Hashtag-wars: The politics of war participation in the digital age

The overall objective of #WARS is to achieve an understanding of the interrelationship between warfare and world society in the digital age. ‘Hashtag-wars’ are collective acts of political violence which take place in global crisis ecologies that intermesh the physical and virtual battlefield. Thanks to the Web 2.0 revolution, hashtag-wars give rise to a new mode of participatory warfare as digital technology now enables ordinary people across the world to participate in an armed conflict. Starting from the assumption that war and society constitute each other, the project aims to investigate how participatory warfare configures world society and vice versa. #WARS will fulfil the following theoretical, empirical and socio-political objectives: 1. advance an understanding of the transnational politics of participatory warfare and rethink war agency under the conditions of digital war ecologies