Alexis Lerner (US Naval Academy), “Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States” (European Studies Council)

Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States evaluates street art as a viable avenue of political expression, effective in circumventing autocratic censorship. Post-Soviet Graffiti culminates a ten-year ethnographic study of political street art across the post-Soviet and post-Communist Europe regions. Using longitudinal and cross-sectional analyses, this book is the first systematic, comparative study of how graffiti is used as a political tool in the post-Soviet region and era.

 

Dr. Alexis Lerner is an award-winning scholar of authoritarianism and dissent, with a regional focus on Russia and the post-Soviet region. She is an assistant professor of Political Science at the US Naval Academy, and is the author of Post-Soviet Graffiti: Free Speech in Authoritarian States (University of Toronto Press, 2025).