RevDem Podcast

This interview with historian Professor Xu Guoqi explores the major themes of his latest book The Idea of China ata moment marked by the weakening of the international order and the global resurgence of nationalism. We begin by tracing the changing meanings of “China” and “Chineseness.” The conversation then moves to thinking about Chineseuniversalism, its alignments and tensions with Western liberalism, conflicts between evolving historical identities and the projection of a stable national order, and the role of “cooked past” in constructing modern Chinese identity.We also discuss the importance of diasporas, foreign influences, sport, religion, and bodily discipline in shaping modern China beyond purely political or economic frameworks. Finally, the interview reflects on the relationshipbetween science, democracy, and governance in contemporary China, and what alternative histories of “Chineseness” might still remain possible.

Are interethnic marriages bridges or fault lines in post-conflict societies? What happens when the politics of national identity enter the intimacy of home? Who were the main agents to oppose or promote mixed marriages in East-CentralEurope? Was it the Church? Was it the legal framework? Were it depending on local culture? Was it determined by class?In our podcast in two parts, we discuss this topic with Karolina Lendák-Kabók and Lucija Balikić, around their research project called entitled “Mixed Families: Searching forIdentity and Belonging in Post-Conflict Societies”. Their research group emerges from the The Momentum (Lendület) 2025 project hosted at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of MinorityStudies and it is financed by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences – Flagship Program of the Academy.By following marriages that crossed lines of language,confession, and social status, the research project “MixedFamilies: Searching for Identity and Belonging in Post-Conflict Societies” trace how states, churches, and communities sought to regulate intimacy long before theyregulated borders.Our first part begins by discussing the intellectualcuriosities that led to this project and the main research questions. Then, the discussion moves to a careful unpacking of the project's main term, mixedness, and why it offers a productive lens for studying interethnic marriages.The episode then turns to the choice of cases: Hungaryand the post‑Yugoslav space. Listeners will learn what makes these regions comparable, how their shared imperial and socialist legacies matter.

In our latest episode of the special series producedin partnership with the Journal of Democracy, we discuss therecent article by Susan Stokes, entitled “Why Elected Leaders Subvert Democracy” (Journal of Democracy, Vol. 37, No.2,April 2026). Democracy today faces many paradoxes. According to recent reports, democracy has regressed to the level of 1978, and the successes of the third wave of democratization have been eroded. More than two-thirds ofthe world's population now lives in autocracies. At the same time, however, democracy seems almost hegemonic as a political idea. Today, even the most brutal dictators claim that they are, in fact, staunch democrats. Perhaps evenmore paradoxically, politicians who undermine democracy often come to power through free and fair elections. This seems to have replaced the military coup, which was the predominant form of change toward authoritarianism in the 20th century. In a recent article in the Journal of Democracy, Susan Stokes examines several questions that arise from this phenomenon: Why is there an increase in democratic erosion at this point in history? What factors leave some countriesmore at risk than others? And, perhaps most importantly, what can be done to counter these developments?

How can a democracy emerge from authoritarian rule when those who hold power fear what comes next?In this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast, Gabriel Pereira speaks with José Ramón Morales-Arilla about the challenges of democratic transition in Venezuela.Drawing on economic theory and comparative experiences, Morales-Arilla argues that the key obstacle is not simply political disagreement, but a deeper problem of credibility: regime insiders may resist change if they expect sweeping retribution.The conversation explores how concepts such as adverse selection and signaling help explain this dynamic, and what it would take for democratic leaders to build trust with keyactors. It also introduces a novel framework for transitional justice—one that differentiates between actors based on both responsibility and strategic importance.At stake is a difficult but unavoidable question: can “imperfect justice” provide a realistic path toward democracy, or does it risk undermining its very foundations?

