months:

The cities in eastern Ukraine were anxiously waiting to meet the [Ukrainian] ‘fascists’ coming to destroy, kill, and enslave them. It would be fair to admit that most of the local population lived in a constant state of fear … In fact, the only thing that made the two groups [those who were pro-Ukraine and those who were pro-Russia] different was a disparate interpretation of the state which they both lived in, diverging stories of heroic deeds, histories and traditions that they passed from generation to generation … ‘We’re here to honor the memory of our grandfathers who defeated fascism’ – could be commonly heard among the pro-Russian groups. (Ivan Bohdan, 2016: ch. 4)

As seen from this excerpt, the ‘disparate interpretation of the state’ and the ‘diverging stories of heroic deeds’ pointed to the existence of two distinct national narratives. Fascism allegations played an important role in both narratives. For the Ukrainian activists, non-recognition of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity by Russia was perceived as an act of fascism directed at the local population. At the same time, Russian actors were using the ‘fascist/anti-fascist’ narrative to popularize pro-Russian sentiment by presenting an alternative interpretation of historical events of the past century, particularly by claiming the legacy of Russian victory over fascism in the ‘Great Patriotic War’, a Soviet interpretation of World War II. As Wilson contends, Nazism was condemned for posing an existential threat to Russia, not for its anti-humanist ideological convictions – for which reason, the ‘Great Patriotic War’ in Russian history dates back to 1941 and not 1939 (Wilson, 2014). The narrative labeling the Ukrainian government as the ‘fascist junta’ was embedded within this longstanding rhetorical tradition: depicting the newly elected pro-Western Ukrainian government as fascist was a move to equate that government with Nazi Germany. This parallel thus depicted Ukrainian national identity as an existential threat to all ethnic Russians. As this facet of the conflict demonstrates, both Ukrainian and Russian actors used social media in attempts to control the framing of the conflict.

Social media were thus important in constructing a narrative to frame the military conflict and visualize the image of the enemy (Makhortykh and Sydorova, 2017). The Ukrainian activists used their Facebook accounts to push back against fascist allegations, rearticulating the meaning of fascism by exposing the identities of the alleged separatists, who were in fact Russian citizens with a history of membership in far-right groups (Wilson, 2014). A series of photographs circulated by a Group 1 member marked an effort to represent an ‘outgroup image’ (Korostelina, 2014) of the pro-Russian demonstrators in Mariupol and to undermine the Russian narrative about who were the fascists and who were the anti-fascists. These photographs depict a so-called ‘political tourist’, who, despite pretending to be a local pro-Russian protester, turned out to be a St. Petersburg resident. In one of the photos, this individual is seen protesting in the streets of Mariupol, holding a sign that asks for deployment of Russian troops in Ukraine, allegedly to protect the Russian-speaking population from violence and extermination by the Ukrainian ‘fascists’. Yet, the other photos show this individual proudly displaying swastika tattoos on his chest and arms, revealing his affinity to the Nazi ideology. Outgroup images articulate the outer boundaries of a national identity – by juxtaposing the outgroup to the nation, they illustrate and reinforce the distinction between ‘us’ and ‘them’. For the Ukrainian activists, circulating this and the other outgroup images on social media was a way of saying, ‘we are not the fascists they purport us to be.’ This move reframed the meaning of the ‘fascist/anti-fascist’ narrative – once disassociated from fascism, the Ukrainian identity no longer represented a threat to ethnic Russians.

Networked publicness was integral in connecting the Ukrainian activists, who used Facebook for sharing each other’s posts and coordinating in-person actions. As one activist reported, ‘Facebook was crucial as it allowed us to find and connect with each other. That was the reason why I made my statuses and comments public – so that other users stayed informed of the recent developments in our city’ (interview excerpt, 2016).

The activists also monitored social media users and groups from other eastern Ukrainian cities, which helped them identify patterns of separatist activity that they could expect to see in Mariupol:

It was Facebook that helped us keep track of the situation in other cities – we knew, for instance, that Kharkiv had their own ‘tourists’ from Belgorod [Russia], Donetsk had ‘tourists’ from Taganrog [Russia], so we could definitely see the pattern and know that we have the same thing happening in our city, and we knew for sure it was orchestrated from the outside.

Thus, when unidentified young men started appearing in the city center, waving Russian flags and expressing radical pro-Russian views, the activists knew Mariupol was following the pattern of neighboring Donetsk. The men, who were bussed from Rostov-on-Don (Russia), spoke in an unfamiliar accent, had difficulty using local currency, frequently got lost, and asked for the location of landmarks well known to the local population.

