Civil Society as Arms Producer: Oxymoron or Reality? Ukraine’s Drone Production in Response to the Russian Invasion

Abstract

This article explores how Ukraine’s civil society has taken on direct security functions during Russia’s full-scale invasion, with a particular focus on the production of weaponized drone technologies. Drawing on and grounded in the “everyday International Relations (IR)” framework, the article assembles a novel database of both for-profit and nonprofit drone manufacturers operating in Ukraine, while applying social-network analysis to trace their patterns of collaboration. The article asks why civilian actors assumed a role usually monopolized by the defense industry and how their micropolitical practices reshape Ukraine’s macro-level war efforts. The results reveal a hybridized field in which civic activists, start-ups, and established firms converge, consequently blurring the conventional boundary between market activity and grassroots activist mobilization in the pursuit of national defense imperatives. By illuminating how market logics and activist practices intertwine under conditions of existential threat, the study challenges the standard definition of civil society as a realm separate from the state, family, and market, thereby advancing scholarship on whole-of-society resilience during wartime exemplified by the production of weaponized drones.