RevDem Podcast

We are delighted to bring you a new episode of the Review of Democracy podcast, born out of an encounter at the CEU Democracy Institute’s annual conference in Budapest.In this discussion with Irina Velicu, a political ecologist at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra whose work brings critical theory into conversation withpolitical ecology, we examine the slow unmaking of rural lifeworlds across the European countryside. Drawing on interviews with peasant activists in Romania and Portugal, as well as on her own family history as “a child of the transition,” Velicu explains how subsistence farming came to be cast asshameful, how small landholders were pushed out of agriculture through “pinprick” land grabbing and subsidy regimes, and why their lament should be understood not only as a response to injustice but also as a form of grief. Wediscuss why land-grabbing in Eastern Europe has attracted so little attention compared with Latin America, what the Roșia Montană anti-mining movement reveals about the difficulty of building coalitions, and how unaddressed humiliation and anger in the countryside are being channeled into nationalistand far-right politics.

The Blinken Open Society Archives, or the OSA, is a complex archival institution. On one hand, it is a repository of vast collections that document how power operated across the twentieth century. OSA holds 10,000 linear meters ofarchival material, 17,000 hours of audiovisual recordings, and 15 TB of digital records, as well as 150,000 photographs, 6000+ documentary film titles and 22,000 library items. Their catalogue is available online.OSA is not only an archive. It is one of Europe’s leading research centers on the history of the Cold War, statesocialism, human rights, and surveillance. The OSA Archivum also provides fellowships for promising researchers who want to investigate the archival funds. Particularly the Visegrad Fellowship supports scholars, engaged artists,journalists, and scholars at risk who want to work directly with these materials. Since its start in 2010, the Visegrad Scholarship has been awarded to more than 290 fellows from over 65 countries. The next application deadline for the Visegrad Scholarship at the Blinken Open Society Archivum (OSA) in Budapest is November 10, 2026, at 12:00 PMIn our series, we will invite Visegrad Fellows to share their experience working with this fascinating archive. Alternative histories of 1989 became much more prevalent in the last decade. The Netflix series Kleo, the Instagramaccount DDR Mondbasis, or the book Stealing the Future propose a new version of late socialism and transitiontowards capitalism. Our guest today, Dorine Schellens, thinks this is not merely generational shift or a matter of taste. Instead, the stakes are deeper: they challenge theconsequential historical framework. During her Visegrad Fellowship at the Blinken OSAArchivum,  Dorine Shellens worked on her book project “Beyond Post-Communism, Imagining the Future in Times of Transition”, where she examines alternative futures imagined by cultural actors in Soviet Russia and East Germany duringthe 1980s and early 1990s. Throughout our conversation, the overarching questionis: When an old world suddenly disappears, how do people begin to imagine a new future? As our guest emphasizes, the answer for this question might be provided by the German historian Reinhart Koselleck:  [Koselleck] argued that our relationship with the future is notdefined by one particular model or one particular framework. Instead, in our societies we have multiple narratives, models of the future that coexist and sometimes also start competing with each other. We relate to the future (...) with a range of different emotional responses.The topic of the possible futures of socialism is extremely actual and has a longer history than we might have thought. For instance, historians explored this methodological avenue to understand the stakes of perestroika. Yet, most of the studies on this topic have focused so far only on strictly understanding the experts’ take. Dorine Schellens argues that dissidents and writers alsoenvisioned divergent paths for their societies. Their projects ranged from reformed versions of socialism to radical nationalist ones. So far, few historians have used the Koselleck’s approach to understand them. In this context, the OSA Archivum proves to be extremely valuable in providingnuances:  until 1991, we are dealing with a very tightly controlled publicspace. Literary landscape (...) excluded many people through persecution, through censorship, through self-censorship. And this is where I think the archives really come in and are really important because so many people tried to contribute or contributed for themselves on paper, but their voices werenever heard- in many cases until today publicly.Throughout the podcast, Dorine Schellens also expandson the methodological challenges of working in the archive, particularly how to reconstruct ideas that were suppressed or unpublished.