Of the many political ideologies that exist, perhaps oneof the most paradoxical ones is nationalism. It has been associated with various political currents. At the end of the eighteenth and during the nineteenth century, people who wanted to overcome monarchy were often staunchnationalists. In the first half of the twentieth century, nationalism is said to have been a root cause for the two world wars and the horrors of fascism. However, especially in the second half of the same century, nationalism was important inthe fight against imperialism and the struggle for decolonization of many countries in the Global South. Today, in almost the whole world, processes of democratic backsliding, autocratization, and a rise of the far-right can beobserved. Again, nationalism is said to play an important role in this. In this conversation, Filip Milačićconsiders the influence of nationalism on current processes of democratic backsliding and proposes counterstrategies.

In the new episode of our series produced in partnership with the Journal of Democracy, Ferenc Laczó speaks with L. Jason Anastasopoulos and Jie (Jason) Lian about their article, “The Limits of Authoritarian AI.”They discuss the new challenges and opportunities for repression that AI poses; the dilemmas autocrats face when employing such tools; what a maximalist agenda forpro-democracy activists could look like and how it could begin to be realized; and how authoritarian and democratic regimes may use AI in the future.

In our new podcast, Diána Vonnák discussesthe recent past and present state of relations between Hungary and Ukraine. Focusing on questions of scholarship, culture and media, the conversation explores howprevalent Hungarian perspectives on Ukraine may be characterized and contextualized; how ties between Hungarians and Ukrainians have been transformed since 2022; and how this highly sensitive – and controversial –relationship could be improved in the near future.

In this special podcast episode with Pepper Culpepper, we discuss the latest article entitled, When Populism Can be Good, jointly written by Pepper Culpepper and Taeku Lee. This discussion reframes populism as a differentiated and politically consequential phenomenon rather than a uniformlyanti-democratic force. It distinguishes between populism rooted in political failure, which often turns exclusionary and anti-institutional, and populism grounded in economic unfairness, which can mobilize more inclusive, redistributive demands. Pepper's argument suggests that whilepopulism can act as a corrective, it also reveals the system's failure to address structural inequalities and sustain its emancipatory promise. The conversation also touches on the inability of mainstream parties to channeleconomic grievances, underscoring limits in political imagination and institutional incentives. The central challenge, as Pepper elaborates, is whether these populist energies can be rechanneled into durable democratic reforms, rather than hardening into destabilizing, anti-system anger.

According to the Rule of Law Index, prepared yearly by the World Justice Project, in 2025, 68% of countries worldwide experienced a decline in the rule of law, a bleak contrastto 57% the previous year. In what feels like a permanent rule of law crisis, revisiting the origins of the concept offers much-needed distance and room for reflection.This discussion with Fernanda Pirie focuses on the historical roots of the rule of law and what these roots tell us about our present time.

