Civic Activism as a Novel Component of Armenian Civil Society

Thus, if civic initiatives aim to mobilise larger public support, the organisers need to consider
how to spread information through methods other then social networks. If the information about
civic initiatives is mostly or exclusively available through social networks, it will not reach those
potential participants who are not users of social networks, or who are distrustful of new
communication media.
V. Civic Initiatives in Armenia: General Overview and Analysis
An important new development in the realm of Armenian civil society is the relatively recent
emergence of a new type of activities and organisational structures called ‘civic initiatives’. The
term is a self-description used by a variety of issue-oriented, loosely horizontally structured
groups of individual activists that unite around a common, often very specific cause (such as
preventing construction in a public park, the preservation of an architecturally valuable building,
or protests against a new mine). These new forms of civic participation have registered a number
of victories since their emergence in 2008 (Ishkanian et al. 2013a) and are now an important and
highly visible element of Armenian civil society that must be taken seriously. For instance, in
2013-2014 a series of large-scale well-organised protests against an unpopular pension reform
caught the government and many analysts of Armenian civic activism by surprise. As a result,
the implementation of the reform was postponed for at least six months. The Prime Minister
resigned, and the government was re-shuffled, although officially, the Prime Minister’s
resignation was the result of other, unexplained reasons. The most recent case of public activism
was a protest against an increase in electricity prices, mostly referred to in the English-speaking
media as the ‘Electric Yerevan’, after its twitter hash tag. In June 2015, thousands of people took
to the streets in a non-stop, fortnight-long series of protests and sit-ins that blocked one of the
capital’s main streets, several hundred meters from the Presidential Palace and the National
Assembly. Both cases are discussed in detail below.
With the exception of these two cases, civic initiatives are small in numbers and often
confined to Yerevan, or spearheaded from Yerevan, if a regional environmental issue is at stake.
Since 2007, there have been at least 37 such initiatives, 12 of which had at least partial success.
The core activists are young educated people; they use social media to organise and to spread
information regarding their activities (Bagiyan 2015; Kankanyan 2015).
The gender aspect is an important dimension of civic activism. Some of the prominent
Armenian activists are young women. They advocate feminist causes (such as social and cultural
inequalities, domestic violence, selective abortion) but also join, or even lead, environmental
protests and other civic campaigns. Similar to many other post-soviet societies (Funk and
Mueller 1993), the public attitude towards feminists and female activism is sometimes negative.
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