When: Tuesday, 6 May 2025, 18:00 - 19:30
Where: Konferenzraum, Department of Political Science, NIG, 2nd floor, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Vienna
Speaker: Veronika Zablotsky (FU Berlin)
Moderation: Viktoria Huegel & Rebekka Pflug (Department of Political Science, University of Vienna)
Abstract
While neoliberal structural reforms have been a feature of post-Soviet transitions across Eurasia – echoing postcolonial developments in the Global South and elsewhere – critiques of top-down deregulation and privatization tend to overlook transnational diasporas as agents of social, economic, and legal reform initiatives. Through a case study of diasporic “extrastatecraft” in the Republic of Armenia, this talk offers an ethnographically informed political theory of neoliberal governmentality that accounts for the impact of circular migrations and minor histories of globalization in the region. On the basis of empirical research among Armenia’s repatriate reform activists, it retraces how the formerly “stateless” Armenian diaspora – linked to the Ottoman dismemberment of the Armenian nation-body a century prior – has adopted the post-Soviet state as a “national enterprise” in which all self-identified Armenians are incorporated as shareholders and potential investors. In this “global” vision of diaspora as human capital, sovereignty is vested in the corporate nation, rather than a given state, resulting in efforts to reconstitute Armenia as a “start-up country” – a joint venture – after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The talk connects this entrepreneurial turn in Armenian national discourse to the longue durée of global coloniality in the region.
Veronika Zablotsky is a political theorist with a focus on feminist and postcolonial approaches; migration and border studies; critical refugee and Armenian diaspora studies; and postsocialism in West and Central Asia. She completed her PhD at the University of California at Santa Cruz and co-founded the Critical Armenian Studies Collective at the University of Pennsylvania. Currently, she serves as a visiting postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin.
