Paper short abstract:

Since the full-scale Russian invasion, TikTok has become a central tool of communication and documentation for many Ukrainians. This paper explores the anthropological and historical implications of the production of a real-time digital archive of conflict, displacement, war crimes.

Paper long abstract:

Since the full-scale Russian invasion on the 24th February 2022, TikTok has become a central tool of communication and documentation for many Ukrainians. Many legal and judicial processes are underway to record the unfolding of the conflict and assemble an archive of the war, yet other grass-roots processes of archiving are also emerging. Alongside journalistic and human-rights reporting, social media has been mobilised as a tool of journalism, documentation, narration, and negotiation, and TikTok has emerged as a particularly central platform. Some Ukrainian TikTokers go as far as to articulate their content as a form of archiving for future war-crimes investigations.

Drawing on digital ethnographic research that I have carried out since the invasion began, on long term research on TikTok since 2020, and in Ukraine since 2016, this paper explores the political, historical, and anthropological implications of this continuously growing, living social media archive of conflict. How might an attention to the archive allow us to engage with the lived experience of invasion, conflict, displacement, and violence? What role does the collective creation of a digital archive play in the crafting of imagined post-conflict futures? How can we methodologically explore such a fast-moving, continuously changing digital landscape? This paper will begin to tease out these questions and offer a set of tools for working with social media archives of conflict.