Hashtag-wars: The politics of war participation in the digital age

Objective

"The overall objective of #WARS is to achieve an understanding of the interrelationship between warfare and world society in the digital age. ‘Hashtag-wars’ are collective acts of political violence which take place in global crisis ecologies that intermesh the physical and virtual battlefield. Thanks to the Web 2.0 revolution, hashtag-wars give rise to a new mode of participatory warfare as digital technology now enables ordinary people across the world to participate in an armed conflict. Starting from the assumption that war and society constitute each other, the project aims to investigate how participatory warfare configures world society and vice versa. #WARS will fulfil the following theoretical, empirical and socio-political objectives: 1. advance an understanding of the transnational politics of participatory warfare and rethink war agency under the conditions of digital war ecologies; 2. produce knowledge on global conflict socialisation, transnational political activism, and the war experience of remote participants; 3. raise awareness about the seductive and destructive power of participatory warfare and gauge the implications for conflict analysis, prevention, and mediation. These research objectives will be achieved through a multi-perspective screening of war participation in three hashtag-wars: the Myanmar civil war, the Russian-Ukrainian war, and the war in Sudan. By combining digital and traditional methods of social research, #WARS will survey horizontally the interplay between world society, war ecology and war agency and delve vertically into four dimensions through which participatory warfare shapes world society: narratives, aesthetics, actions, and experiences. #WARS will offer a novel perspective on war participation in the digital age that is urgently needed to fathom the risk that the world turns into a fully militarised society."