The Democracy Institute’s annual conference, with the titleImaginary Exhaustion? asked to what extent today’s democracies are trapped by fear and exhaustion, and how we might rebuild our collective imagination to shape more hopeful democratic futures. The panel The People We Fear: Demography, Migration, and Civilizational Anxiety hadthree guests: Kristijan Fidanovski, Attila Melegh and  KasiaNarkowicz. They unpacked the genealogies and present-day legacies of the “demography as destiny” mantra and examined how manufactured fear corrodes democratic imaginaries from within.In our podcast, Francesco Trupia explained the logicbehind this interesting panel. Demography has become an extremely important watchword in today's political debate. (...) The idea was to have this conversation on how migration is shaping political debate in Europe, where we have a crisis of liberal democracy.The panel revealed the tension between the overload ofdata and the overconfidence in narratives. On one hand, demographers and statisticians such as Kristijan Fidanovski reveal the demographic decline, ageing societies, and migration flows. On the other hand, as Attila Melegh, Kasia Narkowicz or Francesco Trupia argue, we witness a certain fascination with  narratives, often which end in claims aboutcivilizational survival, cultural replacement, or other statements that use pathos instead of reason. The solution to solve this tension, lies in intersectionality. As Francesco Trupia stated for Review of Democracy,intersectionality and interdisciplinarity (...) can really help usunravel this data (...) and perhaps to not fall into the trap of identity politics, which sometimes uses data in order to double down on certain people and to pursue certain vested interest by manipulating this data.The misleading interpretations could also be a part ofthis problem. Our conversation expands on his previous Review for Democracy podcast with Marina Simakova,where they discuss how Gramsci’s ideas were co-opted by the contemporary far-right. In our episode,  Francesco Trupia, expands this argument and gives the example of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, who provide a mimicryinterpretation of Karl Marx or Antonio Gramsci. the far-right actors and those who are supporting the concept of remigration, for instance, are openly using leftist and Marxist philosophers to express their ideas.Then, our conversation moves to his research. Based onhis fieldwork, Francesco Trupia argues that the experiences of minority could provide us with a different lens on democracy that majoritarian perspectives systematically miss.

In the new episode of our special series produced in collaboration with the Journal of Democracy, we are joinedby Edgar Şar and Pelin Ayan Musil to discuss their article “Why Oppositions Lose Together and Win Alone,” published in the July 2026 issue.For years, the conventional wisdom held that the only way to defeat an entrenched autocrat was to unite the opposition. In Hungary and Turkey, oppositions did exactly that, and they lost.Then single parties, running alone, broke through where the grand coalitions had failed. Was unity the problem all along, or just the way it was done? And why did one breakthrough end in a change of government while the other was followed by a crackdown? With Turkey’s opposition now in turmoil and Hungary’s new government confronting the state Orbán built over sixteen years, the authors also look ahead: can winning alone ever be enough?

Scholars often frame the history of democracy as a gradual expansion of voting rights and representative institutions. Camille Creyghton, our guest today, offers a different perspective: democracy also emerged from radical ovements and everyday practices of self-government. In her presentation at the CEU Democracy Institute AnnualConference, held in Budapest in June, Camille Creyghton challenged two assumptions: that democracy was gradually built through parliamentary institutions, and that it followed a gradual, top-down approach emanating from the Rousseau concept of nation-building. In many cases, democratic practices emerged from below to find practical solutions tocollective problems.Her presentation was part of the panel “Was Democracy Always This Fragile? A Longer Historical View,” where speakers explored how debates over democracy, self-government, liberty, and equality in the long nineteenth century continue to shape our understanding of democratic challenges today. In our second part of the podcast, we discuss the thorny concept of crisis of democracy. As Camille Creyghton reminds us, this phrase is hardly new:“ As a historian, you also very early on discover that “crisis of democracy” is a recurrent phrase. It was already there since the beginning of democracy. “To a large extent, political scientists, journalists, and think-tankers dominated this field. Historians’ perspective, so much needed, was remarkably absent. In the newly published volume Democratie in crisis, Dutch historians wanted to address the overlooked nuances. In a nutshell, their findings are extremely valuable to contextualize the debate: ”Democracy is always in crisis; it is inherently sensitive to crisis. It is a malleable concept that changes over time, what it means and what it does for particular people. This means that it was never completely uncontested.”Camille Creyghton demonstrates effectively in our podcast why history is so vital within this debate.  The crisis of democracy should always be contextualized within the historical context and the conceptual framework that operated throughout that period. Direct comparisons between past and present when discussing the concept of democracy might often be misleading. For instance, concepts such as equality had totally different understandings during the French Revolution and today, and parallels should always be contextualized.Creyghton’s historical perspective should be taken into consideration in the debate over crisis of democracy. On a first level, such nuances might offer an antidote to alarmism. Moreover, we might recover ideas that at some point proved to be relevant and effective. Looking at history can also teach us that democracy isnot only connected more than the list of criteria that political scientists, NGOs or institutions like the European Union use; it is also the democratic ethos, and it might also include emotions.  Studying past democratic practices can provide us with a richer democratic heritage than narrow lists of criteria.Camille Creyghton is an assistant professor of Political History at the University of Utrecht. Her areas of expertise are intellectual history, history of political culture, and cultural history from the end of the 18th century until the first half of the 20th century. Currently, she is working on a research project on the transfer of ideas among political exiles from various national backgrounds in a couple of European cities in the period 1830-1848. The interview was conducted by Adrian Matus. Lilit Hakobyan edited the audio file.

