History and Anthropology

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After Utopia: Leftist imaginaries and activist

politics in the postsocialist world

Larisa Kurtović & Nelli Sargsyan

To cite this article: Larisa Kurtović & Nelli Sargsyan (2019) After Utopia: Leftist imaginaries
and activist politics in the postsocialist world, History and Anthropology, 30:1, 1-19, DOI:
10.1080/02757206.2018.1530669

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2018.1530669

Published online: 26 Mar 2019.

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HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY
2019, VOL. 30, NO. 1, 1–19
https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2018.1530669

After Utopia: Leftist imaginaries and activist politics in the

postsocialist world
Larisa Kurtović and Nelli Sargsyan

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
In this introduction to special issue ‘After Utopia: Leftist Imaginaries Political activism;
and Activist Politics in the Postsocialist World’, we explore the postsocialism; leftist politics;
theoretical implications for thinking about activism as a form of historical imagination; social
movements
historically situated practice in the former socialist world. Building
on insights from the papers included in this issue, which draw on
ethnographic research in Ukraine, Armenia, Bosnia and along the
Balkan refugee route, our introduction considers both the fragility
and resilience of leftist imaginaries in the aftermath of lost
utopian dreams of socialism and the betrayed promises of post
1989 democratic transformation. We do so in four moves, (i) by
offering a reframing of postsocialism as a problem-space of
historical and political consciousness; (ii) by interrogating the
figure of the activist in its self-conscious and ethnographically
embedded guises; (iii) by heeding Sherry Ortner’s call to think
beyond ‘dark anthropology’ and finally, (iv) by considering what it
might mean to imagine, and model, political alternatives in both
activist and scholarly work.

Over the last decade, commentators writing from various ends of the political spectrum
have cast the postsocialist world at large, and Eastern Europe and Eurasia in particular,
the ground zero of authoritarian encroachment and growing ascendance of reactionary
values and political forms (see for example, Dzenovska and Kurtović 2018, also Gille 2010;
Gullette and Heathershaw 2015; Kudaibergenova 2016). Such problematic tropes persist
despite, on the one hand, the formidable efforts of scholars to offer a more critical portrayal
of political life in the postsocialist world (for example, Yurchak 2006; Boyer 2005; Greenberg
2014; Jansen 2015; Razsa 2015; Klumbytė 2014; Ishkanian 2016; Sargsyan 2018; Dubuisson
2010), and on the other hand, the occasional Euro-American fascination with phenomena
like the ‘Pussy Riot’ or the Ukrainian Maidan (Bernstein 2013; Jonson 2016; Gapova 2015;
Yurchak 2014). These spectacular political events indicate that in actuality, postsocialist pol-
itical space is inhabited by a diverse array of contestations and forms of political experimen-
tation – even if these formations remain poorly understood. The continued fascination with
‘those that survived communism’ (for example, Drakulić 1993; also, Gessen 2017) suggests
that former socialist world somehow still exists as a mirror, a peculiar other, which can,
and perhaps ought to be mined for comparative insights (for example, Boyer and
Yurchak 2010; Boyer 2013a) in a world gripped by a renewed sense of upheaval.

CONTACT Larisa Kurtović lkurtovi@uottawa.ca School of Sociological and Anthropological Studies, University of
Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 L. KURTOVIĆ AND N. SARGSYAN

This collection of essays challenges both the dominant representations of postsocialist

political subjectivity and the widespread tendency to hyperfocus on specific moments of
political interruption. Instead, we take as our object of analysis the quotidian work of pol-
itical activism taking place across the postsocialist world – in other words, we privilege
slow moving forms of political action in order to catch glimpse of a present suspended
by ruptures and futures desired and yet to be imagined (see Dzenovska and De Genova
2018). We seek to capture the weight of as well as see beyond one of these formative
breaks through our title ‘After Utopia’ – which hints at our preoccupation with the increas-
ing elusiveness of leftist horizons in a postsocialist world and the sense of urgency we
encounter in the field about the need to replenish contemporary political imaginaries.
For us, ‘utopia’ is a shorthand for the humanist and modernist horizons that shaped politics
and social life in what was once known as the ‘Second World’ – and a type of political hope
that had underwritten many state socialist projects (see Razsa 2015, 6). After 1989, this
utopian horizon of socialist politics was replaced by the powerful yet also elusive promises
of more livable life in a capitalist democracy. The disappointments that followed gener-
ated new ‘discursive closures’ whose final effect was not only the defeat of the utopian
telos of modernity (Buck-Morss 2002), but also the loss of meaningful political alternatives
(Petrović 2015; also Greenberg 2014).
Like Maple Razsa’s Bastards of Utopia, we too are interested in moving beyond the crisis
of political imagination that lies in the wake of modernist conceptions of progress, which
dominated twentieth century political life (Holloway in Razsa 2015, 10; also Brown 2001).
Approaching postsocialism as an intersectional experience and a geopolitically sensitive
form of knowledge, this collection of articles therefore explores the ways in which the his-
torical experience of socialism’s fall and the subsequent disillusionment with nationalist
politics and neoliberal governance, come to impact present-day activism in Armenia,
Ukraine, Bosnia–Herzegovina, and along the newly emerging transnational Balkan route,
created by the movement of migrants and people who have been refugeed. Importantly,
our focus is on the ‘Left’ not because we do not recognize that activisms fall on all sides of
the political spectrum, but because we are specifically interested in how the loss of state
socialism as a world-making project (and the subsequent failures of postsocialist ‘civil
society building’) has impacted new generations of progressive, antinationalist, anarchist,
and social-justice oriented activists.1
We recognize it has been nearly thirty years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and that the
world which our interlocutors and we inhabit is a different one, less confident and more
sombre. The deposing of once victorious liberalism as the chief political cosmology of our
time (Mahmud 2016; Westbrook 2016) and the challenge posed by the reorganized and
revitalized right-leaning movements in Europe and the US, makes all the more urgent
the question whether new, less exclusionary and more livable worlds, can be produced
out of the wreckages of our political present. Importantly, although this special issue har-
nesses situated and geographically anchored ethnographic insights, it is our contention
that in order to think about post-utopian politics, we might need to rethink ‘area’ and
do away with the hegemony of national categories altogether. We consider the decentring
of nationalist politics a particularly important move in a special issue that brings into com-
parative perspective activist efforts in former Yugoslavia, Ukraine and Armenia, areas of
the world where nationalism and in some cases, growing militarism and securitization
(related to identifying various ‘enemies of the state’ including Leftists and migrants),
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 3

