In Russia and the Baltic states, competing ideologies of sovereignty have defined their positions in international relations and towards the war in Ukraine. I discuss how Russia’s sovereign ideologies of a great power and Lithuania’s as its victim were mutually constitutive after the collapse of the USSR. After 2014, the Baltics’ radical politics of sovereignty, grounded in its history of occupation and resistance against the USSR/Russia, has become a framework to imagine the imminent war and, after 2022, the future of Europe with its center in the East.

Neringa Klumbytė is associate professor of anthropology, Havighurst Faculty at the Havighurst Center for Russian and Post-Soviet Studies, and director of the Lithuania program at the Havighurst Center, Miami University. She is the author of Authoritarian Laughter: Political Humor and Soviet Dystopia in Lithuania (Cornell, 2022); co-editor of Soviet Society in the Era of Late Socialism, 1964–85, with Gulnaz Sharafutdinova (Lexington, 2012); and co-author of Social and Historical Justice in Multiethnic Lithuania: Ideas, Experiences, and Contexts, with Monika Frėjutė-Rakauskienė, Andrius Marcinkevičius, and Kristina Šliavaitė (Center for Social Research, 2018). She was the editor of Perspectives in Europe. Her work has focused on topics of authoritarianism; sovereignty; (post)colonialism, nationalism, and ethnicity; electoral politics; propaganda and censorship; historical justice and memory studies; political satire and humor; food, consumption, and marketing.

This lecture will be presented in person in 555 Weiser Hall and on Zoom. Webinar registration required at http://myumi.ch/NmNMq

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