POLITICAL EXTREMISM OF THE YOUTH AS AN ETHNO-SOCIAL DEVIATION
IN THE POST-SOVIET ELECTRONIC INFORMATION SOCIETY

Volume 17 Issue 4 2016 CENTRAL ASIA AND THE CAUCASUS
https://www.ca-c.org/online/2016/journal_eng/cac-04/ca-cE-4-2016.pdf
BY IRINA MKRTUMOVA
D.Sc. (Sociol.), Professor, Deputy Director for Scientific-Analytical Work,
Institute of Supplementary Professional Education
(Moscow, Russian Federation)

Irina KARABULATOVA
D.Sc. (Philol.), Professor,
Member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences,
Chief Research Associate, Head of the Sector of Ethnopolitical and
Sociocultural Security and Communication Technologies,
Institute of Socio-Political Research, Russian Academy of Sciences
(Moscow, Russian Federation)

Anastasiya ZINCHENKO
Ph.D. (Econ.), Lecturer at the Tyumen Military Engineering Officer Academy
(Tyumen, Russian Federation)

ABSTRACT
 We belong to an electronic information society and live in a global  space of information and communication technologies with the following intertwining parameters: (1) the individual and the collective; (2) the objective and the subjective; (3) the material and the ideal. This is
a new type of global integrity that has already challenged those who are learning to
distinguish between the external and the internal and between “mine” and “yours,” while
remaining within the information space. 

This adds special importance to the conditions within which these two spaces can be outlined; the absence of outlines or inability of any country to defend its own lines gives rise
to a new type of danger created by information flows. This is extremely obvious among
young people as the most mobile group susceptible to all sorts of factors that change
stereotypes and create ethnosocial deviations.1

 The religious factor as part of the political process is becoming a catalyst of sta
bilization and/or destabilization of the political space. We need to identify the mechanisms and technologies that draw religion into politics and arrive at methods through
which social and state security can be ensured. This doubles the importance of the
subject of our study. The information threat per se can crop up in a variety of forms: virtual worlds that replace reality in the minds of people; manipulation of human minds and
human behavior, replacement of goals, values, and lifestyle with standards imposed
from the outside, distorted information, etc.2

This means that the problem of interaction between consciousness and being has
been revived in the information society: today, they coexist in the common space of
information flows (knowledge, technologies,2 and programs). They are practically indistinguishable, which creates a negative trend, viz. the replacement of the subjective with a technological milieu, in which the difference between “moral” and “amoral” can hardly be
distinguished. To arrive at a strategy for preventing and opposing the discussed phenomenon, we must undertake as thorough an analysis as possible of the ontogenesis
and phylogenesis of political extremism among young people, as well as its specifics
and non-lineal dynamics in Russia’s sociopolitical conditions, and generalize the results thus obtained. The time has come to admit that today the state is opposing extremism merely to neutralize its most dangerous repercussions. So far nothing has been done to eliminate the fundamental causes of extremism in the younger generation: its social vulnerability, lack of opportunity to move up the social ladder, and glaring property inequality.

See: I.S. Karabulatova, “Sovremenny elektronnoinformatsionny diskurs kak indikator etnopoliticheskoy
bezopasnosti: mezhetnicheskaya tolerantnost v XXI veke,”
Nauchnoe obozrenie. Seria 2: Gumanitarnye nauki, No. 2,
2016, pp. 3-14.

This study has been carried out with the financial support of the Russian Federal Property Fund within the framework of research project No. 16-06-00476.80