have been a dominant political force in official politics for over twenty years. Our focus on
leftist activists, who if not openly antinationalist (see Channell-Justice, 2019), certainly seek
to move beyond the hegemony of nationalist categories, is also important in this respect.
Our move is therefore deliberate and analytical, sometimes explicitly so; for example,
El-Shaarawi and Razsa (2019) follow on the trail of the critique of methodological nation-
alism (see Wimmer and Schiller 2002; Chernilo 2011) and offer a compelling model for how
to think politics in a non-national and simultaneously grounded and situated way.
El-Shaarawi and Razsa’s ethnography also recuperates internationalist histories of the
Non-Aligned Movement, which come to matter during the ongoing refugee crisis in some-
times surprising ways.
As a group of collaborators, we follow activists seeking to imagine and enact alternative
futures in the aftermath of state socialist projects. We are interested in the broader theor-
etical implications of thinking about political work and imagination as historical artefacts –
not only as situated and contextually bound – but really as always providing a certain kind
of relationship to historical narratives, modes of emplotment and horizons of expectations
(Scott 2004; 2014; Bonilla 2015; Kurtović and Hromadžić 2017). As this collection of essays
makes clear, there is nothing straightforward about this relationship between history and
political action; this relationship is profoundly contingent, and to understand it, one has to
also develop a more sophisticated theory of history and historicity itself. We imagine one
such avenue by rereading theories of performativity which see the work of historical
interpretation not merely as an act of documenting, but producing new worlds (see, for
example, LaCapra 1983; Rancière 1994; Koselleck 1985).
Our orientation to the work of historical experience, residual categories, infrastructures
and archives, as they become remediated for new and emergent projects, also places a
demand on us to rethink postsocialism as a horizon for interrogating contemporary
forms of political consciousness. Although the term ‘postsocialism’ has recently come
under attack by observers from within and without (for example, Thelen 2011; Chelcea
and Druta 2016; Dunn and Verdery 2011), in this introduction, we insist on dwelling in
the afterwardsness (Laplanche 1999) of state socialist experience in order to mobilize
anew its critical capacities. In doing so, we also assert that it is impossible to fully chart
out the contours of contemporary political contention – shaped as it is by long-term pro-
cesses like NGOization, professionalization and state cooptation of activism, and new
emergencies, like the ongoing refugee crisis or the rise of the global Right – without think-
ing of them in relation to legacies of the Cold War, and in particular, the crisis and margin-
alization of leftist imaginaries which coincide with the rise of neoliberalism.
We make clear in this special issue that the figure of an activist is itself a site of contesta-
tion and confusion. Activists are often read as the most agentive of all subjects – those that
seek to challenge the existing norms and model alternative forms of life (Dave 2012;
Holston 2009; Ishkanian 2015; cf. Mahmood 2005). But in the context of the former socialist
world, activists have historically had a more ambiguous and oblique role (Yurchak 2006;
also Razsa 2015; Greenberg 2014; Hemment 2015). This complexity was at least in part
related to the fact that socialist political subjectivities were often caricatured and
caught between two oppositional sets of narratives: the hyperpoliticized promises of
emancipation and compulsory modes of participation associated with the state, and
liberal tropes of totalitarianism, ‘captive minds’, complicit greengrocers and brave dissi-
dents. In an effort to think beyond the exceedingly mediated and most visible
4 L. KURTOVIĆ AND N. SARGSYAN

