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.

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........

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