Interview – Veronika Pfeilschifter
Veronika Pfeilschifter is a social scientist whose work focuses on the sociology of youth, the New Left, and the South Caucasus. She is a research associate and lecturer at the Institute for Caucasus Studies, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, and a research affiliate at ZOiS (Centre for East European and International Studies) in Berlin. Her doctoral dissertation, In Quest for Otherwise: Young Left-Wing Subjects and Political Imagination in the South Caucasus, examines left-wing political identification among young people in Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia. She is currently developing her dissertation into a book as a guest researcher at Free University of Berlin.
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Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?
One research field that I find interesting is the slowly, but steadily growing scholarship on affective communities and emotive norms and practices with emphasis on the South Caucasus. Various colleagues have made important contributions, be that the insight that nationalism is not only a political ideology, but an affect between objects and people which “grips” the body or to understand “hate” as an “emotion norm”. Relatedly, I find the work of anthropologist Nutsa Batiashvili inspiring. Along with other scholars, she has proposed an anthropology of anxiety, which suggests regarding anxiety as an “instability with which identities are lived and experienced”. Considering that the Caucasus is one place among many where multiple identities define communities, this resonates well. She proposes interpreting anxiety not as a form of mental disorder, pathology, or expression of worry, but as “leaking” into a “placid feeling of heartbreak” and “hurt”, which can help sustain communality and temper hostility.
It is also great to see research in social and political studies that pluralizes Caucasus Studies, brought forward especially, but not only by many peers and younger colleagues. These works have contributed to questioning or overhauling the transition paradigm which to some degree had reinforced what anthropologist Florian Mühlfried termed the “deficiency paradigm”. This is the assumption that something is lacking in the Caucasus and needs to be brought from outside. I find contributions from for instance Lela Rekhviashvili (on multiple geographies and political society) and Laura Luciani (on de-centering and embodied geo-politics) important since they emphasis a future-oriented theorizing of the region against the background of material dependencies. Questioning the transition paradigm does not mean to no longer hold solidarity or not be interested in democratization, but it means to think about the Caucasus as a place of self-definition instead purely of ‘spheres of influence’.
How has the way you understand the world changed over time, and what (or who) prompted the most significant shifts in your thinking?
What has changed most over time is that, having been a positivist from my undergraduate studies until the beginning of my PhD, I came to much value the importance of subjectivity, emotions, and dialogic knowledge production in research processes. With that I mean to appreciate these principles in “theory” (theory reflection) and “praxis” (interactions with interlocutors and interpretation of data), though those are both of course interlinked. Next to conversations and observations during research stays in Georgia and Armenia which have strongly influenced me, I have been inspired in particular by the philosopher Robin Celikates and his work “Critique as Social Practice: Critical Theory and Social Self-Understanding”. Celikates proposes to move beyond the dichotomy of false consciousness and self-interpretation as truth in our research methodology and instead to find a middle-ground where we reconstruct critically what subjects think and do.
In your work, you focus on youth and young leftists in the South Caucasus. As you have researched youth at large, how would you characterize young people in the contemporary countries of the South Caucasus?
All over, we can say that youth, but also the populations at large in the South Caucasus, have been confronted with profound socio-economic and political insecurity for a very long time. This becomes particular clear when we analyse everyday challenges: young Georgians are clearly affected by high levels of unemployment, poverty, and rising prices, much like young Azerbaijanis. For the latter, territorial integrity was also a highly salient issue in the summer of 2022 (when nationally representative surveys were evaluated in all three countries); this was before the 2023 One-Day War, during which Azerbaijan reasserted control over Karabakh and forced the Armenian population of the region to flee. Today, as from the standpoint of Azerbaijan the Karabakh conflict is widely resolved, the importance of this issue for young Azerbaijanis may have changed. Young Armenians have also been challenged by socio-economic issues, first and foremost however by internal political tensions and the aspect of neighbourly relations. The latter is next to the mentioned wars linked to the fact that until recently (prior to the 2024 peace declaration), the Armenian–Azerbaijani border saw recurrent casualties and that Armenia's borders with Turkey and Azerbaijan have remained closed for decades.
