Between crowd and conflict: Crowdfunding warfare in the 2022 war in Ukraine

Abstract

The Dutch crowdfunding efforts that supply Ukrainian armed forces with consumer drone technology in their fight against the Russian army is a novel manifestation of civic participation in warfare. Although recent academic debates have started to pay attention to new forms of civilian engagement in warfare, no attention has yet been paid to transnational crowdfunding organisations that deliver hardware directly to the battlefronts. Civilians have long traditions of engaging in war and violent conflict within their state of through diasporic network, but as new media and drone technologies spread to all levels of society, civilians are enabled to engage in new ways and in wars to which their state is no direct party. Building upon the body of academic literature on participatory warfare and combining it with theories of technological innovation, this research investigates through interviews and document analysis how new clusters of technological technologies enable a relationship between civilians and war. It finds that through the convergence of social media, consumer homegrown drone technologies and instant messaging in the organisation a crowdfunding, civilians can participate in war by providing military logistic support directly to combatants of another state. Due to the affordances of these technologies, civilians can mirror the social institutions of the state conventionally responsible for the legitimisation and production of war. Both in terms of dissemination of discourse as the distribution of lethal power. This research shows that in crowdfunding warfare, the ability of participating in remote war has extended further from state institutions to the civilian population than was thus far acknowledged in literature on civic participation in war. To further academic debate on the topic, this research proposes and theorizes the concept of crowdfunding warfare.