Today, the afterlife of communism is equally about monuments and half-ironic memes, retro aesthetics, movie series and board games. Far from being confined to archivesor secondary sources, references to socialist period survive throughout everyday cultural forms and reveal a way of processing histories that were never fully resolved. In our conversation with Anna Váradi and Lucy Jeffery, built around their edited volume Replaying Communism: Trauma and Nostalgia in European Cultural Production, thistension comes into focus. Published this year by the Central European University Press/ Amsterdam University Press, the book presents how cultural productions do not simply represent the socialist period but also give newmeanings and emotional textures.Throughout our conversation, we explore the theoretical underpinnings of the concepts of nostalgia and trauma. Their central claim challenges the familiar binary between nostalgia and opposition. As Anna Váradi and Lucy Jeffery stated intheir introduction, they follow van Liere and Sremac'sunderstanding of trauma, which is: theremembrance of a painful irrevocable past scatters in different modalities of culture, politics, and religion and contributes to new forms of longing and belonging. In this process, nostalgia is a powerful vehicle to (re)present painful pasts in the present while mobilizing hybrid forms of identity and counter-identity.Instead of opposing nostalgia with trauma, Anna Váradi argues that these concepts should be analyzed together. As she stated in the podcast, “for us, trauma and nostalgia are best understood as coexisting forces that shapecontemporary engagement with the past”. More specifically, nostalgia often carries unresolved trauma, while trauma itself can be reactivated through selective, even comforting narratives about the past. At the same time, traumadoes not disappear. It returns, refracted through stories, images and collective narratives that give new political uses.Their chapter on the film series Deutschland 89 makes this analysis more tangible. Moments that feel nostalgic, music, shared habits, familiar images, are never neutral. Theyare tied to experiences of control, division, and adaptation. Even the fall of the Berlin Wall does not appear as a clean break, but as a moment that leaves lasting confusion and imbalance, still visible in political divides today. Asthe chapter concludes, The Deutschland seriesdepicts differences between life in the DDR as opposed to the BRD and the rootlessness experienced during die Wende through plotlines that trace the inescapability ofpast traumas for East Germans.Across the volume, similar patterns emerge. Museums, online humor or board games do not simply preserve the past. Instead, they reorganize it and turn memory intoa field of negotiations where identities are redefined. Among others, Carmen Levick examines how the Romanian Revolution is curated at the History Museum ofBraşov, while Kateryna Yeremieieva shows how Soviet-era anecdotes are recycled in contemporary Russian online media. Lucia Szemetová, in turn, explores GáborZsigmond Papp's Retro Series and the cultural afterlife of Hungarian state propaganda films. Across these cases, the past is not simply preserved but actively negotiated, revealing how memory, culture and politics remain tightly intertwined.

Politicians have usually neglected the needs and concerns of young voters, since they were seen as the most inactive and unreliable segment of the electorate. However, the interlocking crises of the contemporary global landscape have awakened Gen-Z's political consciousness and have made them realize that their voice should also be heard. But have politicians adapted to this new reality and are they willing to discuss the issues that young people find imperative? In our new podcast, Vlad Adamescu and Răzvan Petri discuss the new wave of youth engagement in Romanian politics. Starting from their own Politică la Minut (Instant Politics) initiative that aims to increase political participation among young Romanians, they analyze how the current political situation in Romania has moved away from the divide between post-communist and anticommunist factions and is now similar to the landscape in other European states, where the conflict occurs between liberal and conservative forces. Petri and Adamescu also emphasize how, as opposed to Hungary or Poland, Romania has always managed to avoid the concentration of power in the hands of a single leader. However, it has faced another problem: the cartelization of political parties through the existence of several clientelist pyramids. In turn, this entails that establishing a new reformist political party is extremely difficult, since it will have to overcome the obstacles generated by these political cartels. Adamescu and Petri note that this may be one of the main reasons why Gen-Z still lacks appropriate political representation in Romania, even if young people are prominent voices in civil society and are active members of various NGOs. The conversation was conducted by Luca Matasaru. Lilit Hakobyan edited the audio file.

In this episode of our podcast series produced in collaboration with the Journal of Democracy, Ferenc Laczó speaks with Andrés Mejía Acosta and Javier Pérez Sandoval about their new article, “Why Populists Hollow Out Their States.” They discuss how, why, and when elected leaders seek to undermine the state; what libertarians and leftists share when it comes to practices of state erosion and where they might differ; how the pertinent examples from Latin America they present in the article may be placed in a global context; and in what ways the connections between low-capacity states and flawed democracy may be conceptualized.Andrés Mejía Acosta is associate professor at theUniversity of Notre Dame's Keough School of Global Affairs.Javier Pérez Sandoval is a postdoctoral research associatein democracy at Notre Dame.Alina Young edited the audio file.

In this conversation, Julian E. Zelizer – editor of the new volume The Presidency of Joseph R. Biden. A First Historical Assessment – discusses the key accomplishments of Joe Biden's presidency as well as the sources of his ultimate failure to fulfil his promise. He explores the historical origins of the Biden presidency, reflects on its foreign policy record, and considers the questions future historians will be debating.

