‘I don’t feel like a classic rights defender’: rights subjectivities and disidentification in Russian disability organising

Abstract

Drawing on in-depth interviews, this article investigates how Russian civil society actors organising around disability understand and use human rights discourses. It asks whether and how these actors mobilise distinctions between social and political human rights. It argues that civil society actors perceive the Russian State as legitimising social action and delegitimising political action. However, these actors also disidentify with this binary division by taking a third position; they identify their apparently social work as forming another kind of politics, different from that dominantly perceived as political. The article thus identifies a non-apparent or infra-political strategy by which political organising evades perception as political through the dominant depoliticisation of social rights. Actors instrumentalise this dominant perception to continue to engage in work which they identify as political, thus repoliticising the social sphere.