Description
Parties to all protracted conflicts use all means and social capital at their disposal to propagate narratives of war, its origins and likely resolution that fit their own foreign policy priorities. Under-researched in this wider context is how states engage with dominant religious organisations for this purpose, as well as the specific roles played by religious organisations to propagate or resist wartime (dis)information and historical revisionism. Using Russia’s war on Ukraine as a case study, this paper examines the competing ways in which the Russian Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Church of Ukraine have represented both the conflict and the historical and cultural legacies feeding into it, with a particular focus on engagement with children and young people. It gives a more nuanced picture than accounts that present Orthodoxy as directly subservient to state imperatives, examining the contrasting institutional and philosophical underpinnings of the churches’ competing claims to represent the ‘true’ Orthodoxy to a new generation and critically interrogating how the Churches’ involvement in matters of historic, political and cultural contestation impacts upon broader parallel processes of identity fragmentation and consolidation.