representations of political action, this special issue highlights how postsocialism (as an
aftermath) makes us notice forms of activism that otherwise go un-amplified and un-nour-
ished, but which enable various creative forms of citizen engagement as well as collabor-
ations between those who are often labelled (or self-identify) as activists and (activist-)
researchers, along with groups on the move (often labelled as migrants), and people
who do not self-identify as activists.
Hence, we are seeking not only to enrich our understanding of what counts for activism
and how activisms function differently in different postsocialist contexts, but also to pay
attention to the potential worlds that emerge from them. As we examine the multiple under-
standings and engagements with the figure of the activist, we hold together this figure’s
meaningful promises that animate the political imagination for desiring a different future
in some places (such as Bosnia Herzegovina and Ukraine) and the fruitful abandonment of
the figure in order to be able to desire a different future in other sites (such as Armenia).
Each paper in this special issue uniquely showcases the conceptual and methodological
insights arising out of the ethnographic study of activism in the postsocialist world. In
doing so, they seek to make a larger contribution to the growing anthropological literature
on political and social movements. We illustrate that postsocialist political contexts offer
opportunities for problematizing and enriching ongoing debates on the politics of late-
liberal disenchantment (for example, Greenberg 2014; Bonilla 2015), prefigurative action
(for example, Graeber 2009; Razsa 2015; Dzenovska and Arenas 2012), intimacy and
affect (for example, Povinelli 2006; Dave 2012; Howe 2013), memory as political work (Con-
nerton 1989; Verdery 1999; Boym 2001; Eyal 2004; Kaneff 2004; Oushakine 2007; Lee 2016)
and the impact of transnational connections that nowadays animate the political work of
many groups (Juris 2008; Alexandrakis 2016; also Graeber 2009).
In addition, these articles are interested in posing a few fundamental questions of their
own, such as: What might and might not count as ‘activism’? How do sedimented histories
become an arena of innovation and experimentation? How are ongoing (political) efforts to
respond to current events and to the exigencies of the present affecting the work of activist
contention? What worlds become discernable when we re-evaluate our understanding of
‘activism’ and political work in general? What political horizons are made visible when we
abandon the constraints of ‘nation-state’ and the violences that maintaining its borders
take? And, last but not least, in what ways does the very ethnography of political work
depend on and become affected by the positionality of the researchers themselves?
In what follows we explore key themes that help situate our special issue, namely, post-
socialism and the problem of history, the figure of the activist, the practice of anthropology
of activism, and modelling political alternatives. Clarifying our approach to postsocialism
and its historicity will allow our readers to more productively engage with the contri-
butions in this special issue. Pointing to the multiplicity of ways in which the figure of
the activist is deployed in different postsocialist places with different histories will
enable us to think more carefully about the connections between history and futurity.
By situating our collection in relation to anthropologies of activism we affirm our commit-
ment to the kind of research practice that allows us to caringly and meaningfully engage
with our interlocutors. And lastly, by discussing alternative political futurities we gesture to
potentialities that are life-affirming, in that they openly challenge and seek to combat con-
ditions that are producing structural and social violence (Gilmore in Chari and Donner
2010).
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 5

Postsocialism and the problem of history

By exploring what becomes of leftist politics after the demise of state-socialism in what
was once called the ‘Second World’, this collection of essays sets out to understand the
contemporary forms of political action in relation to the loss of the utopian political aspira-
tions marked by the global event that was to be the so-called ‘end of history’ (Fukuyama
2002). Sites that anchor our ethnographic insights – Armenia, Ukraine and former Yugosla-
via – have distinct and often singular socialist and postsocialist histories – a characteristic
that, in our view, also makes them into attractive and productive vantage points for think-
ing about contemporary leftist imaginaries and political practices. All of us are also writing
amidst or in the aftermath of massive protests and/or situated political crises. The work of
Channell-Justice explores the complex field that constituted the Ukrainian Maidan, while
El-Shaarawi and Razsa write from the frontlines of the refugee crisis in the Balkans. Kurtović
focuses on archiving efforts taking place amidst and in the aftermath of the 2014 Bosnian
uprising, while Sargsyan gives an account of feminist practices that emerged, and were
subsequently dismissed, in a climate of political ‘apathy’ (see Greenberg 2011) in post-
Soviet Armenia, only to be widely re-employed at a massive scale during the recent,
May 2018 protests, which managed to force a regime change at the national scale. Our
emphasis on ‘slow moving’ forms of activist work therefore should not be misunderstood
as an act of sidelining actual political events (c.f. Povinelli 2016; Das 1996); rather, it reflects
our commitment to demonstrating how moments of acute political mobilization take
place amidst enduring forms of political struggle that continue even after protesters
leave the streets.
Duration also matters to us in another sense. As different as our ethnographic sites are,
they also share the historical experience of the fall of socialism and the subsequent post-
socialist transformation. Anthropologists of postsocialist transformation have from the
start sought to problematize and critically engage with the normative readings of postso-
cialist history associated with the discourse of ‘transitology’ which imagined a postsocialist
future as a liberal-capitalist one (Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Verdery 1996; Hann 1994). In
critiquing the unilinearity of this way of thinking about postsocialist transformations, these
scholars also sought to assert the value of people’s lived experience and the ethnographic
realities they encountered on the ground, without dismissing them as evidence of unfin-
ished or failed transition (for example, Humphrey 2002; Creed 1998; Berdahl, Bunzl, and
Lampland 2000).
In parallel with this, theoretically inclined analysts also worked to move away from con-
ceptualization of postsocialism as a mere problem of periodization, and instead reimagine
it as a critical standpoint, not unlike postcolonialism (Chari and Verdery 2009; see also
Rogers 2010). Political theorists like Nancy Fraser (1997) and Susan Buck-Morss (2002)
were helpful in pushing forward this line of critique, in so far as their own work posited
that postsocialism was a global political condition (Gille 2010). Buck-Morss (2002)
argued especially poignantly that the end of one utopian project – socialism – spelled
the end of utopian promises of capitalist modernity.
In Eastern Europe and Eurasia, the term postsocialism did not travel everywhere with
the same effects or intensity – whether or not people understood the demise of socialism
as a key event in need of political reflection and reckoning depended on their location. For
example, former Yugoslavs, and especially Bosnians, placed this period in ‘parentheses’
6 L. KURTOVIĆ AND N. SARGSYAN

