Networking of ethnic mobilization: exploring the role of appeals in interethnic conflicts

The article aims to identify the mobilizing role of propaganda tools in the online space in the unfolding ethnopolitical conflicts. Ethnic conflicts are the subject of close society's attention and scientists' research. Within the framework of the study of ethnopoliti-cal mobilization, the analysis of appeals (as incitement) becomes one of the methods that contribute to the consolidation of various social actors. Over the past decades, various approaches to the study of appeals in the so-called offline space have been developed. The current situation forces us to shift the focus of research to the Internet environment. The subject of the study were calls and appeals in the social network Twitter related to the two most resonant interethnic confrontations in modern Russian history - the pogroms in Biryulyovo (2013) and the so-called "The nanny Bobokulova's Case " (2016). The research tools were the methods developed for the analysis of texts in juridical linguistics, primarily to identify calls in the general array of text units. Identified lexical units were subjected to intent-analysis to clarify their semantic content and direction, the formed image of the enemy. At the same time, an attempt was made to reveal the level of aggression of intentions. To correlate communicative messages on the Internet with real events, the case-study method was used. The result of the study was a multi-stage analysis of more than 3,000 appeals in the social network Twitter, which allowed to reveal the tendency of the enemy image formation in the mass consciousness, to understand who is guilty in the public consciousness. According to the participants of the network discourse, responsibility for what happened lies on labor migrants, representatives of another ethnos, and specific political actors. The trend of generalization of the enemy is traced, when mostly negative characteristics of a single representative of an alien ethnic community are extrapolated to the whole of this community. In addition, the bulk of appeals are of a reflective, reactive character, and the requirements articulated in them are mostly blurred. Nevertheless, calls as one of the propaganda methods have already proved their effectiveness in the offline space, and therefore deserve further serious study in social networks. The study of appeals, along with other propaganda methods and techniques, helps to reveal the intentions of participants in interethnic confrontations and, accordingly, to develop countermeasures for the prevention of open social conflicts.

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