Artificial intelligence or the pandemics were two recent crises framed as almost magical non-human actors. They both reshaped the boundaries of human agency. By now,the language explaining them is often one of rupture and unprecedented transformation. AI or COVID-19 were described as opaque, autonomous and difficult to control. Yet the fear of the non-human as a destabilising force is not new. What we would like to pinpoint in our series it that societies, when confronted with such moments of rupture, authorize forms of exclusion and violence based on (ir)rationalism.Our focus throughout this series will fall on the vampire and witchcraft epidemics. European societies once confronted witches, revenants and vampires as threats to moral and political order. These figures emerged at moments ofepidemic disease, religious fracture and institutional weakness. They explained crisis. This new dossier revisits those episodes of collective anxiety. Whilst the differences between AI, pandemics and zombies, witches and undead are substantial, these moments reveal the fragile boundary between the rational state and collective hysteria. The imagery resulted can be a fine barometer ofthe how states respond when agency seems to escape human control or what mechanisms of blame, purification and boundary-drawing are activated.In our third podcast, we host Ádám Mézes, with whom we discuss the fascinating topic of vampire contagion in the Habsburg Empire and its broader impact on the history of science. As in the earlier conversation with Kateryna Dysa on witchcraft trials, the discussion begins with a deceptively simple question: what exactly is a vampire, and who has the authority to define it? The first clear definition of vampires in the Habsburg lands comes from a medical report written in 1732. It describes the vampire as “a returning dead, a revenant, a physical corpse that (…) it is also to spread its condition to its victims”, asour guest emphasizes. Because Ádám Mézes focuses on the Habsburg case, most of the written sources he uses come from medical personnel and members of the clergy. These reports were mediated through translators and shaped by theconceptual frameworks of imperial officials. Many of them interpreted the unfamiliar beliefs through the categories of Catholic demonology. Thus, religious confessions played an essential role in defining vampires. The conversation then moves to the specific political and epidemiological context of the Habsburg military frontier, which strongly influenced the perception about vampires. Officials stationed along the frontier were trained to watch for signs of contagious disease. When several unexplained deaths occurred in the same village, suspicion quickly spread. As John Blair emphasized in our first podcast of this series, reports of vampires often emerged as a possible explanation for the sudden wave of deaths.In an ironic twist, the focus on vampires had an important effect on scientific investigation. Mézes brings the examples of two physicians who exhumed and dissected bodies suspected of being vampires. At that time, systematic research on human bodies was morally and legally constrained. However, by observing cases of suspected vampirism, such physicians could produce empirical insightsabout the human body and the process of decay. Our discussion concludes with possible avenues for future research. Our guest emphasizes that primary sources in Orthodox and Catholic monastic archives, as well as administrative records, still require investigation. In turn, thehistorians should move away from the literary stereotypes created in the 18th and 19th centuries and focus instead on reconstructing the complex social worlds in which the figure of the vampire first took shape.

In this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast, Gabriel Pereira speaks with Gabriela Lotta about Democracy on a Tightrope: Politics and Bureaucracy in Brazil,co-authored with Pedro Abramovay and recently published by Central European University Press .Drawing on the Brazilian case, the conversation explores the risks that emerge when the relationship between politics and bureaucracy breaks down: on the one hand, therise of technocratic governance and the “fetishization of meritocracy”; on the other, the erosion of bureaucratic institutions by political leaders.Through a series of concrete policy cases, Lotta reflects on how these tensions shape democratic governance and what a more productive relationship between politicalleadership, expertise, and citizen participation might look like—both in Brazil and beyond.

