Hybridization of Civilian and Military Mobile Phone Use in the Russo-Ukrainian War. Higher Seminar in Media and Communication Studies with Roman Horbyk, Örebro University/Södertörn University.

The Russo-Ukrainian War has produced significant evidence of the broad and unorthodox use of media infrastructure and communication technology since 2014. Its latest phase, the ongoing full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, is soon to enter its second year. During this time, many of the communication trends known from the annexation of Crimea and war in Donbas (more limited and hybrid) have been developed while others have been reversed at the same time. In this seminar I will focus on major trends highlighting how a mobile phone—an ordinary civilian device—has become weaponized and turned into a hybrid tool that integrates a number of peaceful and combat functions.

I will present the final results of a two-year research project, funded by the Baltic Sea Foundation and hosted by Södertörn University. Based on dozens of interviews with military servicemen and women, civilian refugees and frontline populations, government officials and non-governmental activists, as well as some observations on the ground, I will construct a complex typology for the frontline uses of mobiles in the spirit of actor-network theory (Latour 2005) and in the context of other contemporary conflicts (such as wars in Syria and Yemen), where mobiles have played an important role. One of the problems in the growing subfield of mediatization of war or “digital war” (Hoskins & O’Loughlin 2015; Merrin 2018) is evidence on how exactly civilian communication devices become integrated with warfare, so the study is at once contributing to solving a major theoretical problem in media and communication studies and advances understanding of Ukraine and its networked publics—powered largely by mobile and web communication—as a key factor in Ukraine’s resistance and resilience.

A variety of personal purposes, such as private communication and entertainment, are combined in the same device with wiretapping, fire targeting, minefield mapping, and combat communication. Mobiles supplant old or unavailable equipment and fill gaps in military infrastructure, becoming weaponized and contributing to the hybridization of the military and the intimate, and of war and peace. At the same time, there are signs of an emerging Russian doctrine of intentionally destroying mobile communication infrastructure as well as targeting civilian mobile phone users. These results imply the role of mobiles as a mediated extension of battlefield, question the very definition of what constitutes weapon as tool of combat, and point out to the role of imposed mobile blackout in Russian genocidal war crimes.