because the historical event that caused actual harm and demanded more urgent reckon-
ing was the Bosnian war (Gilbert 2006, Gilbert et al. 2008; also Jansen 2006). What’s more,
the former socialist world had radically different attitudes towards its socialist past – which
often mapped onto questions of historical experience and past legitimacy. Central Europe,
newly independent Baltic states, former Yugoslavia and former Soviet republics in the
Caucasus and Central Asia experienced state socialism in quite varied ways, ranging
from politically emancipatory to eroding of sovereignty and even colonial (Grant 1995;
2009; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003; Dzenovska 2013; also Moore 2001). Channell-Justice’s interlo-
cutors (2019), for example, nowadays resort to reading postcolonial critical theory – rather
than scholarship on postsocialism – in order to try to make sense of the Ukrainian
predicament.
In addition to the heterogeneity of experiences and discursive frames, postsocialism is a
slippery tool of analysis of political life. Firstly, as a mode of critique, postsocialist orien-
tation appears to gaze backward (Rethmann 2015) and in doing so, it disrupts linear con-
ceptions of time and its concomitant categories of growth and progress. Depending on
context, such a temporal disordering can be seen as an opportunity for subversion and
invention, or alternatively, a form of historical injury (that is, an accusation of backward-
ness) that precludes the possibility of thinking and doing otherwise. In fact, one of the cri-
tiques of ‘postsocialism’ (as an analytic) highlights the dangers and myopia of such a
powerful, overarching interpretive frame for all social thought and action. Secondly, this
orientation towards what was, posits the postsocialist subject as one that is perpetually
stuck in the past, hopelessly nostalgic, overdetermined by loss and unable to grasp that
which lays on the horizon or imagine new alternatives (see Boyer 2006). Activists on the
left seem especially vulnerable to the accusation of being beholden by this kind of melan-
choly (Benjamin 1974 [1930], Brown 1999; also Traverso 2016). Leftists’ nostalgia for all
things socialist (Rethmann 2015) can be read as a form of cruel optimism (Berlant 2011)
when it becomes a form of desire that stifles one’s capacity to act. Ironically, as Dzenovska
and Kurtović (n.d.) argue, in the postsocialist space, it is most often the ‘actually existing’
socialist-era words that are objects of nostalgia among both our interlocutors and scholars
– and not socialism as an intellectual tradition (c.f. Boyer 2013b; also Channell-Justice,
2019). At the same time, as Sargsyan (2019) suggests, negative perceptions of Soviet-
era actually-existing socialism and its postsocialist reevaluation make it difficult for Arme-
nian feminists – whose political discourses and practices pivot around revalorization of
social ownership and collective care – to gesture to a socialist future.
Essays in this selection, then, deliberately disrupt the frame of left-wing melancholy by
documenting various emerging forms of political action whose connection to the past is
complex and evolving. In so doing, they call for a less overdetermined understanding of
the postsocialist analytic itself. As evidenced by our ethnographies, as a form of historical
consciousness, postsocialism does not have a clear trajectory or political content.2 This is
why the question ‘What does it mean to be a leftist after socialism?’ (Razsa 2015) seems a
crucial one for scholars of activism in the former socialist world, whether one emphasizes
reinvention or critical re-valuation, like Razsa does, or continuity of political contention, like
we are doing here. If past is often a resource that people use to stage contemporary forms
of political contention (for example, Bonilla 2015; Scott 2014; Lee 2016), then what forms
do these resources take? Contributors to this issue show how that toolbox can contain
elements as varied as philosophical ideas, archival traces of socialist era associationism
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 7

or actual political networks that have existed for a long time. Kurtović, for example, gives
an account of various activist initiatives which seek to harness the traces of socialist-era
political organizations, including those bringing together antifascist women and
workers, in order to replenish contemporary political imaginaries even while they offer
critical and antiromantic readings of socialist era histories. El-Shaarawi and Razsa show
how historical legacies might take a form of regional activist networks that can be mobi-
lized in order to stage responses to contemporary crises. Channell-Justice considers how
the political coordinates and the very figure of the leftist is itself haunted by socialist and
postsocialist histories. Sargsyan illustrates how the historical toolbox of political work
requires a creative upgrade and careful recasting to cultivate political imagination in a
now differently precarious reality. For Sargsyan’s interlocutors, the central question is
how to do so without being coopted by rival agendas, which are developing at various
scales (and involve fellow leftists, nationalists, state agents, and corporations, to name a
few).
On the whole, these interventions point to the necessity of drawing upon (as well as
drawing up) a more robust theory of history and historicity in making sense of contempor-
ary forms of political action. Several intellectual traditions, from White’s metahistory, Kosel-
leck’s conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, Derridian
deconstruction, Freudian psychoanalysis to various strands of intellectual history and col-
lective memory, teach us that as a social, political and biographical fact, ‘history’ always
presents itself as a problem-space. This insight offers an opportunity for anthropological
analysis as well – an opportunity that has already been taken up by many scholars of con-
temporary political life, especially those whose research is focused on the postcolonial
world (a fact we, as scholars of postsocialist world, find telling). For example, Jennifer
Cole (2001) works to make sense of her Malagasy interlocutors’ initial denial of memory
of colonialism (and its subsequent political re-activation) by combining Halbwachs’s
theory of socially constructed and communally negotiated nature of collective memory,
with a more oblique and decidedly anti-functionalist Freudian reading of memory as a
site of repression and inaccessibility that enables the past to have multiple meanings.
White’s attention to historiographic genres of emplotment makes its way into David
Scott’s analysis of the spectres of the Haitian revolution (2004), allowing Scott to consider
both the political and epistemological consequences of loss of utopian horizons that once
animated postcolonial Caribbean space. Mike McGovern activates Ricoeur’s entanglement
between time and narrative in order to demonstrate how postsocialist Guinea was able to
prevent the political fate of its West African neighbours devastated by ethnic conflict by
drawing on a well-defined and idealized image of the future (2017, 12). Indeed, these scho-
lars’ preoccupations with residual and emergent conceptions of futurity (and their political
purchase in the present) echo Koselleck’s seminal thesis about the co-constitution of
(1985) past and the future. Our intervention shares with these authors a preoccupation
with the political purchase of these ‘futures past’ (Koselleck 1985).
We find it is helpful to think about postsocialism as that which Raymond Williams the-
orized as the residual: that which has ‘effectively been formed by the past, but … is still
active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past,
but as an effective element of the present’ (Williams 1977, 122). Like its companion
term ‘the emergent’, the residual helps reveal characteristics of our political present.
Residual elements are subject to ‘reinterpretation, dilution, projection, discriminating
8 L. KURTOVIĆ AND N. SARGSYAN

