The culture of ban: pop culture, social media and securitization of youth politics in today’s Russia

Abstract

ABSTRACT In today’s Russia, one can observe aspiration of ruling political elites to securitize cultural politics, i.e. to present culture as an issue of state security. This process is very noticeable in youngsters’ pop culture: in the 2010s, it became an object of close attention and “management” on the part of political actors and institutions. This article is focused on complex relationships between this policy of securitization and waves of moral panic regularly arising in the Russia’s society. These moral panics can be entailed with many types of agents, from local state employees to conservative groups of parents. These panics can be used as a reason for the further securitization. This reciprocal interdependency of local agents and state-level subjects of cultural politics (and cultural policy) now experience a hidden crisis, caused with current processes of self-organization and growing politicization in the Russia’s pop culture milieu.