Françoise Daucé, Benjamin Loveluck, Francesca Musiani (dir.), 2023, Genèse d’un autoritarisme numérique. Répression et résistance sur Internet en Russie, 2012-2022, Presses des Mines, 218 p.
Françoise Daucé (CERCEC-EHESS), Benjamin Loveluck (Télécom Paris) and Francesca Musiani (CIS-CNRS) published in May 2023 Genèse d’un autoritarisme numérique. Répression et résistance sur Internet en Russie, 2012-2022 [Genesis of a digital authoritarianism. Repression and resistance on the Internet in Russia, 2012-2022].
Ksenia Ermoshina (CIS-CNRS) participated in several chapters.
This book is available in open access (in French).
Book summary
In the wake of the end of the USSR, the Russian Internet initially developed freely, leaving the initiative to numerous actors inventing digital tools adapted to their uses. However, since the beginning of the 2010s, the authoritarian turn at the top of the Russian state has led to the deployment of a network of controls and constraints which has tightened both on the actors and on the country’s digital infrastructures.
While the network of networks has long carried hopes of democratization of the Russian public sphere, its framework was built up gradually, through controversies and trials. Despite criticism and circumvention by activists and citizens, digital oppression has contributed to political sovereignization and the warmongering dynamic, the culmination of which was the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The book, informed by field surveys carried out as part of the ANR ResisTIC project, draws an overview of coercive governance and emancipatory digital uses in Russia, from peace to war. It focuses on the multiple digital actors and objects at the heart of political controversies and usage tensions in the Russian digital space in the 2010s. It shows the processes of construction of digital oppression, as well as critiques, conflicts and circumventions which bring together public and private actors, both supporters of the internet order and defenders of its freedoms. Through the lens of the Russian case, this book questions contemporary digital reconfigurations, from surveillance to sovereignty.