Fröhlich, C., & Jacobsson, K. (2017). States Shaping Civic Activism: Comparing Animal Rights Activism in Poland and Russia. The Sociological Quarterly, 58(2): 182–201. https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2017.1296338

ABSTRACT

This article offers a comparative study of animal rights and animal

welfare activism in Poland and Russia. It investigates how an East

European democratic state, on the one hand, and a post-Soviet

semiauthoritarian state, on the other hand, steer civic activism and

how different state–society relationships affect the forms that activism

takes. The analysis aims at identifying the specific institutional

mechanisms by which steering operates in the two cases, thus

explaining some notable similarities between the movements in the

two countries, such as the focus on noncontentious animal welfare

issues, but also the differences between them. Although facing a

more repressive context, the contentious radical flank of the

Russian movement is more active than the Polish one.

KEYWORDS

Animals and society;

collective behavior and

social movements; political

sociology

It is well-known that state responses to social movements shape the form of civic activism

and protest.1 Repression (Davenport 2007; Earl 2003; Peterson and Wahlström 2015),

closure (Kriesi 1995; McAdam 1996), incorporation (Browning, Marshall, and Tabb 1986),

co-optation (Coy 2013), channeling (Jenkins 1998; McCarthy, Britt, and Wolfson 1991;

Oberschall 1973), and enrollment (Jacobsson 2013) are all attempts to conceptualize the

ways in which states can forestall, control, divert, incorporate, or in other ways influence

protest and collective action. The mechanisms by which this influence is exerted can be

either direct or indirect. The effects, on the other hand, can range from moderation of

protest and goal displacement of social movement organizations to improved opportunities

for advocacy and claim making and/or increased levels of politicization, protest and

contention.

This article offers a comparative study of animal welfare and animal rights activism in

Poland and Russia, investigating how different state–society relationships and distinct

ways of steering activism affect the form that activism takes. More specifically, the analysis

aims at identifying the concrete institutional mechanisms by which channeling and/or

repression operate in the two cases as well as the effects on the animal rights movements

in terms of action forms and activist orientations. Thus the article provides a comparative

analysis of the steering of civic activism and the pacifying and depoliticizing effects of an

East European democratic regime, on the one hand, and a post-Soviet authoritarian

regime on the other. We argue that both regimes’ steering mechanisms serve to direct

CONTACT Kerstin Jacobsson kerstin.jacobsson@gu.se University of Gothenburg, Department of Sociology and

Work Science, Box 720, 405 30 Gothenburg, Sweden.

THE SOCIOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

2017, VOL. 58, NO. 2, 182–201

dx.doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2017.1296338

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their domestic movements to animal welfare issues while more contentious, rights-related

activities and groups get marginalized.

Activism for the protection of animals typically addresses two concerns, which often

divides groups of activists. On the one hand, activism focusing on animal welfare strives to

abolish animal cruelty in the ways animals are kept for companionship, slaughtered for

food or clothing, or used in scientific research. In both of the countries under examination

these types of organizational activities are strongly related to the so-called humane

societies of the nineteenth century, which represent the historical pre-Soviet heritage of

contemporary animal welfare activism. Animal rights activism, on the other hand, while

embracing the first position, ultimately demands that any human exploitation of animals

should stop, thus embracing a more radical, abolitionist agenda. This strand of ideology

and activity developed internationally in the second half of the twentieth century and took

root in Poland and Russia in the last decades of the twentieth century. Today in practice,

animal protection movements usually consist of groups and organizations leaning more

toward one or the other position, constituting of two streams of the broader animal rights

movement (Jacobsson and Lindblom 2016:27). In Poland and Russia, animal welfare and

animal rights activists clearly identify themselves as part of the same movement, even if

there are constant tensions between the different factions. While the Polish activists in our

study refer to themselves most often as “animal rights” activists (obrońcy praw zwierząt),

most Russian activists call their activity “animal protection” (zoozashchita) or “animal

rights protection” (zashchita prav zhivotnykh). As we will see in the following analysis, in

both cases activists intertwine their rights-related activities, which are aimed mostly at

installing certain legal rights in order to fight animal cruelty, with their main focus on

animal welfare, namely, dealing with pets and stray animals. We see both branches as part

of the wider animal rights movement; nevertheless, in the empirical analysis, we distinguish

between groups focusing more on welfare- or more on rights-related activities, since

they constitute different forms of organization and action.