Scholars often frame the history of democracy as a gradual expansion of voting rights and representative institutions. Camille Creyghton, our guest today, offers a differentperspective: democracy also emerged from radical movements and everyday practices of self-government. In her presentation at the Democracy Institute AnnualConference, held in Budapest in June 2026, Camille Creyghton challenged two assumptions: that democracy was gradually built through parliamentary institutions, and that it followed a gradual, top-down approach emanating from the Rousseau concept of nation-building. In many cases,democratic practices emerged from below to find practical solutions to collective problems.Her presentation was part of the panel called “Was Democracy Always This Fragile? A Longer Historical View”. In this panel, speakers explored how debates over democracy, self-government, liberty, and equality in the longnineteenth century continue to shape our understanding of democratic challenges today.Our conversation starts with a bold claim. Democracy had a different understanding in the 19th century. As she stated,“ in the first half of the 19th century, democracy wasnot that much talked about in most historical contexts in Europe because of a certain fear of what went wrong in the French Revolution.(..)However,  the concept of democracy survived at the extreme left of the political spectrum.”Thus, democratic practices could be present even when the concept of democracy remained a marginal political ideal.Local guilds in the Netherlands used democratic practices to self-manage local issues, such as managing the drainpipes. Moreover, in the 19th century, those who called themselves democrats were at the fringes of the political spectrum. Many of them did not have access to parliaments. Instead, theygathered and shared political ideas in less formal settings: clubs, associations, or often pubs. As Camille Creyghton develops, these stories are more historical curiosities. They illuminate broader questionsabout how people understood and reshaped the concept of democracy beyond the institutional framework. Although the modern understanding of democracy has clear roots in Antiquity, its meaning shifted radically over time, particularlyduring the era of nation-building. Therefore, local nuances and everyday practices should always be considered. Creyghton’s approach belongs to a broader movement to recover this historical diversity. Research projects suchas Re-Imagining Democracy, thoroughly mapped the nuances of this matter by bringing together historians from across Europe. As she stated:  Historical studies can contribute by showing this breadth and also this wildness of democratic thought at certain periods in history. A lot of what is in the backpack of what democracy is today (…) we tend to forget if we look from a short-term view at institutions and voting rights.

In this opening episode of a new Review of Democracy podcast series on law, rights, and democracy in Latin America, Gabriel Pereira speaks with Fabio de Sá e Silva about the increasingly complex role of law in contemporary struggles over democracy and rights.The conversation explores autocratic legalism and its evolution, asking how legal institutions and practices can contribute to democratic erosion while also providingresources for resistance. It then turns to conservative and right-wing legal mobilization, examining how actors beyond government use courts, rights claims, and other legal strategies to advance political projects and contest existingunderstandings of rights.Finally, the discussion steps back to ask a broader question: how new is any of this? Against the familiar image of law as a vehicle for democratization and social transformation, the episode considers its longer-standing and more ambivalentrelationship with political power in Latin America.

Challenging Archives is a new series of podcasts jointly organized between Review of Democracy and BlinkenOpen Society Archives, based in Budapest. We will invite scholars to discuss about their investigation in this archive. The Blinken Open Society Archives, or the OSA, is a complex archival institution. On one hand, it is a repository of vast collections that document how power operated across the twentieth century. OSA holds 10,000 linear meters ofarchival material, 17,000 hours of audiovisual recordings, and 15 TB of digital records, as well as 150,000 photographs, 6000+ documentary film titles and 22,000 library items. Their catalogue is available online.OSA is not only an archive. It is one of Europe’s leading research centers on the history of the Cold War, statesocialism, human rights, and surveillance. The OSA Archivum also provides fellowships for promising researchers that want to investigate the archival funds. Particularly the Visegrad Fellowship supports scholars, engaged artists, journalists, scholars at risk who want to work directly with these materials.Since its start in 2010, the Visegrad Scholarship has been awarded to more than 290 fellows from over 65 countries.In our series, we will invite the Visegrad Fellows that will share us their experience with working with this fascinating archive. In our third episode, we invited John Bessai, who researched the impact of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act. Signed by 35 states from both sides of the Cold War divide, the agreement aimed to reduce tensions between East and West in the process called détente. Beyond security issues, it also included commitments on human rights, information, and contacts between people.The human rights commitments contained in the HelsinkiFinal Act had consequences that reached far beyond diplomacy. They encouraged the emergence of citizen groups dedicated to monitoring state behavior and documenting rights violations. Over time, these initiatives developed intoorganizations such as Helsinki Watch and eventually the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, the central focus of John Bessai’s research. As he mentioned in our podcast: this organization [...] was composed by individuals and groups who found voice thanks to the Helsinki Accords. It was connected to the creation of human rights organizations which actually followed the protocols that were within the Helsinki agreements and it continued on until 2007. The Records of the International Helsinki Federation forHuman Rights, held by the OSA Archivum, revealed how reports, testimonies, and public documentation became important tools in Cold War politics. John Bessai’s readingof these archival materials is fresh, as he shifts attention away from military confrontation and toward procedures, communication, and the growing role of civil society:[IHFHR] did fundamental work in ensuring that human rights were being observed. In a nutshell, the HelsinkiAccords provided a foundation for legitimizing human rights within the Eastern Bloc. This was counterposed to the Western Bloc, or NATO, on one hand, and the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact on the other. This sort of breakthroughthrough the Helsinki Accords (...) opened the door to the discourse of human rights within the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union. In our conversation, we discuss the Helsinki process,the role of culture and dissident networks, the challenges of archival research, and what the archives can reveal about the changing nature of international politics during the late Cold War.

