What kind of a family should exist? Children and Russia’s use of ‘traditional family values’ narratives in the Russia-Ukraine war
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Kremlin’s rhetoric of defending ‘traditional family values’ has been central to Russian justifications for its invasion of Ukraine and policies towards its children. This study analyzes the relationship between family, state ideologies, and child protection within this context by examining: (1) How are children positioned within Russia’s framework of family values and the roles of the state in enforcing them? (2) How have discourses on family values and child protection been used to justify Russia’s expansionist geopolitical objectives and application of biopolitical power in the Russia-Ukraine war? Through thematic analysis of political discourse, our research reveals how, through instrumentalization of narratives on ‘traditional family values’, childhood becomes a critical site where geo- and biopolitical strategies intersect and play a central role in nation-building, expansionist foreign policy, and constructing collective identities by imposing control over human bodies. We also examine how these justificatory narratives converse with global human rights and child protection discourses. Our study contributes to the scholarship of childhood and family as sites of social and political relations and how states use cultural narratives to secure geo- and biopolitical objectives. Confronting and subverting these narratives becomes critical to any post-conflict settlement and holding Russia accountable for its actions in Ukraine.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".