Justifying Civic Activism in Russia and Finland

ABSTRACTIn 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 Thevenot 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 whic…