This dissertation examines how distributed forms of anti-war mobilization in Russia, emerging in the aftermath of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, transform into a mode of collective agency termed survival organizing. Grounded in the case of the Russian anti-war ecology, the research investigates how diverse and self-organized actions initially emerged without central coordination, often in exile or under conditions of extreme repression. These actions were marked by a rejection of traditional hierarchies and the legacy of the liberal opposition, instead embracing principles of horizontality, autonomy, care, and ethical responsibility.

The work traces how these distributed initiatives—ranging from mutual aid networks and digital solidarity campaigns to care work and feminist anti-war interventions—form a dense and dynamic field of resistance. What connects them is not a shared ideology or centralized leadership, but a shared commitment to acting in the present while prefiguring alternative futures. These practices are often fragile, small-scale, and embedded in everyday life, yet they hold transformative potential precisely because they build infrastructures of support and relational continuity in times of collapse.

Through this lens, the dissertation develops the concept of survival organizing—a mode of collective action that moves beyond reactive survival to become a proactive, world-building strategy. It is “survival with a plus sign”: a form of organizing that sustains life and enables political subjectivation under conditions of profound precarity. Survival organizing draws on the logic of autopoiesis, not only maintaining existing structures but generating new forms of relationality and resistance that are open-ended, non-linear, and often anonymous. Importantly, this form of agency is decentered; it is not located in individual actors or organizations but embedded in practices, relations, and infrastructures that can be taken up and actualized by others—even those yet to come.

By focusing on the distributed, prefigurative, and ethical dimensions of anti-war organizing, this dissertation offers a rethinking of collective action under authoritarianism and sociatal inertia.