Furthermore, according to colleagues working on youth as well, young people in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan, are generally quite supportive of democracy as a system of governance, even if the degrees and extent vary. Young Azerbaijanis hold considerable scepticism towards the principle of democracy, however considering that Azerbaijan has been an authoritarian state for a very long time, the results which show that 54% approve of democracy may actually also underline young people’s agency. Youth in the South Caucasus has, as elsewhere, little trust in political parties, trade unions and civil society, but much more so in the respective national military and in the case of young Azerbaijanis, the president and the national government. Young Armenians and Georgians do hardly trust political elites in power all over, and wish for political alternatives. In the case of Georgia, this has manifested in large-scale street mobilisations and protests carried out in particular (and not only) by youth in response to the adoption of the “foreign agents law” and the government’s announcement to suspend negotiations with the European Union (EU) until 2028. In the case of Armenia, amidst a fragile post-war situation, youth politics manifests itself in more mundane forms, like engagement in the solution of neighbour’s problems, donating to social organisation or volunteering.
More specifically, what would you identify as the main differences among young people in the three countries regarding the memorialisation of the Soviet and post-Soviet past?
This is an interesting question. Surveys and also my own more ethnographic research indicate that the Soviet past and the collapse of the Soviet Union still hold impact on young people’s identities. However, the exact impact and meanings differ.
For young Georgians, the collapse of the Soviet Union is generally perceived as a highly positive development. Following the restoration of its independence, Georgia distanced itself from the Soviet system, which many, particularly younger, Georgians equate with Russia, a perception that, while reflecting Russia’s dominant role in the USSR, often obscures Georgia's experience as a constituent republic of the Soviet Union. Today, many Georgian youth believe that the post-Soviet period has brought greater freedom of expression, increased opportunities for political participation, and improved possibilities for economic advancement. For young Armenians, the collapse of the Soviet Union is seen as in a rather opposite way, namely quite negative: it happened simultaneously with the first Nagorno-Karabakh war (1988-1994), which then later continued in the second (2020) and third One-Day war (2023). Armenian youth think that in comparison to the 1990s, things are harder today. Young Azerbaijanis take a less straightforward position, and the collapse of the Soviet Union has an ambivalent or no specific meaning for them: They think it is easier to earn money, but considering the authoritarian conditions in the country, much harder to feel safe and have freedom of expression.
These differences have to be interpreted within the context of politics of memory which are also very different in the three countries. In Georgia, the state exercised a drastic mnemonic rupture from the Soviet past which served to advance the political project “to return to Europe”. In contrast, in Armenia, the Soviet past is rather silenced in official discourse, and when spoken about, it is associated with modernisation and development of the country. In Azerbaijan, the collective memory of the Soviet Union is, despite some positive moments related to internationalism, primarily rather negative, with a particular emphasis on 20 January 1990, when Soviet troops intervened in Baku to suppress demands for national independence and killed more than 100 people.
When it comes to young leftists in the region, what are similarities and differences between the respective leftist youth segments in the three countries? What are the main factors that shape left-wing political positions in each of the three?
One similarity is how young leftists emerged in a post-Soviet context: In all three countries, they initially emerged in the late 2000s within a predominantly urban context, even though young leftist actors early on formed alliances with workers in regional and rural areas. They usually did not want to associate themselves any more with the still existing communist parties. In Georgia and Azerbaijan, the origins are to some degree more related to the university and intellectual engagement (e.g., demanding better access to education materials or translating literature, but not only) and then went hand in hand with initiating political acts, whereas in Armenia, street praxis (e.g., protests against privatisation) was rather first. All over though, the leftists from the 1990s who have been growing into adults and the young leftists from the 2000s do share a respective trans-generational momentum: frustration with post-Soviet neoliberalisation, inequalities, destruction of the commons, authoritarian governance. These are also among the core factors that drive their political engagement today as well. It is mostly the demand to have a more egalitarian distribution of material resources, political access and a dignified life.
One major difference between the three contexts concerns the degree of political organisation, which is closely linked to the broader political circumstances in each country. In Georgia, there is a left-wing movement young people can become part of, whereas this is not the case in Armenia and Azerbaijan. Interlocutors in Armenia suggested referring to the left-wing landscape there as consisting of “segments” while in Azerbaijan, we have to speak of a highly dispersed nature of leftist actors, particularly in the context of consolidated state repressions following the second Karabakh War.
In Georgia, even though the space for civil society has decreased considerably in recent years, there has nevertheless been a vital tradition of organising and co-organising among left-wing groups. The Armenian left-wing segments have become quite fragmented following the 2018 ‘Velvet Revolution’ and the Karabakh wars. Azerbaijani leftist youth was all over quite transnational earlier on; now, they have almost entirely been forced into exile, are imprisoned and otherwise need to act in caution not to face further repercussions.
You chose to integrate the prism of political imagination as central for your work. Why did you decide to do this and what kind of insights did this angle offer for you?
I pursued this for three reasons: first, to focus on future-oriented visions; second, to integrate practical observations on imagination into my theoretical framework; and third, to situate my work within broader debates on political imagination. Let me explain this more in detail.
