Troubled Waters and Cracks in Ice. Environmentalism and Contention in Russia’s Peripheral Regions

Over the past two decades, Russia’s formal channels for political participation have been systematically co‑opted, while avenues for grassroots mobilisation have narrowed under the increasingly authoritarian regime. Nonetheless, episodic protest cycles of varying scale have punctuated this repression. This dissertation examines one such episode: the Shies mobilisation in Russia’s periphery, which challenged an extractivist landfill project, sustained over time, achieved meaningful results, and remained a landmark in the landscape of civil society initiative in contemporary Russia. This dissertation aims to reconstruct the elements that made such protests possible and to analyse their implications on state-civil society relations. Rather than comparing multiple cases, the study first reconstructs Russia’s dominant mobilisation paradigm (adaptive tactics, institutional co‑optation, pervasive repression and the fusion of authoritarian governance with neoliberal logics) using Baikal Environmental Wave, a NGO based in Irkutsk, as a paradigmatic example. BEV’s professionalised, non‑confrontational engagement with state institutions illustrates how environmental NGOs typically secure minor concessions before being neutralised. Against this backdrop, Shies emerges as a striking exception. By weaving deep local ties with transregional networks, reframing a local environmental grievance in explicitly political and systemic terms, and sustaining momentum over an extended period, the movement briefly breached the narrow boundaries of permissible civic action. Its characteristics and achievements set it apart from the usual LULU campaigns, which in Russia rarely evolve into systemic, openly political contests. The dissertation’s central aim is to identify the resources that Shies organisers generated - strategic repertoires, discursive frames and relational dynamics - against a backdrop of asymmetric centre-periphery relations and the broader neoliberal‑authoritarian nexus that embeds state-society dynamics worldwide. Ultimately, this dissertation provides insights about civil society initiative and alternative pathways for contention and state-civil society relations in Putin’s Russia, while setting them in the broader context of neoliberal restructuring and challenging exceptionalist narratives of a uniquely Russian path.