| dc.description.abstract | Since February 2022, the Russian anti-war diaspora in Norway has politically mobilized in response to the full-fledged invasion of Ukraine by the homeland. A phenomenological case study has been conducted in order to indicate manifestations of the mobilization and lived experiences associated with this phenomenon. Such lived experiences included both the political emotions and various aspects of the anti-war community identity relevant for the mobilization process. The political emotions, the identity contents, and the mobilization manifestations constituted, in their conjunction, the essence of the mobilization phenomenon. Afterwards, the collective affective intentionality (CAI) account of political emotions has been applied to the description of the phenomenon’s essence. Three methods of data collection have supplied the research with partly corroborating and partly complimentary data: qualitative semi-structured in-depth interviews with four members of the Russian anti-war community, surveys, and qualitative content analysis of social media profiles of the NGO “SmåRådina: for democracy in Russia”, the center of the Russian anti-war protest in Norway. The analysis shows that the political mobilisation of the Russian anti-war diaspora has manifested itself in significant increase in topics, forms and directions of activities, as well as in growth in number of both registered and informal community members. Diasporants have experienced the phenomenon of political mobilization as a complex set of negatevely valenced emotions, the nature and intencity of which can hardly be conveyed by words. Resorting to metaphors, the respondents sketch the feelings of despair, lostness, dying, catastrophe, apocalypse, collapse of their entire world. The flip side of the political mobilization phenomenon is, however, the joy of collective action for a cause. Besides, various contents of identity, such as, relational (the relation to Ukrainians, to pro-regime Russians), collective (national, diasporic, political) and individual contents (patriotic, cosmopolitan) play into the process of mobilization. Russian diaspora political mobilization represents a dramatic intensification of the members’ political stance, feelings, and actions. Though the intensity of feelings fades in time, the diasporants continue to speak out and act. “Moved to action” in a more disassembled way would read as “emotionally moved to political action”. | eng |