Participatory War and Social Media: Discursive, Material, and Ethical Dimensions

Participatory war is the idea that anyone with an internet-connected digital device can influence the course and outcome of wars. This chapter considers social media as a point of entry into the participatory war ecosystem, opening possibilities for various types of digitally mediated involvement by its users. It begins by drawing out the historical continuities in scholarship that intersects social media and war, bringing these perspectives together into a diffraction model. While the forms of participation may change in interaction with technological changes or sociopolitical factors, diffraction allows researchers to see them in context, as propagation of discursive and material practices. The chapter concludes by analysing the epistemological pitfalls of researching participatory war, with the purpose of encouraging more reflexive, critically engaged, and action-oriented research in this area.
War has always been shaped by the media and technologies of its time. Processes of deep mediatisation (Couldry & Hepp, 2018), fostered by the rapid development of digital media, on the one hand, and our increasing reliance on it, on the other, have unsettled the structural conditions of the beginning, conduct, and, consequently, outcomes of wars around the world (Boichak, 2019). Social media have become a powerful force in transforming how wars are waged, witnessed, and remembered (Boichak & Hoskins, 2022). When considering the entanglement between social media and war, participation is a phenomenon of particular interest. The past few years have seen an emerging interest in various participatory modalities on social media (Merrin, 2018; Cervi & Divon, 2023; Ford, 2025) — in part due to increasing geopolitical instability in many regions of the world, including Russia’s war against Ukraine and Israel’s war on Gaza.