Warwashing as an Influencer-Based Mechanism of War Legitimacy in a Platformized Public Sphere

The article provides a political science analysis of the transformation of war legitimacy mechanisms in the context of a platformized public sphere, with a particular focus on the role of influencers and networked actors. Drawing on classical theories of political legitimacy and contemporary approaches to digital political communication, the study argues that sources of societal support for war are increasingly shifting from institutional actors to non-institutional, personalized, and network-based forms of political legitimation. The article introduces and conceptualizes the concept of warwashing as an analytical category describing a structural effect of influencer-driven political action within platformized environments. Warwashing is not treated as a form of propaganda or manipulation, but rather as a set of recurring influencer and networked communicative practices through which war is symbolically converted into a resource of political legitimacy. Within this process, war comes to be perceived as socially intelligible, morally justified, and politically self-evident, often outside formal procedures of democratic accountability. Methodologically, the study employs a qualitative political science approach based on comparative case study analysis. The empirical section examines three types of cases representing different configurations of influencer-based war legitimacy: personalized influencer practices, decentralized networked communities, and pseudo-journalistic formats of conflict normalization. The analysis demonstrates that influencers function as autonomous political actors capable of producing alternative regimes of war legitimacy independently of formal political institutions. Special attention is devoted to the implications of influencer-based legitimacy for the political socialization of Generation Z. The findings indicate that for younger audiences war is increasingly experienced as a platform-mediated political phenomenon shaped by personalized narratives, low-threshold digital participation, and affective engagement. These dynamics carry long-term consequences for democratic accountability, institutional trust, and patterns of political participation in the post-war period. The article contributes to broader political science debates on legitimacy, digital power, and the role of influencers in contemporary public politics during wartime. Keywords: political legitimacy, war policy, warwashing, influencers, platformized public sphere, digital political communication, political socialization, Generation Z.