The Russian state under Vladimir Putin envisions children as objects in its war against Ukraine, which has a wider nexus of geopolitical control in former communist countries. However, young people in the digital age resist, adapt, and re-use scripts in everyday private and civic practices. This introduction argues that Russia’s war against Ukraine is reshaping how young people across the former communist space understand themselves, shape their identities, and are being shaped by fluid geopolitical forces embodied in a range of such practices. We use Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of becoming/being and Hanson’s notion of the “been” to describe youth as subjects formed by past legacies, present pressures, and imagined futures. The war circulates through a mediatized, always-on environment in which participation is routed through and between platforms, algorithms, and attention. Contributions examine Central Asia, where linguistic activism and decolonizing claims have intensified and media literacy, education, and social context shape interpretations of the conflict; Ukrainian children’s creative agency in responding to war; and the ambivalent affordances of social media for authoritarian mobilization of youth in Russia. Together, the articles demonstrate that the attempt to restore imperial influence through conflict has produced unintended effects: powerful processes of identity reconfiguration among youth. The collection offers comparative evidence and a clear conceptual toolkit for studying the effects of Russia’s war against Ukraine on generational formation and cultural politics across the region today.
Garner et al. (Mon,) studied this question.