RevDem Podcast

In the latest episode of our Democracy After 2024 series, Karolina Wigura discusses Poland’s currentrole in Europe and the changing polarization between liberal and illiberal forces; analyzes the role of emotions in contemporary liberal politics; reflects on how we distinguish between agendas of accountability, onthe one hand, and of retribution and revenge, on the other; and explains what she will watch particularly closely in the coming months.Karolina Wigura is a historian of ideas, sociologist, and journalist. She is a Senior Fellow at the Center for Liberal Modernity in Berlin and a member of the Board of the Kultura Liberalna Foundation in Warsaw. She is alecturer at the Institute of Sociology at Warsaw University and a member of the European Council on Foreign Relations. In her research, Karolina Wigura focuses on the political philosophy of the 20th century, on emotions in politics as well as on the sociology and ethics of memory and, more particularly, on questions of transitional justice, historical guilt, and reconciliation.

In the latest RevDem podcast our co-managing editor DrOliver Garner discusses processes for becoming an MP today in Europe with Dr. Emiljana Krali.Dr Krali is a generalist Equity Research Analyst who has experience in telecommunications, fintech, software,and hardware among other fields. She holds degrees from the University of Bari in physics and from the University of Surrey in nanotechnology. Her Ph.D. was obtained from Imperial College London. She is currently undertaking the selection process to become a candidate for the governing Socialist Party in Albania.

In this episode, we explore the newly published book Texts and Contexts from the History of Feminism and Women’sRights in East-Central Europe, Second Half of the Twentieth Century (CEU Press, 2024) edited by Zsófia Lóránd, Adela Hîncu, Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc, and Katarzyna Stańczak-Wiślicz. Our conversation with the editors delves intothe book's aim of highlighting the often-overlooked contributions of East Central European women to global feminist thought and activism. We discuss the selection processof a diverse range of texts and artworks that challenge the dominant politicaland intellectual canons, focusing on the importance of including works thatdon't necessarily self-identify as feminist but engage with themes of systemicoppression. The discussion also touches on how socialism and the post-socialisttransitions shaped feminist movements in the region, notable figures and textsfrom the volume, encountered controversies during the process of editing aswell as the books' reception, and finally, the book's potential to inspirefuture feminist research and activism in East-Central Europe.

In this episode of the Democracy After 2024 series, Dorjana Bojanovska Popovska hosts Marlies Glasius for adiscussion that goes beyond traditional regime-type classifications and the public/private divide, by looking at examples of illiberal and authoritarian practices that emerged or peaked in 2024 as well as their diffusion across different contexts.Dorjana Bojanovska Popovska is a Post-doctoral Fellow at the CEU Democracy Institute.Marlies Glasiu, is a Professor of International Relations at the University of Amsterdam, a Senior Core Fellow at the CEU Institute for Advanced Studies, and author of Authoritarian Practices in a Global Age (OUP 2023).

In this conversation with the Review of Democracy, Professor Leigh Payne, Dr. Julia Zulver, and Dr. Simon Escoffierdiscuss the development of right-against-rights movements that have grown in numbers, strength, and influence in recent years in Latin America. The discussion draws on their latest book, “The Right against Rights in Latin America,” published by Oxford University Press, in which they show that newanti-rights groups are intent on blocking, rolling back, and reversing social movements' legislative advances by obstructing justice and accountability processes and influencing politicians across the region. Their book containschapters that empirically explore the breadth, depth, and diversity of a new wave of anti-rights movements. It details why they are fundamentally different from previous movements in the region, and — perhaps more importantly — why it is of vital importance that we study, analyse, and understand them in a global context, as their impact extends far beyond Latin America.Leigh A. Payne is Professor of Sociology and Latin America at the University of Oxford, St Antony's College. She worksbroadly on responses to past atrocity. Together with Gabriel Pereira and Laura Bernal Bermúdez, she has published Transitional Justice and CorporateAccountability: Deploying Archimedes' Lever (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and a follow-up edited volume on Economic Actors and the Limits of Transitional Justice (Oxford University Press, 2022). Shehas also edited with Karina Ansolabehere and Barbara FreyDisappearances in the Post-Transition Era in Latin America (Oxford University Press, 2021) and with Juan Espindola Collaboration in Authoritarian and Armed Conflict Settings (Oxford University Press, 2022).Julia Zulver is a Wallenberg Academy Fellow at the Swedish Defence University, where she researches  feminist response to backlash in post-conflict settings in Latin America. She was previously a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellow between the Oxford School of Global and AreaStudies and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. She earned her D.Phil. in sociology at the University of Oxford in 2018, where she studied how and why organisations of women mobilise in high-risk contexts – actions that exposethem to further danger. Her book High-Risk Feminism in Colombia: Women’s Mobilization in Violent Contexts was published in 2022. Her co-edited volume, Brave Women: Fighting for Justice in the 21st Century was published this February.Simón Escoffier is an assistant professor at the School of Social Work at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He is the author of the book Mobilising at the Urban Margins: Citizenship and Patronage Politics in Post-Dictatorial Chile (forthcoming, 2023). He holds a doctorate from the Sociology Department and St Antony's College at the University of Oxford. His research sits at the intersection of social movements, citizenship, urban marginality, local governance, democracy, and Latin American studies. He teaches on sociological theory, politics, and social movements.

