In the period from February 2022 to July 2023 alone, an estimated 250,000 men subject to military service fled Russia. Draft evaders seeking protection from military service abroad rarely receive it. Between early 2022 and April 2025, 6,374 Russian men aged 18 to 45 applied for asylum in Germany. Only 349 of them were recognised as refugees or received subsidiary protection. My discourse analysis of recent rulings (2023–2024) shows that these decisions reproduce epistemic injustice and reflect deeper structural inequalities.

Since Miranda Fricker’s publication of “Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing” (2007), socio-legal scholars have increasingly drawn on the framework she outlined to analyse how legal institutions reproduce and legitimise epistemic harms. Following Fricker’s account of epistemic injustice, Katharine Jenkins (2023) proposes the concept of ontic injustice, which shifts the focus from injustices of knowing to injustices of being—that is, to the ways social structures constitute people in unjust forms of existence. Ontic injustice thus refers to wrongs built into the very structure of social roles. For example, before 1991 in England and Wales, and until 1997 in Germany, wives were legally denied the right to refuse sex to their husbands due to marital rape exemptions. This denial was a structural injustice tied to the role of “wife” itself.

Reading law against lived experience

My empirical material consists of ten asylum court decisions from Germany, concerning men with Russian citizenship, who are marginalised on the grounds of class, ethnicity, and origin. I read these rulings against a backdrop of my own research and the biographical interviews that I conducted, as well as the extensive documentation produced by journalists, human rights organisations, and evacuation networks regarding Russia’s recruitment practices. These disproportionately target the poor, ethnicised/racialised minorities, and illegalised migrants (Bolokan 2024).

The contrast between what is known through this work and what is recognised in legal reasoning brings epistemic injustice to the fore. In Fricker’s terms, testimonial injustice arises when courts discount the credibility of those subject to coercive recruitment, framing their experiences as exceptional. In one ruling, for example, the judge acknowledged reports of overrepresentation of Crimean Tatars in the military draft but rejected their evidentiary value because ethnicised and racialised targeting was not explicitly declared in Putin’s mobilisation decree. Here, the absence of formal policy is taken to be proof of non-discrimination, thus discounting lived realities. Injustice is also evident in the way courts frame recruitment as “arbitrary” rather than systemically classed. Coerced recruitment does not typically occur in banks, but rather on construction sites, farms, or in factories. It also does not occur in orthodox churches, but rather near mosques, where undocumented workers are also present—people who are particularly vulnerable and therefore easier to coerce and recruit. Men are moreover not taken out of expensive cars, but rather identified through surveillance cameras in subway stations and removed at the station exits. In court decisions, both testimonial and hermeneutical injustice become evident, as differences in the recruitment of social groups—such as conscripts, undocumented migrants, prisoners, or the unhoused—are not recognised as discrimination and targeted marginalisation, but rather presented as evidence of generality.

Naming ontic injustice

What I encountered in these rulings was not only a failure to hear or understand, but an underlying normativity about what men are expected to do: serve unconditionally in times of war. Refusals to join the military were dismissed on the grounds that they did not stem from a generalised political stance. Instead, courts ruled that such men could be expected to fulfil their civic duty, “even in an authoritarian state”.

This led me to Jenkins’ concept of ontic injustice: the wrongs done to individuals by virtue of the unjust constraints and expectations attached to their social kind membership. In this case, being a man means being obligated to kill and die for one’s nation. In the rulings I analysed, the human right to conscientious objection (affirmed by the European Court of Human Rights in 2011) was sidelined in favour of the male obligation to fight. This ontic injustice is invisible within the current legal reasoning because it is constitutive of that reasoning.

Methodologically, recognising ontic injustice requires a shift in approach. It is no longer sufficient to focus solely on what is said or left unsaid in courtrooms, or which sources were cited to justify legal decisions. We have to attend to the social scripts silently affirmed within legal reasoning. What assumptions about masculinity, national duty, and citizenship are embedded in this jurisprudence?

To make ontic injustice towards men visible, I emphasise that refusing to participate in war is, by definition, a political act. Regardless of the individual motivations behind it, such refusal challenges the foundational social contract between men and the state: the expectation to unconditionally kill and to die in times of war for one’s nation. Acts of war refusal should thus be recognised as acts of political opposition. While one could certainly argue that legal discourse lacks the appropriate conceptual tools and epistemic horizons to name and interpret structural inequalities (epistemic injustice), the deeper cause of this injustice lies in the political unwillingness of decision-makers to integrate the human right to conscientious objection into asylum policy. Courts do have the legal capacity to classify draft evaders as members of a persecuted political group and to grant them asylum. Yet they mostly choose not to, thereby reinforcing the very injustices that they could challenge.