AMIS-CEMES Student Forum lecture: The 'Crisis of Liberalism': Reflections from Latvia, the Place Where History Never Ended

Many in Latvia did not want to give up their collective sense of self and insisted on the importance of the nation alongside individual liberties and respect for diversity. From the perspective of liberal Europe, this often led to the conclusion that Latvia’s residents exhibited too much socialist mentality or nationalist sentiment and thus required lessons in political liberalism in order to become fully European.

In this talk, Dr. Dace Dzenovska critically examine efforts to extend lessons in political liberalism to Latvia’s residents on the basis of an ethnography of tolerance promotion in Latvia in the 2000s. Dace argue that, rather than viewing Eastern Europe as falling behind, it should be viewed as the laboratory for forging post-Cold War political liberalism in Europe. Moreover, it provides insight with regard to the current crisis of political liberalism from a moment in time when it was still confident and from the perspective of a place and people that were thought to have never been liberal.”

Dr. Dace Dzenovska is  Associate Professor in the Anthropology of Migration, Center on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford

Everyone is welcome!