Everyday Revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Balkans

This book draws on ethnographic case studies from Eastern Europe and the Balkans to examine “everyday revolutions,” shifting focus from spectacular uprisings to the subtle, dispersed, and often overlooked practices through which people challenge power and reshape social life.

Exploring a region often imagined as either a cradle of upheaval or politically stagnant, the book highlights acts of resistance, refusal, care, and creativity that unsettle dominant orders without conforming to grand narratives of revolutionary change. From hospital wards, households, and schools to digital archives, satire, and grassroots cultural scenes, the contributors trace how actors negotiate constraints, contest authority, and enact alternative futures in the present. By probing blurred boundaries between continuity and rupture, the mundane and the exceptional, they interrogate who is recognised as a political subject and what counts as revolutionary action. “Everyday revolutions” are proposed as an analytical lens to reveal how ordinary practices carry transformative potential, expanding understandings of political struggle and illuminating less visible yet profoundly consequential modes of social change.

Accessibly written, this interdisciplinary volume speaks to undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars of anthropology, sociology, political science, and human geography, as well as those with an interest in Eastern Europe and the Balkans.

Piotr Goldstein is a social and visual anthropologist based in Berlin. He has published on everyday activism, civil society, migrants’ social engagement, visual methods, narratives and practices of diversity, and language and identity. He is the director of the internationally awarded ethnographic documentaries: Active (Citizen) and Spółdzielnia / Cooperative.

Phaedra Douzina-Bakalaki is a social anthropologist at the University of the Aegean. Her work examines economic transformation and social reproduction in Greece, including provisioning during the crisis, energy transitions, and mass tourism. She is currently researching beauty labour and its politics through an ethnographic study of manicures.