Justifying Civic Activism in Russia and Finland

ABSTRACT

In this article, we present a novel way of researching civil society in a comparative perspective and illustrate it through a detailed analysis of public disputes concerning urban building construction projects in St. Petersburg and Helsinki in 2008–2009. In our illustration, we use justification theory, a line of thought developed by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot in the early 1990s, but until now little used in comparative civil society research. Moreover, we use a variant of Public Justification Analysis, a new method for analysing media data. Our focus is on moral justifications, that is, on arguments which are presented against or in favour of the proposed projects and which draw on shared moral principles. Clear differences were found in referrals to these principles by urban activists in Russia and Finland. We argue that justification theory enables both international comparisons as well as inclusion of specific features of national political cultures.