Authors

Denis Shedov¹;  ¹ University of Helsinki, Finland

Discussion

Russia’s expulsion from the Council of Europe represents a pivotal moment in global geopolitics, highlighting the disintegration of long-standing institutional frameworks amid the ongoing full-scale aggressive war against Ukraine. While this issue has generated substantial academic debate, most discussions centre on international politics and legal institutions (Kahn, 2024; Muravyeva & Brin, 2024). In contrast, this paper foregrounds the human-centred perspective of legal professionals and victims of human rights violations (Kubal, 2021) and examines how this institutional rupture has affected the Russian human rights community, which long relied on the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) for advocacy and legal redress. A key conceptual framework for the analysis and accompanying advocacy actions is social trauma. Originally introduced in psychotherapy, the concept has notable interdisciplinary potential, functioning both as a metaphor and an analytical tool (Hamburger, 2021). Social trauma connects personal experiences with broader social and political phenomena (Muldoon, 2024). Experiencing or witnessing human rights violations can itself be traumatic (Nickerson, Bryant, Rosebrock, & Litz, 2014). At the same time, social trauma shapes how communities relate to institutions, influencing public discourse, silences, and collective memory (Herman, 1992; Rinker & Lawler, 2018). This dual perspective makes the concept relevant to the data I collected during fieldwork with the Human Rights in Eastern Europe and Russia project. It supports a nuanced analysis of how personal experiences of trauma intersect with the erosion of institutional protections and how these processes may generate new forms of social and cultural resistance within the Russian human rights community.