Peer-reviewed article
“Too immature for politics?” Political agency in the eyes of Russian adolescent protesters, 2011–20
Ерпылева Светлана Витальевна ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This research examines how adolescents in Russia constructed their political agency while participating in anti-regime protests across two periods: 2011–13 and 2017–20. The study uses in-depth interviews to understand how young activists viewed their own political involvement in an authoritarian context. The findings suggest that children's political agency develops differently in authoritarian settings compared to Western democracies, challenging existing theories about how children exercise agency in Childhood studies.
Key points
- Two cohorts of Russian adolescent protesters constructed political agency differently across the study periods
- Authoritarian and depoliticized context of Russian society shapes how child activists build political agency
- The study challenges main concepts of agency in Childhood studies by showing Western-based theories may not apply universally
- Research bridges empirical work on children's political participation with theoretical debates on agency
Limitations
The document is a metadata summary and does not provide specific findings, numbers, or detailed results about how agency differed between cohorts or what mechanisms explain these differences. It does not indicate sample size, specific interview questions, or concrete outcomes of the protests.
Abstract
This paper bridges empirical research on children’s political participation and theoretical debates on the concept of agency in Childhood studies. It takes insights from the internal criticism of the essentialist conception of agency in Childhood studies and develops it further. Based on an analysis of in-depth interviews with adolescent participants of anti-regime protests in two periods of recent Russian history—i.e., 2011–13 and 2017–20—it compares how these two cohorts of politically active children constructed their political agency. It suggests that the authoritarian and depoliticized context of Russian society affects the construction of agency by child activists in ways we do not see in Western democracies. It thus challenges the main concepts of agency in Childhood studies, including the “critical” ones.