The movements in the two countries display many similarities: both countries have a

long history of animal welfare. The two movements, in fact, have the same historical

origin. The oldest Polish organization (TOZ, Towarzystwo Opieki nad Zwierzętami, the

Society for the Protection of Animals) developed as a branch of the Russian Society for the

Protection of Animals, founded in 1865 (Plach 2012). Both movements are descendants of

the wider international reformist movement in the nineteenth century, since at that time

the Russian Society and its branches throughout the Russian Empire were closely connected

to other important Animal Protection Societies in Britain, the United States,

France, and Germany (Bonhomme 2010; Nelson 2010).

Still both movements are highly oriented to animal welfare activism (the running of

shelters and sterilization programs for stray animals), although the Polish organizations

typically combine this with political claims and legal activism with greater success than the

Russian ones. While Poland has an Animal Protection Act that sets high objectives, with

an opening paragraph stating that “An animal is not an object,” Russia still lacks such an

act, and in legal terms, animals are treated as private property. And while the Polish

activists (at the time of the study) were operating in a liberal democracy with institutionalized

interactions between the state and civil society, the Russian activists were operating

in an increasingly authoritarian political environment (Gelʼman 2015), leaving

interactions between state and nonstate actors very limited (Greene 2014), and making

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contentious collective action a significant risk. From mid-2000 onward, and especially

intensively since 2012, the Russian state has established a number of measures for

controlling and containing protest, including the channeling of civic activism toward

nonpolitical, welfare-related issues. This has led to an alteration of state–civil society

relationships in recent years, where socially oriented nongovernmental organizations

(NGOs) willing to uncritically help the state are supported with resources, and other,

more critical NGOs that threaten the status quo are hindered (e.g., Salamon, Benevolenski,

and Jakobson 2015). Therefore, we would expect Russian organizations to be more

enmeshed in governmental structures and institutions or more repressed than their

Polish counterparts.

The article argues that in the governance of state–society relationships, different

institutional mechanisms are at play, which explains differences as well as (ostensible)

similarities in the ways that movements appear in the two countries. Thus the article, first,

contributes an analysis of the institutional shaping of civic activism in two postsocialist

countries. Second, it provides the first empirical study of contemporary animal rights

activism in Russia (for historical accounts, see Beregoi 2016; Borovick and Mikhel 2010;

Loukianov 2011), and one of the few studies of contemporary animal rights activism in

Poland (Jacobsson 2012, 2013; for historicals account see Plach [2012, 2015]; some animal

rights groups were also mentioned in Gliński’s [1996] study of the ecological movement in

the 1990s; see also Kapucinski and Kaemierczak [1993] and Wilson [1999]).

The study is based on qualitative interviews with animal rights and animal welfare

activists in the two countries as well as information collected from the organizations’

websites and other secondary sources. The Polish sample consists of interviews conducted

in Warsaw, Kraków, and Bielsko-Biała from 2010 to 2016 with 35 animal rights and animal

welfare activists, representing the most salient organizations and groups presently active in

Poland. The Russian sample consists of 10 interviews conducted in 2012 with animal rights

and animal welfare activists in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where informal groups and

organizations, as well as more radical activism, are most concentrated and frequent. That

excludes a variety of welfare-oriented groups in Russia’s regions from our analysis (and

since Russia is a geographically vast country, covering all its parts would not have been

feasible). The smaller size of the Russian sample reflects, first, the limited number of animal

rights-oriented activist groups presently engaged in the two Russian cities (beyond the mere

running of animal shelters). Second, the sample reflects the challenges entailed in interviewing

activists in a repressive setting. The activists informally operating in affinity groups

were only accessible after long periods of trust building, because the authoritarian environment

forces them to “close” their networks and because, as more radical activists, they are

especially prone to repression and operate mostly undercover. This feasibility sample has

been complemented and cross-checked with written and Internet sources for validity.

Mechanisms of Channeling and Repression

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