“Too immature for politics?” Political agency in the eyes of Russian adolescent protesters, 2011–20

Abstract

This paper bridges empirical research on children’s political participation and theoretical debates on the concept of agency in Childhood studies. It takes insights from the internal criticism of the essentialist conception of agency in Childhood studies and develops it further. Based on an analysis of in-depth interviews with adolescent participants of anti-regime protests in two periods of recent Russian history—i.e., 2011–13 and 2017–20—it compares how these two cohorts of politically active children constructed their political agency. It suggests that the authoritarian and depoliticized context of Russian society affects the construction of agency by child activists in ways we do not see in Western democracies. It thus challenges the main concepts of agency in Childhood studies, including the “critical” ones.