inclusion and exclusion’, and in their case, the work of selective tradition is especially
evident (123). Conceptually, then, all our contributors pay close attention to how
different residual elements of the geopolitical pasts at their ethnographic sites intertwine
with the ‘discursive closures’ (Petrović 2015) and impasses of the present to prefigure
something else.
Analyses attuned to historical experience and imagination therefore require careful
work of interrogation that remains attentive to both the context of their emergence
and their effects. Indeed, we find that interpretations of historical experience carry an
enormous political purchase, and often have unintended consequences. Discourses
about the past do not merely reflect actual historical experience – they are a form of per-
formative speech that has the capacity to transform the world (Austin 1975; Derrida 1988;
Butler 1997). This is why it is not sufficient, in our view, to simply announce the end of post-
socialism as a period (see also Stoler 2016) – because the impact of historical experience
and its narrative accounts is profoundly contingent and never-ending. This is not only
evident in the postsocialist world: we see similar dynamics at play in the recent clashes
between antifascists and white nationalists on the University of Virginia campus
sparked by removal of Confederate statues, or closer to our ethnographic sites, the
massive nationalist protests in Warsaw on Polish Independence Day in November 2017.

The figure of the activist in our anthropological practice

In addition to asserting the need for a careful rethinking of historicity and postsocialist
aftermaths, this special issue seeks to interrogate the activist as a certain kind of an ethno-
graphic and conceptual figure. In her work on queer activism in India, Naisargi Dave (2011)
approaches activism as an ethical practice that critiques normativity, creates alternatives
to the already-established norms, and creatively practices these alternatives relationally
(3). This definition of activism parallels Wright’s more praxis-oriented description of eman-
cipatory critical social science work. Wright points out the tasks for such social scientific
work: systematic diagnosis and critique of the world as it exists; envisioning viable alterna-
tives; and understanding the obstacles, possibilities, and dilemmas of transformation
(Chari and Donner 2010, 82). Activism, much like ethnography, Dave (2011) suggests,
needs to undo the stable assumptions on which it depends for it to become an ethical
practice animated by the tension between ‘stability and invention, knowing and unknow-
ing’ (15).
Such an open-ended, ethics-centered, and praxis-oriented understanding of an activist,
which many of us in this issue find useful for working with our, often very differently posi-
tioned interlocutors, has the potential to deepen the situated conceptualizations of the
activist figure in the former socialist world. In his ethnography of the last Soviet generation,
Alexei Yurchak suggests that the term ‘activist’ had long been a site of problematization,
and existed in relation to two other ideal types: ‘dissidents’ and ‘normal people’ (Yurchak
2006, 103–104). From the vantage point of ‘normal people’, socialist era activists were seen
as idealists with a (too) sincere attachment to the promises of the socialist project, particu-
larly because they were striving to make state socialism live up to its true potential through
valiant acts of citizenship. Dissidents, by contrast, saw the entire socialist system as irrepar-
ably flawed, and ‘called upon fellow citizens to refuse official falsities’ (106). In their quest
to speak truth to power, dissidents captured the hearts and minds of the liberal West,
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 9