Within a few days after the ‘political tourists’ appeared, the city was filled with Russian flags, which generated support among certain vulnerable populations (Ivan Bohdan, 2016). Given the city’s high unemployment rate, a number of local residents were homeless or suffered from alcohol dependency. The ‘tourists’ started mobilizing these populations by offering free drinks and small cash compensations in exchange for their participation in a pro-Russian demonstration. Given the outcomes in Donetsk and Luhansk oblast, the local Mariupol government and the police forces were reluctant to intervene with the pro-Russian groups; nor did the Ukrainian government attempt to act in the situation. Despite this government inaction, activists articulated a Ukrainian identity to set themselves apart from the ‘fascist’ accusations, juxtaposing the pro-Russian ‘patriots’ to the Ukrainian ‘fascists’. Such comparison was the essence of the activists’ attempt to solidify a national identity in opposition to outgroups.

Driven by an attempt to produce a counter-narrative to the pro-Russian ‘anti-fascist’ framing, Ukrainian Facebook users mobilized their personal online networks for daily offline flash-mobs to demonstrate resistance to the Russian occupation. The groups would swiftly gather in public spaces, wave national flags and chant patriotic mottos (such as, ‘Glory to Ukraine – Glory to Heroes’), and quickly dissipate into the crowd to prevent themselves from being caught by the police. The activists also participated in so-called ‘symbolic wars’: every night, they would go out and paint public spaces in the colors of the Ukrainian flag: lampposts, benches, and fences were painted blue and yellow to demonstrate that the local population supported the Ukrainian state. In one example, a Group 1 activist posted a photo of a sign reading ‘MARIUPOL’ that was painted in the colours of the Ukrainian flag. This was done to reinforce the symbolic component of national identity, legitimizing the Ukrainian state and its territory through the use of national symbols.

Shortly thereafter, these symbols of the state were being painted over with the Russian tricolor and the flags of the DPR. These ‘symbolic wars’ continued on a daily basis for a few months, occasionally followed by severe beatings of the Ukrainian activists (many of whom were university students). Nonetheless, flash-mobs and the Ukrainian national symbols were a powerful means to make the Ukrainian stance visible to the local population, and most of these activities were organized through Facebook (interview excerpt, 2016).

The Russian intervention in the east of Ukraine caused increasing distrust of Russian-owned media (including public broadcasting as well as online media) among the Ukrainian citizens. In July 2014, the Security Service of Ukraine issued a memorandum on internet safety, advising all Ukrainian citizens, especially those who were public servants, to delete their online accounts on Russian-owned platforms. This happened in response to newly adopted anti-terrorist legislation in Russia that allowed the Russian Federal Security Service to access all personal data of account holders, which could compromise national security interests of Ukraine given the war in the East (‘Espresso.tv’, 2014). For the first time, Vkontakte, a Russian social media platform that was long popular with Ukrainians, saw a sharp decline in membership, as an increasing number of Ukrainian users were switching to Facebook. By 2016, the number of Ukrainian Facebook users grew by 125 percent in comparison with 2014, reaching 7.2 million (Dmytrenko, 2016). At this critical moment of conflict, when activists began using Facebook to mobilize and demonstrate support for Ukraine and opposition to separatism, more and more of their neighbors began to use their chosen social media platform to stay up to date with the newest developments in the city. As Facebook became more commonly used, activists’ posts reached larger audiences of Mariupol residents.

The flight of Ukrainian citizens from the Russian-owned media was accompanied by makeshift advocacy campaigns, such as one calling upon Mariupol residents to ‘consider your safety’ and ‘Take care of yourself, your friends, and your country’ by deleting all personal accounts on Russian servers and withdrawing all money from Russian-owned banks. As an activist explained, ‘I made a conscious decision to abandon my Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki [Russian social media] accounts as I understood they were unsafe venues for information exchange’ (interview excerpt, 2016). The activists also shared memes that equated buying Russian goods with paying to kill Ukrainian soldiers. ‘Boycott Russia’ – said one of the memes shared on the wall of Group 1. Other memes called for economic patriotism, encouraging Mariupolians to ‘help Ukraine bloom’ by buying Ukrainian goods. Images were an important feature that helped activists solidify their narrative of resistance (Seo and Ebrahim, 2016), legitimizing state power by articulating a specific set of national values in the time of conflict.

