The Baltic Studies Program presents
Lelde Luika, Postdoctoral Associate, Juris Padegs:
“Claiming MyVoice: Prefigurative Politics and Democratic Activism in Eastern Europe.”
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.