which saw them as true fighters against totalitarianism. However, this is not how dissidents
were necessarily perceived back home; the issue was not their criticism of the state, but
rather, the direct manner in which it was offered.
Yurchak argues that activists and dissidents, in fact, had a lot in common, because they
actually took the authoritative discourse of the state at face value, privileging its constative
dimension – a tendency that made them stand in stark contrast to the third category of
‘normal people’ whose relationship to official ideology was far more ambiguous.
‘Normal people’, in contrast to activists and dissidents alike, understood the norms of
Soviet society differently, and did not become consumed by truth-seeking or causing pro-
blems for others with their largely insignificant acts of protest. For ‘normal people’, dissi-
dents’ critiques of the system seemed as obvious, silly, and uninteresting as activists’
commitments and campaigns to make it better. This is because ‘normal people’ read
the authoritative discourse of the socialist state by and large in its performative dimension;
they were neither pro nor anti state, but svoi (108).
Since the fall of state socialist regimes, the figure of the activist has undergone signifi-
cant transformation, thanks in part to the newly globalized political imaginaries, forms of
regulatory power and new kinds of public practices to which activists have been central. As
a consequence, contemporary anthropological literature on activist movements, in both
the postsocialist world and beyond, is especially attuned to translocal nature of activists’
struggles, and the ways in which local forms of political work intersect with global social
movements and NGOization, as well as new forms of governmentality, including democ-
racy promotion and human rights (for example, Hodžić 2017; Paley 2001; Greenberg 2014;
Hemment 2007; Helms 2013).
Ethnographic methods have also been effective in identifying unconventional types
of political engagement, which may or may not register as ‘proper activism’ (for
example, Haugerud 2013; Hetherington 2011; Yurchak 2008a, 2008b; Kurtović 2012).
Importantly, other anthropologists have criticized the disciplinary tendency to fore-
ground modes of subjectivity that focus on resistance to power (Mahmood 2005; also
Abu Abu-Lughod 1990), and particularly those forms of political action that seem to
offer hope to anthropologists themselves. Foucauldian critique of subjectification
upon which this scholarship rests seeks to destabilize notions of emancipation, which
are central to many leftist activist movements, particularly those that were active in
the twentieth century. Yet, we find that activist struggles today do not fetishize emanci-
pation in the same way, but often focus on responding to crises and building new modes
of sociality and new forms of togetherness. The activists we know have more grounded
political desires, which are often not wedded to specific ideological programmes (see
Dzenovska and De Genova 2018), and see themselves as deeply embedded in and
indebted to the contexts in which their political struggle unfolds.
Hence, we highlight the social entanglements and the multifaceted ways in which the
figure of the activist can be conjured up in relationship to its different historical trajectories
and conditions of emergence. Given the fact that postsocialist political subjectivity is loaded
with discourses of failure (as we discussed earlier), the figure of the activist can be conten-
tious, even elusive. In Kurtović, we see activist archivists being accused of wasting their own,
and possibly also, others’ time, precisely because they are not merely responding to crises
like activists are supposed to. What’s more, as Sargsyan’s contribution shows, our politically
engaged interlocutors may feel ambivalence about using the term.
10 L. KURTOVIĆ AND N. SARGSYAN

In reflecting on the place of Soviet history in various activist efforts in Ukraine, Channell-
Justice shows the different ways in which right-wing activists and leftist activists engage
with Soviet history to animate their political work, the former seeing the Soviets as oppres-
sors and their own world as in need of decommunization, the latter engaging with con-
troversial historical figures as complex and instructive. Her intervention makes clear an
important and resonant point – that activists are not only those on the Left-end of the
spectrum, or those who act in opposition to state power (see also Hemment 2015; and
Dzenovska and De Genova 2018). What’s more, Channell-Justice speaks to the importance
of recognizing multiplicity in leftist politics in Ukraine, which while potentially margina-
lized and fraught, and challenged by processes of decommunization and right wing
groups, nevertheless refuses to be dismissed.
Most of our interlocutors are both locally situated and connected to their peers’ trans-
national, radical political struggles, which fight against various injustices and seek to build
more livable futures. In her article in this special issue, which documents the efforts to
build activist-archives that help recover socialist associationist practices in Bosnia–Herze-
govina, Kurtović highlights the open-ended nature of what counts as political work
(because archiving might not be an obvious answer). The purpose of activist-archives,
as one of Kurtović’s interlocutors points out, is salvaging a politically active and affectively
laden past, and actively disseminating its traces in the current moment of political exhaus-
tion in Bosnia–Herzegovina.
In their article in this special issue, El-Shaarawi and Razsa focus on collaborative efforts
of refugees and non-refugee radical activists to stage a response to the new exigencies
and crises that have created the so-called Balkan migrant route. In the second part of
the paper, for example, the authors show how Slovenian activists drew upon the rich tra-
dition of radical and minoritarian migrant organizing, originally mounted in response to
exclusionary logics of the Slovenian state and EU integration, to come to aid of refugees
from the Middle East, and in so doing, also came to redefine the contours of local activism.
Their intervention makes clear that activists rely on sedimented histories in order to make
their work legible to local publics.
By contrast, in Armenia, Sargsyan’s analysis returns us to the importance of historically
sedimented and highly contextual modes of problematization of the figure of the activist
(Yurchak 2006) and shows how this label becomes a source of contention and strife,
especially when the word ‘activist’ is coopted by the state and actively and purposefully
delegitimized in the public sphere. Sargsyan’s interlocutors, who formerly engaged in
direct political action, suggest that it is precisely the distinction between activists and
regular people inherited from socialism and successfully imposed by the postsocialist
state-owned media that helps produce the large-scale political apathy in postsocialist
Armenia. What’s more, this discursive distinction has had an impact on the leftist-activist
circles in the country, insofar as it has helped construct activists as highly educated, some-
what privileged and mobile subjects. These formulations create hierarchies between those
who studied in the West (and thus should have more highly-valued perspective) and those
who did not. As a consequence, other kinds of important work of cultivating political con-
sciousness, which might not have this cosmopolitan dimension, are rendered unrecogniz-
able and invisible.
Like some of our interlocutors, who contest the postsocialist deployment of the term
‘activist’, we too recognize that activists sometimes come in unconventional forms, and
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 11