In the absence of local news sources and in the face of harsh anti-Ukrainian propaganda on corporate-owned media, the Ukrainian activists used their Facebook accounts to spread messages of reassurance to their fellow citizens. As one of the activists recalls:

During those times, we could hear a lot of rhetoric like, ‘Ukraine does not care about us’, ‘There is nobody to protect us’, and so on, and I used Facebook to inform those people it was not true. Of course, we petitioned the official Ukrainian institutions to intervene, but they did not react to our pleas. So we learned it the hard way that we had only ourselves to rely on. (interview excerpt, 2016)

During the 3-month occupation period, Group 1 went underground (by changing the group settings to private), in order to continue its state-legitimizing activities while keeping its members safe from the separatists who controlled the city. The group administrators established additional safety measures by carefully considering each person who requested to join the group. At the same time, many of the group participants made their personal statuses public, whereby they continued to encourage participation in the group’s activities. Thus, public activism on social media moved from known group pages to anonymous individual pages, using the platform affordances of Facebook creatively to continue to encourage activism while mitigating personal risk. During the period of occupation, activists were being increasingly contacted by the local people they did not know, who requested to join their movement. These residents claimed to have registered on Facebook with an explicit goal of participating in the movement in support of Ukraine – the networked publics of Mariupol were gradually evolving into a ‘virtual stage’ where a Ukrainian identity was being produced and articulated as the city’s residents interacted online. By affording opportunities to engage in both public and private activity while maintaining anonymity, social media allowed activists to minimize personal risk that often accompanies public behavior.

After the city’s liberation, Mariupol activists continued their identity-building efforts by supporting the mobile Ukrainian army headquarters stationed outside the city. They joined the other Ukrainian cities in battlefront volunteering, using social media as a means of civilian resilience (Boichak, 2017). A new, at this time public, group emerged on Facebook (Group 2), which focused on soliciting crowdfunding donations to purchase supplies and equipment for the Ukrainian soldiers. By the end of 2015, the group had a few thousand members who volunteered to help the soldiers and started numerous community-organized humanitarian initiatives, including evacuating wounded soldiers from the battlefronts and providing them with medicine and hospital care, veteran rehabilitation and reintegration, organizing blood drives to fulfill the growing needs in the region after the occupation of Donetsk, taking care of children orphaned in the conflict, and helping internally displaced persons from the occupied territories:

We felt it was our responsibility to help those people rebuild their homes, and our actions also demonstrated that Ukraine cared about them and did not leave them behind. So when they saw crazy folks like us drive up to their village and help them rebuild their house, bring them medical supplies or organize a summer camp for their children (we were sure to make our national symbols prominent) – they understood this is what Ukraine looks like. For those people, we personified the Ukrainian state, as Ukraine in its current state of affairs was unable to support its citizens.

These activities were announced and actively publicized on social media, where influential Facebook users encouraged all Mariupol residents to contribute to the cause. Similar to the initiatives inspired by the Euromaidan protests of 2014, citizens of Mariupol were ‘effectively filling the gaps in inefficient state governance’ (Lokot, 2016: 298). ‘Motherland is never about someone else, somewhere else – Motherland is about each of us’ – this and similar messages were used by Mariupolians to rearticulate the meaning of citizenship during war. An interesting instance of such articulation work were the so-called online flash-mobs, where, in digital parallels of the more common understanding of flash-mobs as a group of people gathering together to do something unexpected in public, people from across Donbas would share mini-blogs on their lived experiences of citizenship in the times of occupation under a specifically designated hashtag (Lokot, 2018). The mini-blogs were contributed anonymously, to protect the authors’ identities, and the group administrator was in charge of publishing a few of those stories daily. This narrative was written by a young woman fleeing Donetsk after it became the capital of DPR:

[Russian]: Losing relatives and family members is the worst. No, they didn’t die! Some moved out, and I have no desire to talk to the ones who stayed [in Donetsk] because of a difference in political views. Even my parents do not support me! ‘Come back, life is wonderful here [in DPR]!’ … My husband is with the Ukrainian Army now. We made our choice, and there is no coming back! All we are left to live with is hope that one day Donetsk will be Ukraine again. Perhaps not tomorrow and not in a month, but someday it definitely will! That’s when we’re coming back. As for now, [continues in Ukrainian]: Welcome us, the free Mariupol, for we are here to stay! (Group 2)

By circulating these narratives, citizens achieved a twofold purpose. First, they joined activists in articulating a Ukrainian identity among the residents of Mariupol that would encourage them to take action, even if that action did not conform to the values of others or led to personal risk. But also, the interactivity afforded by the Facebook platform was crucial in legitimizing the Ukrainian state: people were becoming part of the evolving national narrative and could participate in its construction and circulation. For many of Mariupol residents, participation in networked publics presented a unique opportunity to articulate what being Ukrainian meant to them – thus challenging the boundaries of a national identity from which they previously felt excluded.

