Authors

Bettina Renz¹; Charlie Walker²;  ¹ The University of Nottingham, UK;  ² University of Southampton, UK

Discussion

Russia’s future capacity for reconstituting its armed forces will be subject to factors going far beyond material assets, such as budget, technology and size of population. An important non-material factor in military reconstitution is the motivation of Russian men to serve and fight, which will influence both the quantity and quality of military personnel the state can generate. Western perceptions tend to assume that Russian men’s motivation remains low – underpinned by historical military recruitment and retention problems, the flight of thousands of potential recruits in September 2022, and Putin’s apparent reluctance to launch a full-scale mobilisation. The study is based on the premise that these perceptions are questionable and require deeper investigation. Motivation is a notoriously difficult factor to measure because it is intangible and heavily contingent on context. To concretise the factor, the study will use the concept of military citizenship (Eichler 2012), which posits that militarisation is a gendered process linking the achievement of male citizenship to military service. The study will centre on the ways in which the Russian state and civil society have sought to develop military citizenship by fostering forms of social and legal recognition (Honneth 2000) amongst veterans, soldiers, potential future soldiers, and women supporting these men. It will seek both to measure the scale of these initiatives, and to estimate their effectiveness, focusing on those who were amongst the main ‘losers’ of economic transition in the 1990s and 2000s, and may be regarded as primary targets for militarisation.