Within the interview series, which presents projects funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, Dr. Vera Michlin-Shapir gives insights into her project on Russian online campaigns and its use of ontological insecurity. Thereby, Dr. Michlin-Shapir not only talks about the scope of the project, in which the scholar aims to investigate the interactions between Russia’s domestic operations, its foreign campaigns and global trends in order to gain knowledge on Russia's interventions, but also about the contemporary and scientific relevance of the topic.
"Russian state-backed actors’ engagement with audiences in online environment"
L.I.S.A.: Dear Dr. Michlin-Shapir, within your research project, which is funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, you are working on Russia’s uses of ontological insecurity in Social Media campaigns in 2016-2020. Could you briefly explain the scope of your project? Why is it scientifically worthwhile to deal with the topic?
Dr. Michlin-Shapir: The term and concept of ontological security has gained much interest in academia in the past several decades, but has been scarcely applied or connected to Russia. In the West, the term has been used to describe situations where routines, relationships and practices have fostered a sense of security for people, which is linked to their ability to reproduce a stable long-term identity for themselves as individuals. In reverse, when such relationships and routines were disrupted, they led to a sense of insecurity and a reactionary response – longing for firmer identity as means to reinstate a sense of security. Such a term explains seemingly paradoxical situations when individuals stick to routines that in objective terms do not serve them, such as bad relationships or harmful habits. When such routines are disrupted, subjects feel a sense of insecurity although their objective conditions did not change much. This term has been successfully applied from the realm of individual behaviour to societal and state-level trends, in international relations, political psychology and even in security studies. It, however, was rarely discussed in relations to Russia.
Recently, scholars began to explore how the deficiency in ontological security after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when people’s routines and relationships were interrupted, shaped individual Russians’ worldviews and the way they behave as a polity. This research too, aims to explore this direction, taking it to the state level. It enquires how Russian policy makers may have exploited such feelings of insecurity that exist both in Russian and Western audiences in their online campaigns in Russia and in the West. This is an important and largely overlooked aspect of Russian state-backed actors’ engagement with audiences in online environment. It also aims to contribute to our understanding of the similarities and differences between Russian and Western audiences’ responses to online influence campaigns.