According to a local activist, Facebook was a crucial mobilization and communication medium during Mariupol’s occupation:

I knew there were a lot of people around who truly wanted to do something, but didn’t know how, and didn’t feel [like they had] the agency [to do so]. So we created [Group 2], an organization that became an alternative news source to our official local news website, and that was how we informed people of what was going on, and the needs of the soldiers. Every person who reached out to us, told us the same thing: ‘I am the only person in my family who believes in Ukraine. Everybody else is pro-Russian.’ I don’t know who those people were and how they got the idea in their heads that everybody around them was pro-Russian, but it was our goal to show them otherwise. (interview excerpt, 2016)

Activists did not only use social media to build a political identity among those who were already supportive of the Ukrainian state. Through the publicness afforded to them by social media, activists were reinforcing national identity by sharpening the distinction between Ukrainians and those who advocated for separatism. Users also called on the state to renounce the Ukrainian citizenship of the persons who supported separatism, emphasizing separatism being a crime according to the Ukrainian law. The headquarters of Group 2 set up a hotline to report any instances of suspicious behavior, regular movements of people or vehicles in the vicinity of strategic objects, and suspicious or threatening objects in public spaces. This hotline institutionalized the grassroots processes that started organically on Facebook by providing Mariupolians with an option to anonymously report separatist activity to activists, rather than to the police who were either inactive or sided with the occupants.

With these actions, the activism that rapidly evolved within the networked publics solidified into an informal security force, acting on behalf of the Ukrainian state by supplementing one of its functions:

Our goal was … related to community-building and making our resistance visible on social media to boost morale of people who stayed in the city [through the occupation]. People were asking me, ‘why are you keeping silent’? What’s going on?’ So we felt this need to make our activities maximally visible for the sake of all those people who relied on us as an information source. It is excruciating to watch your city being attacked through a TV screen, and showcasing our volunteering efforts on social media helped us produce a counter-narrative to the devastation that was taking place right at our doorsteps.

In just a few months in 2014, the activists used social media to mobilize thousands of Mariupolians, despite a legacy of political apathy and their city being under attack. In the words of the activist:

Facebook was my only channel of communicating with the city population, and it had been a key mobilization component in the first two years [of war] … now, we have developed a sophisticated emergency management system that functions through Facebook, and all people who are part of it know the drill.

Following the city’s liberation from the separatist forces by the Ukrainian army in the summer of 2014, the activists used their Facebook pages to announce a festive demonstration in celebration of the Ukrainian Independence day. Compared to the 18–20 people who were openly demonstrating support for the Ukrainian state in the beginning of the year, the demonstration on 24 August 2014 included thousands of people. Despite heavy shelling by the Russian artillery on that day, a 5–7,000- strong crowd formed a human chain through the city, waving national symbols and chanting patriotic mottos:

Lots of people came to help us dig trenches despite the shelling. In one of the following days, we organized a ‘live shield’ made of people wearing their vyshyvankas [an embroidered shirt that is a national symbol] and holding hands, connecting the outskirts of Mariupol with the neighboring towns and villages. There were elderly ladies yelling, ‘Putin, if you want to conquer our city, you will first have to kill us!’, while the younger people were digging the trenches. The momentum was so strong that, despite the artillery attacks, we had 10 to 30 new people join us every day to help our efforts. Some came in person, while others reached out through Facebook – and we understood that we, alongside a local web news agency, became a reputable information source that people were monitoring and responding to our calls to action … We knew that, as long as we were involved … we had a fighting chance for survival. Otherwise we would repeat the destiny of Donetsk (interview excerpt, 2016).

Mobilizing the networked publics

As we demonstrated in the previous section, the activists in Mariupol forged a Ukrainian national identity, thereby supplementing the symbolic component of their state’s legitimacy by capitalizing on the affordances provided by Facebook. Given that Facebook was the medium (or, the ‘virtual stage’) on which most of the identity-building action took place, in what ways did the russophone residents of Mariupol build a Ukrainian identity online, and which specific social media affordances did they utilize to resist occupation by supplementing state legitimacy and cultivating a notion of good citizenship?