may include those who communally fix their neighbourhood road or demand accountabil-
ity by asking for a functioning elevator or pension reform. In our issue, however, we focus
on people who are involved in self-conscious political projects aimed toward replenishing
imaginations and enabling more livable, and less violent and exclusionary, futures.
That being said, our papers make clear that the ways in which the figure of the activist is
interpellated and manages to take up public space are far from settled. The meaning of
activism depends both on the historical trajectories and past (authorized and unauthor-
ized) forms of political engagements, but it is also subject to exigencies of the present
and the ongoing political shifts, such as the ones documented by Channell-Justice and
Sargsyan. The tension surrounding the category of activist also helps foreshadow
another question, namely, what exactly is an anthropology of activism? Does an anthropol-
ogy of activism entail a certain orientation towards engaged scholarship? How do we
make sense of our own embodied histories in relation to the sites we study, and the
relationships we forge in the field? And if we follow Naisargi Dave, how can we make
sure that our ethnographic engagement is an ethical practice (Dave 2011)? As we
conjure up the figure of the activist ethnographically, we are also called upon to reflect
on our own role as ethnographers of activism.

Beyond dark anthropology: ethics and politics of anthropological

engagement
Reflecting on the various activist-anthropological practices different scholars come to
understand anthropological engagement in different terms. Sherry Ortner (2016) observes
that much of anthropological work after 1980s could be described under the heading of
‘dark anthropology’ – the kind of anthropology that had to focus on ‘the harsh dimensions
of social life’ (47) in order to document the various crises and violences caused by the
increased proliferation of neoliberal capitalism. The paradigm of dark anthropology
maps onto what Ferguson (in Razsa 2015) calls ‘politics of the antis’ – the kind of activist
positionality that is always reactive and destined to be an oppositional force. Razsa and
other anthropologists like David Graeber (2009), assert instead the need for a prefigurative
practice that seeks to model the forms of life and social organization that it wishes to see in
the world (see also Rethmann 2013). Uri Gordon (2018)3 has recently termed prefigurative
politics the kind of anti-authoritarian practice that foregrounds the unity of means and
ends, meaning that it ‘fights domination while constructing […] alternatives’. Indeed,
the growing literature on prefigurative politics in anthropology (for example, Razsa and
Kurnik 2012; Juris 2012; Bonilla 2015; Rosario 2014; Arenas 2014; also Kurtović and Hro-
madžić 2017; Sargsyan 2018) not only documents various forms of experimental practice
originally associated with feminist, anti-globalist, environmentalist, LGBT and queer(ing)
struggles, but also highlights both the ethical dimension of activist work and the
urgency of producing more livable futures. As anthropological concern with both lost
and desired futures grows, so does the need to identify, acknowledge and grapple with
‘the art of the possible’ in its various guises (see Guyer 2009). In a similar spirit, Maskens
and Blanes (2013) make a case for a ‘romanticist anthropology’, suggesting that an acti-
vist-anthropologist participates in a movement attempting to contribute to ‘changes
‘for the good’ of the society under study’ by incorporating ‘personal experience, political
conviction, theoretical production’ (266, 268).
12 L. KURTOVIĆ AND N. SARGSYAN

Writing about decolonizing anthropological inquiry Faye Harrison (1997) encourages us

to locate our work ‘firmly in the complex struggle for genuine transformation’ (10). Over a
decade later Chari and Donner (2010) insist on the need for a critical ethnography of acti-
vism that points to the practice of leftist activism concerned with what Ruth Gilmore terms
‘life affirming social change’ (Chari and Donner 2010, 76). As we learn and transform along-
side our interlocutors (Ingold 2008) in a struggle for ‘life affirming social change’, in this
special issue we embrace Razsa’s (2015) ‘affirmative anthropology’ as a refusal to turn
the political work in precarious lived realities into ‘a voyeuristic quasi-pornography’
(Kelly quoted in Ortner 2011, 58).
What is more, as editors of this issue, we see a need to lay out the conceptual ground
that would allow us to go beyond the default position of anthropological scepticism which
has shaped our discipline since its inceptions. As an epistemological and representational
practice, anthropological scepticism seeks to uncover complexity and gaps between
speech and action, theory and lived realities, but in doing so, it also privileges friction
and conflict. As ethnographers of activist politics, we work in contexts which are already
overdetermined by tensions, interpersonal strife, and deep disagreements. Channell-Jus-
tice’s article in this issue documents this well – all the while also showing how activists
themselves strategically perform the work of suturing in order to create a united front
in times of crisis (see also Kurtović, 2019). Moreover, activists are often just as, if not
more, sceptical than their anthropological companions about the capacity of their
efforts to usher in meaningful political change, given the often inevitable exhaustion
that accompanies their political work (see Sargsyan, 2019). We also find that in light of pre-
ponderance of criticism of activists in the public sphere dominated by nationalist politics,
many of these tensions are both ubiquitous, can already be anticipated and hence, do not
have the capacity to tell us anything new. These are, to use Petrović’s term again, ‘discur-
sive closures’ that tend to drown out other ways of thinking and doing politics, which as
our issue shows, survive robustly on the sidelines, in dusty basements, devastated
factories, villages in borderlands, as well as often enough, capital cities swept by mass pro-
tests. It is precisely for this reason that many of the contributors to this issue have chosen
to foreground the actual labours of activism in our ethnographic sites, rather than their
dismissals and critiques.
The authors in this collection work toward affirmative anthropology in different ways.
Sargsyan positions experience-sharing, communal story-telling, and learning alongside
her interlocutors as political work that nourishes imagination and makes space for prefig-
uring desired futures. Kurtović posits that archiving is a practice of political subversion that
uses socialist past to rekindle political imagination. El-Shaarawi and Razsa give us a
glimpse into the Balkan route itself that fosters transnational political work, turning
away from the nation-state and the violences it takes to maintain its borders. Channell-
Justice is attuned to her interlocutors, employing methodologies that are meaningful to
their lived realities and are directed toward meaningful co-production.
In her Afterword to this special issue Jessica Greenberg (2019) suggests a more nuanced
reading of the relationship that develops between activist-researchers and activists, point-
ing past the romanticist and the dark, commenting on how this academic engagement
and knowledge production find their way back into the political work of our interlocutors.
Our academic engagement, then, requires more care, not only because it circles back to
our interlocutors’ political work but also because our politically engaged interlocutors
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 13