What happens when democracy faces violence as a recurring feature of political life? In this episode, we discuss the DANGER – Democracy, Anger, and Elite Response European Research Council (ERC) project with PrincipalInvestigator, Nils-Christian Bormann. This EU-funded research project examines how European democracies responded to political violence, economic crisis, and rising extremism in the interwar period.The conversation explores the project's core questions, including how violence interacts with democratic stability and what role political elites play in moments of crisis. We also discuss the project's mixed-methods approach, combining large-scale data collection with in-depth historical casestudies, as well as innovative open-source datasets and visualisations. The episode highlights key early findings, most notably the relationship between local violence and support for extremist parties and reflects on what these historical patterns might tell us about the vulnerabilities of contemporary democracies.

In many democracies today, elected leaders challenge institutions, undermine electoral rules, and test the limits of constitutional order. Yet legal accountability for suchactions remains rare. In this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast, produced in cooperation with the Journal of Democracy, Gabriel Pereira speaks with Luciano Da Ros and Manoel Gehrke about their article “How toBring Authoritarians to Justice.” Focusing on Brazil's response to Jair Bolsonaro's attempt to overturn the 2022 election results, they examine how courts can confront authoritarian behavior by elected leaders—and why judicial action sometimes succeeds where political opposition alone does not. The conversation explores the strategic role of Brazil's high courts, the tensions between judicial intervention and democratic legitimacy, and what Brazil's experience reveals about the broader challenge of defending democracy in thetwenty-first century.

In this latest conversation, we speak with Minxin Peiabout his latest book, The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism (Princeton University Press, 2025),which challenges the enduring assumption that economic development naturally leads to democracy. Pei argues that China's post-Mao reforms produced not political liberalization but a resilient, adaptive form of authoritarianism.Focusing on the Deng Xiaoping time, he shows how these changes also reinforced centralized authority, fostered corruption, and sidelined reformist actors—laying the groundwork for neo-authoritarian rule. The conversation turns to nationalism and the Patriotic Education Campaign, probing how nationalism in contemporary China has been mobilized to legitimize Xi Jinping's totalizing control. We ask whether the features once seen as China's strengths—partydominance and controlled markets—are now sources of fragility under Xi Jinping.Dwelling on the significance of the title of the book, we explore how the rise of China, counterintuitive to many in the West, is ultimately an example of contradictions inherent in modern as well as Chinese politics.

Artificial intelligence or the pandemics were two recentcrises framed as almost  magical non-human actors. They both reshaped the boundaries of human agency. By now,the language explaining them is often one of rupture and unprecedented transformation. AI or COVID-19 were described as opaque, autonomous and difficult to control. Both were imagined as operating beyond ordinaryaccountability, while still exerting real effects on collective life. In that sense, the anxiety does not result only from the fear of machines or unknown germs. It concerns the displacement of agency and the fragility of human beings tasked with governing forces they did not design and do not fully understand. Humans are unsettled when power seems to migrate beyond the human subject.Yet the fear of the non-human as a destabilising force isnot new. What we would like to pinpoint in our series it that societies, when confronted with such moments of rupture, authorize forms of exclusion and violence based on (ir)rationalism. Our focus throughout this series will fallon the vampire and witchcraft epidemics. European societies once confronted witches, revenants and vampires as threats to moral and political order. These figures emerged at moments of epidemic disease, religious fracture andinstitutional weakness. They offered an explanation for crisis. This new dossier revisits those episodes of collectiveanxiety. Whilst the differences between AI, pandemics and zombies, witches and undead are substantial, these moments reveal the fragile boundary between the rational state and collective hysteria. The imagery resulted can be a finebarometer of the how states respond when agency seems to escape human control or what mechanisms of blame, purification and boundary-drawing are activated.In our second podcast of this series, we have as guest Kateryna Dysa, with whom we will discuss her extremely fascinating book Ukrainian Witchcraft Trials: Volhynia, Podolia, and Ruthenia, 17th and 18th Centuries, published by the CEU Press in 2023. In this research, she reconstructs the history of witchcraft in Ukraine, with a particular focus on the three so-called “Ruthenian” palatinates of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Podolia, Ruthenia, and Volhynia. Our conversation begins with a conceptual question: what counts as a witch and who defines one? Kateryna Dysa reveals that geographical nuances need to be taken into account. In a region situated at the nexus between Catholicism andOrthodoxy, the definitions were less fixed as they emerged from the local community rather from theologians. The nature of primary sources also differs from thetraditional scholarship on this field. Drawing on 198 primary sources, most of them court books, Dysa reveals a judicial culture markedly different from the better-known Western European persecutions. In most cases, accusations did notculminate in execution. Often, only complaints were recorded; investigations were limited, and verdicts tended to be mild. Death sentences were rare and typically entangled withstark social hierarchies, where accusations flowed upward from elites against socially vulnerable individuals.The episode then turns to gender. Rather than endorsing a monolithic narrative of patriarchal persecution, Dysa emphasizes the social logic of witchcraft accusations as embedded in everyday tensions, including fears surrounding love magic, food, and bodily vulnerability. Finally, the discussion moves to the Enlightenment and Romanticism. In the eighteenth century, state centralization and rationalist reform curtailed formal prosecutions, but popular belief persisted, sometimes leading to extrajudicial violence. In thenineteenth century, Romanticism transformed the witch into a literary and folkloric figure, reshaping her image and symbolic function.

