Wartime Demographic Engineering: War, Nationalism, and Population Politics in Putin’s Russia

WARDEM explores the interconnected, yet complex and contradictory, relationships between war, nationalism, and population politics in Putin’s Russia.

The project provides an innovative analysis of the processes and practices that (re)shape the population in times of war, and through the war.

Challenging ‘geriatric peace’ theory, WARDEM examines the ways in which (interstate) war entails new demographic strategies.

More precisely, it examines how, in the context of a declining and ageing population, an aggressor state may use war to expand the population by force through territorial annexation and the intake of displaced persons – a strategy that is particularly relevant when these people are seen as ethnic kin.

WARDEM undertakes an interdisciplinary, systematic case study of a critical case, analysing Russian population politics in the context of the war on Ukraine, from its outset in 2014 to the end of 2023.

Developing a transdisciplinary methodology that synthesises recent insights from nationalism studies, political demography, peace and conflict studies, and illiberalism studies, the project combines a focus on political discourse with an analysis of population policies – that is, citizenship, immigration, demography, and ethnic policies – as reflected in legal acts and policy documents.

These policies are part of a wartime ‘demographic engineering’, which allows Russia to integrate new populations forcibly while seeking to divide the Ukrainian nation and weaken the Ukrainian state.

Thus, the project develops a model linking the analysis of an authoritarian state’s aggressive foreign policy with the reshaping of its population and changes in its nationalist discourse. WARDEM is a timely project responding to the current challenges facing EU foreign and security policy.

A rapidly evolving geopolitical environment, the influx of refugees from Ukraine, and economic impact of war all calls for investigating the dynamics of Russian expansionism and revisionism.