WCEE Lecture. Between Voice and Silence: New Russian Political Migrants in Georgia and Serbia

WCEE Postdoctoral Fellow Liudmila Listrovaya will present findings from her ethnographic research on recent Russian political migrants— relokanti. Relokanti, despite possessing financial, linguistic, and cultural capital abroad, remain politically silent in both public and private spheres. Drawing on interviews and participant observation conducted during fieldwork in Georgia and her most recent trip to Serbia, Liudmila Listrovaya will show how fears of reprisal, familial repercussions, and community ostracism converge to suppress transnational political action.

The data reveal a fraught trade-off: public dissent jeopardizes personal and family ties and risks social isolation within host communities, while silence extends the Russian state’s extraterritorial reach. The authoritarian state’s mechanisms of surveillance and control, ranging from political threats to the possibility of legal punishment and social coercion, produce powerful disincentives to dissent among diasporic populations. By unpacking these dynamics, this research advances theories of transnational authoritarianism and the ethics of voice and silence under authoritarianism. It also highlights the need for host-country policies and diaspora organizations to develop protective strategies that restore exiled communities’ capacity for collective action and political expression.

As an environmental and political sociologist specializing in Russia, Liudmila Listrovaya's research spans environmental inequality and governance, authoritarian populism, and war-prompted migration. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Oregon in 2024, during which she also completed a six-month internship with the United Nations Environment Programme in Geneva.

Dr. Listrovaya's current research projects include exploring the intersection of authoritarian populism and environmental issues in Russia, focusing on how the history of internal colonialism and ethnicity discourse has shaped environmental inequality and its perceptions. Another key project examines the war in Ukraine and its consequences, specifically regime-prompted outmigration from Russia. For this, she conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Georgia and collected interviews with Russian political migrants. Her research has been published in Qualitative Sociology, Social Forces, Environmental Sociology and accepted for publication in Society and Natural Resources.

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