New ERC Grant to CMI Researcher: Investigating Hashtag-Wars

Eva Johais, Post Doctoral Researcher at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI), has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant for her groundbreaking project Hashtag -wars: The politics of war participation in the digital age. 

The ERC Starting Grant is one of Europe’s most competitive and prestigious research grants, awarded to early-career researchers with a scientific track record showing great promise. This year, just over 12 percent of nearly 4000 proposals were selected for funding.

The idea for #WARS was sparked by the hashtag #NAFO that appeared shortly after the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Together with her colleague Mareike Meis, Johais followed the evolution of the hashtag into a veritable transnational movement – the North Atlantic Fella Organization - that counters Russian propaganda, raises funds for the Ukrainian war effort, and even appears in the offline world at street protests and charity events.

Participatory warfare

“I was initially fascinated by the remarkable trajectory and agency of the hashtag #NAFO. But I then realised that this was just one example of a much broader phenomenon: that digital technology enables ordinary people across the world to participate in armed conflicts,” says Johais. 

The project explores how digital platforms allow people to engage in what Johais calls “participatory warfare”. This can involve anything from amplifying or countering war narratives, analysing open-source intelligence to donating drones or other military and humanitarian equipment. These acts can feel empowering or entertaining as they are often triggered by emotions like pleasure, anger or compassion, reflect existing personal values and political beliefs, or create bonds of solidarity. 

“Participatory warfare is attractive and easy - you don’t risk your life by posting a meme or by buying a t-shirt from a webshop. But its implications are serious: remote participants take sides in an armed conflict, and justify, support or perform acts of political violence. While we already know that digital technology changes warfare on the ground, we don’t know much about how this affects people and places afar,” Johais explains.

War ecologies and agency in the digital age

#WARS will address this gap with its novel focus on transnational politics and the experience of remote participants. The goal is to theorise the transnational politics of war participation in the digital age and diagnose the socio-political dynamics beyond the physical warzone.

#WARS will achieve this through a comparison of three contemporary conflicts: The war in Myanmar, the Russian-Ukrainian war, and the war in Sudan. It will first map the conflicts’ war ecologies and then examine four modalities of war agency - narratives, aesthetics, actions, and experiences – of specific examples like #NAFO.

“The project is called #WARS because hashtags literally and figuratively create transnational war ecologies by connecting remote participants to the distant battlefield,” says Johais.

By exploring such connections, #WARS will contribute to academic debates on the social mediatization of conflict, digital activism, diaspora politics, war propaganda and the role of popular culture in world politics. Beyond its academic impact, the project also aims to raise public awareness about the seductive and destructive power of digital war participation.