Lelde Luika

Lelde Luika’s research intersects democratic theory, discourse analysis, history of political thought, and Baltic and east European studies. She is interested in how collective political imaginaries are shaped in postsocialist societies, bridging contemporary political theory with studies of democratisation, political representation, and social activism in the region.

Luika’s doctoral dissertation (University of Tartu, 2023), which won the Estonian National Research Award for the best dissertation in social sciences, reassessed the role of representative institutions within radical democratic perspectives by exploring citizens’ alienation from the state in Latvia. She has held positions as a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES), Södertörn University in Sweden, a visiting researcher at KU Leuven, and guest lecturer at the Latvian Academy of Culture.

At Yale, Luika will examine how the interplay between digitalisation and political mobilisation – such as the citizen initiative platform MyVoice in Latvia – is reshaping practices and meanings of democracy in the region. She is also developing a book project that explores democratisation as a continuous and indeterminate feature of politics, a perspective that has rarely been contextualised within eastern Europe despite the region’s multiple waves of political transformations.