Having achieved formal independence, formerly colonized societies continue to suffer under the consequences of colonialism.Whereas colonialism is often declared to have ended, coloniality persists. Colonialism created power structures that transcend armed control over territories and people and remain “alive in books, in the criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, in common sense, in the self-image of people, in aspirations of self, and many other aspects of our modern experience.” Thus, the question arises: how can we dismantle and break out of this structure? Constitutionalism has traditionally been seen as one of the main paths to emancipation for a people. In defining a collective political identity and laying the ground rules for their society, they could overcome oppression by strongmen. But can constitutionalism also serve the purposes of fightingcoloniality, or is it a Western concept whose application imposes on formerly colonized societies the epistemology of their oppressors? In this conversation, Ronnie Yearwood analyzes the persistence of coloniality in Caribbeanconstitutionalism and asks what a decolonial constitutionalism, able to overcome the past and think the “new,” must look like.

Demographic policies became one of the most defining political battlegrounds of our time. Within this debate, pronatalism is usually discussed within the framework of traditional values and nationalist agendas. This approach, as our podcast guest Kristijan Fidanovski emphasized, might obscure posing other questions. What prevents millions of people from having the families they want? How could social democratic policies reclaim the debate on social reproduction?These questions were at the core of Kristijan Fidanovski’s presentation at the Democracy Institute’s Annual Conference, held in Budapest on June 26. With the title, Imaginary Exhaustion?, this event explored to what extent today’s democracies are trapped by fear and exhaustion and how we might rebuild a more democratic future. Fidanovski spoke in the panel The People We Fear: Demography, Migration, and Civilizational Anxiety.In our conversation following his panel, we explore the implications of the low fertility rate. This demographic reality often morphs into an anxiety, which in turn politicians instrumentalize it. In this framework, he proposes the concept of “progressive pronatalism”. As Fidanovski stated for Review of Democracy, "we have a below replacement fertility rate, which means less than two point one children per woman (…). It is in essence an observable and measurable demographic trend, which has led to certain policy responses (…).The concept of progressive pronatalism seeks to capture some of these policy trends, but it also seeks to critique them in some important ways. Many policy responses have tended to be quite ideological in a similar manner, as all of them have been introduced by self-declared conservative governments."The discussion next tackles common misconceptions about the term, addressing critics who view the concept progressive pronatalism with skepticism. Afterwards, we focus on the political implications:"just because national conservative actors today as well, not just historically, are very alarmist about demography and sometimes exaggerate the objective, the otherwise objective socioeconomic challenges associated with demography, that does not mean that these are not realities. (…) If populations in developed countries continue to have below replacement fertility rates (which will happen), I think it is very unlikely that we will ever go back to above replacement fertility levels."Fidanovski argues that progressives make a strategic error by abandoning the demographical question explicitly. To counter this, Fidanovski advocates transforming demography from an instrument of population management into an ideologically neutral policy space.Kristijan Fidanovski is an economist at Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies focusing on tobacco taxation in Eastern Europe and the political economies of the Western Balkan countries. He holds a PhD from the University of Oxford’s Department of Social Policy, where he examined pronatalist policies and politics in (Eastern) Europe. His other research interests include population aging, EU integration, and electoral systems.The interview was conducted by Adrian Matus. Alina Young edited the audio file. Photo: Daniel Vegel / CEU Democracy Institute