Emergent Prefigurative Politics and Social Psychological Processes: A Systematic Review and Research Agenda

Prefigurative politics—the enactment of desired future social relations in present social change practices—has become central in contemporary political organising. Protest movements like the Arab Spring and recent Latin American uprisings illustrate prefiguration emerging through struggle rather than from a pre-existing political programme. Although psychological perspectives have been identified as promising avenues for exploring prefiguration, the topic has yet to attract widespread research attention within psychology. This paper proposes a research agenda centred on ‘emergent prefigurative politics’, grounded in a systematic review of the empirical psychological literature on prefigurative politics. Drawing from a thematic analysis of 20 studies, which offers insights about existing developments, theoretical and methodological challenges in studying prefiguration, and opportunities for further inquiry, we develop an agenda for future work. Our findings highlight the complexity of prefiguration as a socially embedded, dynamic, and agentic process where the grievances, psychological needs, and aspirations of individuals and groups within their social context shape the emergence, content, and outcomes of prefigurative politics. In developing our research agenda on emergent prefiguration, we argue that dynamic social identity models of collective action, alongside ethnographic, longitudinal, and case study methods, are promising tools to tackle the challenges of researching prefigurative phenomena.