2025/01/01 by Kevin Limonier, Maxime Audinet · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Anthropology: Ethics, History, Culture #Global Security and Public Health #Soviet and Russian History
paper · pdf · doi:10.1525/cpcs.2025.2474792
openalex publication_date 2025/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/12/11 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23
The “exogenous shock” provoked by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 has profoundly transformed the subfield of Russian studies, raising significant methodological and epistemological issues. Like many before them, scholars in Russian studies, mainly from Western institutions, are faced with the need to renew their research methods and sources in light of the challenging access to the research field in Russia. Rooted in discussions on the “computational turn” and digitization of area studies, this article proposes to overcome these new challenges by exploring Russia through its digital fieldwork. Over the past decade, open-source investigations have become decisive in the documentation of objects as diverse as organized crime, elite corruption, or contemporary conflicts. Generally referred to as OSINT (Open Source Intelligence), these investigative practices are made possible by the omnipresence of sensors that digitize a growing proportion of human activities and generate digital footprints. Although these sources are widely used by intelligence services, journalists, and activists, the reflections carried out to integrate them into the “toolbox” of the social scientist in Russian studies are still embryonic and deserve to be enriched. As part of this special issue, this article contributes to this effort, by reviewing the existing literature in “digital Russian studies,” highlighting key epistemological and ethical issues associated with digital investigation in authoritarian context, and proposing a draft methodological framework for potential research avenues. The result is the possibility of a fieldwork “augmented” by digital technology, the use of which proves particularly fruitful to study wartime Russian politics.