States Shaping Civic Activism: Comparing Animal Rights Activism in Poland and Russia

This article offers a comparative study of animal rights and animal welfare activism in Poland and Russia. It investigates how an East European democratic state, on the one hand, and a post-Soviet semiauthoritarian state, on the other hand, steer civic activism and how different state-society relationships affect the forms that activism takes. The analysis aims at identifying the specific institutional mechanisms by which steering operates in the two cases, thus explaining some notable similarities between the movements in the two countries, such as the focus on noncontentious animal welfare issues, but also the differences between them. Although facing a more repressive context, the contentious radical flank of the Russian movement is more active than the Polish one.