are demanding. Starting from the fact that they all read what we write, activists’ continued
input and demands amplify the methodological (and meta-methodological) aspects of
our work in ways that are oftentimes intellectually challenging and that can also be affec-
tively exhausting.

Modelling political alternatives

As we observe what kind of political actors in different locales (from Latin America to
Eastern Europe) are being discredited for being too unrealistic about their political
desires, we are also reminded of Graeber’s (2011) argument that the essence of the neo-
liberal project was to starve our imagination through this ‘diversionary tactic of govern-
mentality’ of dismissal (Fischer 2007; see also Rethmann 2013). And it is through the
politics of critical intimacy (Spivak 1995), friendship, and love (Dave 2012), which acknowl-
edges both our differences and the need for a coalitional start, that we approach our inter-
locutors as ethnographers and anthropologists. We are interested in the kind of
knowledge that is relational (Lugones 2010) and that bears witness to our interlocutors’
world-making efforts, in ways that are accountable, and do not simply generate capital
for ourselves at the expense of their struggles (Chari and Donner 2010). Our positionality
and reflexivity as researchers demand more reckoning and even admission of certain
forms of vulnerability that one feels as an engaged-scholar who is also multiply entangled
with their interlocutors and accountable to them. With attention to our own as well as to
our interlocutors’ politics of interiority we recognize important ‘shifts in [our political] con-
sciousness that radiate from one to another in unexpected and necessarily non-linear
ways’ (Thomas 2015). Ethnography – as a practice of solidarity with leftist activism
through shared and ‘necessary, generative struggle’ (Dave 2011, 15) animates our own
intersecting political, social, and research positionalities and practices. Because our
engagement is a practice of solidarity to amplify the life-affirming potentialities toward
which our interlocutors work (Chari and Donner 2010) it is crucial that we do not talk
over them, but rather join with them to see together without claiming to be them
(Haraway 1988), as we ask these questions: where do we go when our present political
imaginations have been starved, under what Sarah Muir (2016) has termed conditions
of historical exhaustion? How do we arrive at a place where ‘collective expressions of
desire are possible’, where ‘a multiplicity of new, collective arrangements’ transforming
‘human relationships in a struggle against power’ are possible (Seem 1983, xxi)?
Perhaps we should heed Kurtović’s and her colleague’s question: ‘how do we work
together?’ as they seek a form of political relationality and sociality, along with allowing
for new forms of political self-education under a commons-oriented ethos that allows
them to collectively prefigure a different future. What forms of political imagination do
our interlocutors (and we) cultivate and to what political horizons does their (our?) work
point?
Sargsyan affirms and insists on the importance of cultivating political imagination and
learning alongside (and from) our interlocutors, and shows different forms of the ‘practice
of being otherwise’ (Povinelli 2015). She pursues this goal through collaboration: the
article in this collection is part of a larger project with a feminist environmental activist
Anna Shahnazaryan. El-Shaarawi and Razsa suggest that through transnational political
work with migrants, citizen-participants can come to envision alternative futures
14 L. KURTOVIĆ AND N. SARGSYAN

beyond nation-states, gesturing toward post-sovereigntist and anti-representational mul-

tiplicity. Channell-Justice envisions a more attuned and careful negotiation of engaged-
research methodology, one that takes the critique of interlocutors seriously to enrich aca-
demic debates. These are some of the ways the contributors to this special issue point to
different ‘practices of being otherwise’ (Povinelli 2015). It is this desire for the otherwise
that moves us as researchers at this point in time when we share this world with our inter-
locutors, variously entangled. Through personal-political relational transformations with
our interlocutors we collectively prefigure the political worlds we envision as livable.

Notes
1. For anthropological engagements with activisms on the other ends of the political spectrum,
see for example, Hemment (2015) and Kalb (2009).
2. For an insightful engagement with historical consciousness across Southern Europe see
Knight and Stewart (2016).
3. While tying prefiguration to anarchist tradition, Gordon’s genealogy also highlights its reson-
ances with Christian theology and conceptions of preordained futures (see also Auerbach
1968). In so doing, he offers a way of thinking about prefigurative politics as a form of recursive
temporality that weds more desired past, creative presentism and potential futures.

Acknowledgements
We wish to express our gratitude to the editorial team at History and Anthropology and the anon-
ymous reviewers for their close reading and generative feedback that helped us clarify the concepts
that organize our introduction as well as this collection of essays. We would also like to thank our
contributors for all their work on their own contributions to this special issue as well as for their feed-
back on this introduction. Dace Dzenovska read and commented on an earlier version of this piece,
and we thank her for her insightful comments. Last but not least, we thank Andrew Gilbert whose
advice (solicited by Larisa) helped shape our argument about the normative nature as well as
limits of anthropological scepticism.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

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