This talk draws upon long-term ethnographic research in borderlands regions of Ukraine and Russia to analyze the political economy of participation in “imitations” of democratic institutions. So-called imitations are much more than mere simulacra: they can be complex theatrical productions that express and produce their own politics. The practice of political theatre—from electoral machines to elite-led social movements—transcends regime type, rewriting social contracts, redrawing boundaries between state and society, and changing the meanings people give to political participation. Amidst pervasive redefinition of compensation, services, and entitlements as rewards for loyalty, how do people enact forms of agency? What is the relationship of such performances to the Soviet past? And what lessons do they suggest for how we theorize contemporary politics?

Jessica Pisano is Associate Professor and Chair of the Politics Department at the New School for Social Research. She is a longtime associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University and has been an invited professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. She has been awarded numerous fellowships and is the recipient of NSF, NCEEER, SSRC, and SSHRC grants, among many others. In 2017 she received a university-wide award for distinguished teaching at The New School. Pisano’s research focuses on contemporary and twentieth century politics and political economy of Eastern Europe, especially Ukraine, Russia, and Hungary. She is currently completing a book about the political economy of political theatre in post-Soviet space and working on a twentieth-century history of a single rural street in Eastern Europe. Her prizewinning book, The Post-Soviet Potemkin Village: Politics and Property Rights in the Black Earth was published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. Her work has appeared in journals such as East European Politics and Societies, Journal of Peasant Studies, Problems of Post-Communism, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, and World Politics, among many others, and as chapters in edited volumes.