We are thrilled to bring you the newest episodeof our monthly special in cooperation with the Journal of Democracy. In the framework of this new partnership,authors discuss outstanding articles from the latest print issue of the Journal of Democracy.In this conversation, Richard Wike – director of global attitudes research at Pew Research Center – presents the key facts of the growing dissatisfaction with the way democracy works; discusses which parts of society support which kinds of change in the direction of more representativity; explores how people view the impact of social media on democracy; and reflects on how democracies of the future might look different from past versions and how they could empower citizens more. The conversation is based on Richard Wike’s article “Why the World Is Down on Democracy” which has been published in the January 2025 (36/1)bissue of the Journal of Democracy.

In this discussion with Manan Ahmed, we consider thepolitical history of South Asia from the perspective of one of its most vibrant and famed cities, Lahore. Drawing from his latest book, The Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore (The New Press, 2024), we consider the various episodic and modular histories of citiesin the Global South, their role in forming new kinds of tactile consciousness towards politics, and their presence in colonial and postcolonial political imagination. Enchanting yet tragic, monumental yet fragmented, Lahore—as depicted by Ahmed—embodies a dual legacy. It bears the scars of the 1947 partition of South Asia into India and Pakistan while also reflecting its own vibrant, if imperfect, history of religious and cultural cosmopolitanism—a legacy sacrificed to the nationalizing imperatives of what Ahmed calls “Prophetic Pakistan.”Ahmed’s Lahore departs from the grand, romanticized, orientalist cities painted by Western writers. It is intimate and inhabited by ordinary emotions. Navigating the complexities of the city’s past, Ahmed alerts us to the diversevisions of toil and labor, violence and subterfuge that shapes Lahore as a city of celebration and disappointments.

In this episode of the Review of Democracy Podcast, host Alexandra Medzibrodszky talks to Tejas Parasher, Assistant Professor of Political Theory at UCLA, to explore the rich and often overlooked landscape of radical democratic thought in modern India. Drawing from his award-winning book, Radical Democracy in Modern Indian Political Thought, Parasher discusses the ideas of thinkers and activists from the1910s to the 1970s who challenged the colonial legacies of liberal, representative democracy. These figures envisioned participatory, federalist models of governance that resisted elitism and corruption, offering bold alternatives to the political status quo.Join us as we reflect on the value of these "paths not taken" in anti-colonial politics and consider what lessons they might hold for today’s democratic challenges. From familiar figures like Gandhi to lesser-known voices in Indian intellectual history, this conversation sheds light on a counter-tradition that critiques representative democracy and reimagines what “real” democratic participation can look like. Whether you're a student of political theory or simply curious about alternative democratic models, this episode promises fresh perspectives on both historical and contemporary governance.

In this episode of the Democracy After 2024 series, Denys Tereshchenko hosts Margarita Zavadskaya to discuss the asymmetries of power between the state and civil society in Russia, public attitudes toward the full-scale invasion of Ukraine among Russians inside and outside Russia, and the reasons behind the failure of anti-war protests.Margarita Zavadskaya is a senior research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs (FIIA) and researcher at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki. Sheis the editor, most recently, of The Politics of the Pandemic in Eastern Europe and Eurasia. Blame Game and Governance (Routledge, 2024).Denys Tereshchenko is a doctoral researcher in History at the European University Institute, Florence. He previously studied Political Science, Public Policy, and Comparative History in Kyiv and Vienna. Together with Nadiia Koval, he co-edited Russian Cultural Diplomacy under Putin: Rossotrudnichestvo, the “Russkiy Mir” Foundation, andthe Gorchakov Fund in 2007–2022 (ibidem Press, 2023).

“The ability to shame depends foremost on the public sense of right and wrong. You can cite a human rights treaty but that is not going to be enough to persuade people. You got to be able to show them that the government’s conduct is wrong in a waythat they feel viscerally.”In this conversation at the Review of Democracy,Kenneth Roth – who is about to publish Righting Wrongs. Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments – explains what has made the strategies of Human Rights Watch distinct in the world of humanrights-related advocacy and activism, and discusses cases where they managed to have a real impact; considers how the extension of the catalogue of human rights over time has shaped their interests and profile; reflects on HRW’s relationship with different types of governments; and explains how HRW has related to the question of humanitarian intervention and drawn on international humanitarian law across the decades.Kenneth Roth acted as the executive director of Human Rights Watch between 1993 and 2022.Righting Wrongs. Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments is published by Knopf.