Baltic | Claiming MyVoice: Prefigurative Politics and Democratic Activism in Eastern Europe with Lelde Luika
Prefiguration is generally associated with anarchist and anti-representation strains of radical democratic tradition, holding that its key political goals – equality, participation, and autonomy – should be practised here-and-now rather than in a distant future. It has thus been rarely connected to activism in Eastern and Central Europe, given the general weakness of the Left and anti-capitalist movements in the region. However, prefiguration offers a significant conceptual lens to analyse democratisation as an open-ended and indeterminate process, applicable well beyond its traditional contexts. It captures how meanings and forms of democratic practice are reimagined, including through engagement with existing political institutions. This is illustrate with a discussion of citizens’ initiative platform MyVoice in Latvia. Founded by a grassroots group in 2011, the platform has grown into a major venue for direct political participation in the country, while retaining its independence from the state. Prefiguration challenges simplistic binaries of success and failure when assessing democratic activism and instead underlines the capacity to collectively create and enact new political realities in the present.
This event is sponsored by the Baltic Studies Program.
This event is hybrid.
Speakers
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.