As I mentioned before, my work has tried to counter the deficiency paradigm and while being measured against standards that often devalue the region, I wanted to show that there is a range of visions of how society could be different from the current hegemonic political projects and ideologies. And one segment I focused on and found particularly compelling is left-wing youth. Also, unlike sometimes assumed, being left-wing has rather little to do with Soviet nostalgia (even if the Soviet past continues to play a defining experiential role), but more with the discontent about the present.
Related to this is that political imagination has been a driving force in the establishment of some of the left-wing platforms and groups in the South Caucasus and transnational spaces. Thus, it is the movements’ and groups’ imaginative practices which have informed the framing of my work. For instance, during the 2020 second Karabakh war, Azerbaijani and Armenian leftists (together and separately) issued statements where they declared their strong commitment to post-nationalist and anti-capitalist politics in the respective countries. In 2025, in the midst of Georgia’s autocratization process which has created a sombre political climate, various left-wing actors, came together to set up a Movement for Social Democracy, which puts social justice, democratic practices and material equality at the heart of its political agenda.
Finally, political theorist Albenza Azmanova urged that a viable project of the future will not be “another utopian hapless projection” and also not arrive “as a flash of brilliance from an intellect yet to rise as a shooting-star”, “but will rather come from a process, dialogue and a great deal of critically applied effort”. Approaching future not as utopia, but as a gradual process is also what I tried to capture through the prism of imagination.
You take a subject and agency centered approach in your research and unlike one could expect, you focus less on social movements frameworks, when analysing leftist youth. Why did you decide to do this and what does this help us to see?
The dominant scholarship on the left in the post-Soviet context has focused on questions of political opportunities, hegemony and failure, and thus has produced insights which are focused on external evaluation of political strength and outcome. Existing scholarship has analysed primarily left-wing forms, namely protests, social movements, political parties etc. The main research question that was posed then was why the left is weak. Research findings confirmed this weakness in aspects such as political legacy, low organisational capacity, strategic mistakes or lack of cross-societal alliances.
In my work, I make an argument that the former angle remains relevant, however tends to under-analyse the political content. Instead of asking once again why the left is politically weak, I wanted to inquire what does it mean to be left-wing in the particular, in a precarious context in the first place. I then argue that subject-centred analyses allow us to learn more about what the actors themselves think, feel and experience. Such an approach also focuses more on the imaginative and future dimension of analysis, and remains interlinked with macro-sociological conditions and structures. To some degree, I follow Filip Balunović who has researched the revival of the left in the Balkans (Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina) and analysed the emergence of a political consciousness. Finally, I also focus on youth since I argue, following the historian Reinhart Koselleck and political scientist Félix Krawatzek, that the youth lens offers a new “horizon of expectation”.
What are you currently working on, and what are your future aspirations?
Currently, I continue to work on the (new) left in the South Caucasus, while I develop somewhat related, but new research ideas following the end of my PhD. While revisiting the materials I have collected over the past years in order to rethink and reflect on them, I have begun working on a book proposal based on my dissertation, In Quest for Otherwise: Young Left-Wing Subjects and Political Imagination in the South Caucasus. This is a long-term project. In smaller projects, I focus on the nexus between political ideology and geopolitical preferences, with an emphasis on the Georgian left, as well as on Armenian left-wing women and their biographical trajectories. In addition, together with my colleague Ivaylo Dinev, who has worked extensively on the left in Slovenia and Bulgaria, we are preparing a special issue on the New Left in the Balkans and the South Caucasus. We will circulate a call for papers in the coming months, so follow our updates on this if you are interested in contributing. We are quite excited about this! When it comes to other plans further away, we will see what the future holds. I’d love to continue working in the field of youth sociology and emotions, but I also can imagine working outside of academia.
What is the most important advice you could give to early career scholars?
Having recently submitted my PhD thesis, I would not claim to have “made it” in academia at this point, and thus my recommendations will be modest. If I can offer something to people who are at or close to the beginning of their doctoral studies and aspire to become scholars, it would be the following: on the one hand, to pursue one’s own intellectual vision and what one is genuinely inspired by in a disciplined and determinate manner. On the other hand, it is to surround oneself with people who share one’s broader understanding of what academia is, what its purpose might be, and perhaps also what its hopes are. Throughout time, I came to understand - at least for myself - that you need a small group of appreciative and uplifting academic friends in order to navigate the conditions of intense competition and structured distrust that characterise many academic contexts. So, having people by one’s side who celebrate successes and walk alongside failure may turn out extremely valuable.
Editorial Credit: Laura Innocenti