Battlefront Volunteers: Mapping and Deconstructing Civilian Resilience Networks in Ukraine

Abstract

Social networks play an instrumental role in maintaining civilian resilience. During natural disasters and military conflicts, people use online platforms in an effort to reduce loss of human life and foster access to resources in their communities. The emergent mode of collective action, aimed at mitigating casualties by organizing into self-reliant human networks, highlights the infrastructural properties of social media. In a non-deterministic sense, platform affordances define associations and processes that constitute the social infrastructures at the core of civilian resilience networks. This study uses infrastructure ethnography to advance the theoretical understanding of social infrastructures in the context of the ongoing military conflict in eastern Ukraine. Between 2014 and 2016, building upon existing capacities of Facebook, thousands of Ukrainian civilians engaged in a collaborative effort to provide ordnance and supplies to the Ukrainian Armed Forces, preventing the violent conflict from spreading further into the Ukrainian territory. Drawing upon network analysis and a set of in-depth interviews with the volunteers involved in these initiatives, I map and deconstruct the civilian resilience networks, illuminating the use of Facebook by the battlefront volunteer groups in creating social infrastructures.