First, the Facebook platform provided the activists with the perceived affordance of anonymity: when Mariupol residents realized the occupation of their city was inevitable, they changed their names on Facebook to protect themselves from being identified and persecuted by the occupiers. They also replaced their personal photos with patriotic avatars. Thus, during the occupation, Ukrainian avatars served a twofold purpose – they made the users’ positions apparent to the public while protecting their real-life identities. Moreover, this affordance was key in the organization of online and offline flash-mobs, allowing Mariupolians to express their opinions in the networked publics, as well as in the city streets, while reducing the risk posed to themselves and their families. This highlights the socially constructed nature of technological affordances – although Facebook requires users to provide their real name (Facebook Terms of Service, 2018), this feature was inverted by activists to afford anonymity on a highly visible online platform.

Citizens also relied heavily on the affordance of interactivity: the platform allowed activists to covertly organize and manage growing teams of supporters using Facebook’s messenger function. During and following the occupation, this affordance contributed to the emergence of social infrastructures – platform-mediated networks of activists, aimed at helping rebuild the city after the damage, as well as supporting the Ukrainian Army soldiers stationed around Mariupol (Boichak, 2017). The activists not only used Facebook to connect to their existing social networks; they also actively joined new networks by seeking out like-minded individuals, as in the instance where Mariupol residents registered on Facebook in search of a reliable contact to share intelligence. This connectivity is the essence of networked publics, used to mobilize citizens of Mariupol to participate in public events, ranging from demonstrations and flash-mobs to blood drives to benefit victims of the conflict. Interactivity was used to cultivate a shared sense of community and citizenship among the members of the networked publics: through the feedback loops that manifest in ‘likes’ and ‘shares’, the reader of the information became aware of its significance in other readers’ everyday lives. The publicness of this social interaction reminded the residents of the city who supported Ukraine that they were not alone: there were others who shared their Ukrainian identity.

These affordances allowed Mariupol residents to rearticulate their national identity, imagining themselves as citizens of a legitimate Ukrainian state, even though that state did not fulfill its basic duty of providing security for Mariupol. Drawing on the evidence from Mariupol, we see that legitimate state authority was an integral component for responding to a separatist threat and stepping out of an entrenched military conflict; yet the traditional components of state legitimacy were notably absent in the city. Those who believed that ‘Mariupol is Ukraine’ found an alternative way – in which social media played a central role – to foster Ukrainian legitimacy in the city. A key question remains: given the circumstances, would the citizens of Mariupol have been able to resist Russian occupation had it not been for their use of social media? Given the fragile state–society relationships of that time and the Russian cultural affinity of the population across eastern Ukraine, this would have been problematic: even if residents of the region had supported Ukraine and opposed separatism without the example set by prominent Ukrainian activists, they would have been unlikely to find each other and coordinate their efforts. Yet, in under two years, the industrialized russophone city of Mariupol made strides in counteracting the threat their city faced by using social media to produce collective actors, narratives, and identities with an explicit Ukrainian stance. These efforts in digital identity building were complemented by on-the-ground activity that reinforced this identity: taking clothing and food to under-equipped soldiers, finding critical medical supplies for hospitals, and spending time with other activists who shared a common identity.

Networked publics, mobilized by a handful of Ukrainian activists on social media, were a crucial element of national identity formation, which helped legitimize the Ukrainian state authority in a city torn by conflicting allegiances. The public nature of social media platforms is key: without Facebook, activists may have been forced to choose between anonymous-but-hidden activity that would have reduced personal risk and public-but-attributable activity that would have mobilized the citizens. The Mariupol case demonstrates that, by opening a new array of opportunities for identity formation on the basis of platform affordances of interactivity and anonymity, social media can be used to articulate a new vision of national identity, conferring state legitimacy in a fragile state. As one activist concluded, ‘How does one occupy a city where thousands of crazy people march in a demonstration [in support of the Ukrainian state] despite being shelled?’ As we demonstrated in this study, the active citizens of Mariupol benefited from social media affordances of interactivity and anonymity in their efforts to confer legitimacy of the Ukrainian state in the face of an existential threat, mobilizing supporters around Ukrainian national identity, thereby supplementing the symbolic component of their state’s legitimacy.

Of course, just as the features of social media platforms are not intrinsically ‘infrastructures of resistance’ to states (Milan, 2015), neither are they intrinsically infrastructures of support for an embattled state in Mariupol. Indeed, Russian actors also used social media platforms to try to persuade residents of Donetsk to reject the Ukrainian state and to support separatism. Our argument in this article is not one of technological determinism, where the technical features of platforms determine social and political outcomes. Instead, this study illuminates a new way in which activists may use social media to construct their own narrative and challenge the boundaries of an identity from which they felt excluded. Most importantly, as we demonstrated in this study, by creating public spaces for collective storytelling, social media may serve to support a threatened state rather than resist an entrenched regime.