In our new podcast, Ferenc Laczó speaks with Erica Chenoweth and Matthew Cebul about their Journalof Democracy article, “Why Gen-Z Is Rising.” Erica Chenoweth and Matthew Cebul discuss the politicalprofile of Gen-Z protesters, what ignited their recent protests across the globe, and how those protests unfolded invarious places. They reflect on the promises and perils of those protests – and how the related question of violence and non-violence has played out. In closing, Erica and Matthew consider what kind of political transformations weare likely to see as members of Gen-Z will take on ever greater roles in the coming years.

In this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast, political theorist Shuk Ying Chan (UCL) discusses her new book Postcolonial Global Justice (Princeton University Press, 2026), which develops an account of postcolonial global justice as social equality by thinking with anticolonial leaders Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah and JawaharlalNehru. Chan explains her method of “historically inflected normative theorising”, which treats specific historical actors as interlocutors in developing normative principles for the present. The discussion also explores how the nation-state was often an instrument used by these thinkers to pursue abroader ideal of relational equality, and Chan's conceptualisation of postcolonial global justice as a matter of social equality, focusing on the ability of individuals and groups to “stand as equals”. Finally, the conversation turns to contemporary problems of undemocratic global governanceand Chan's proposal to rethink global democracy in terms of horizontal inequalities of power between groups, rather than only a vertical gap between individuals and global institutions.

Artificial intelligence or the pandemics were two recentcrises framed as almost magical non-human actors. They both reshaped the boundaries of human agency. By now,the language explaining them is often one of rupture and unprecedented transformation. AI or COVID-19 were described as opaque, autonomous and difficult to control. Both were imagined as operating beyond ordinaryaccountability, while still exerting real effects on collective life. In that sense, the anxiety does not result only from the fear of machines or unknown germs. It concerns the displacement of agency and the fragility of human beings tasked with governing forces they did not design and do not fully understand. Humans are unsettled when power seems to migrate beyond the human subject.Yet the fear of the non-human as a destabilising force isnot new. What we would like to pinpoint in our series it that societies, when confronted with such moments of rupture, authorize forms of exclusion and violence based on (ir)rationalism. Our focus throughout this series will fallon the vampire and witchcraft epidemics. European societies once confronted witches, revenants and vampires as threats to moral and political order. These figures emerged at moments of epidemic disease, religious fracture andinstitutional weakness. They offered an explanation for crisis. This new dossier revisits those episodes of collectiveanxiety. Whilst the differences between AI, pandemics and zombies, witches and undead are substantial, these moments reveal the fragile boundary between the rational state and collective hysteria. The imagery resulted can be a finebarometer of the how states respond when agency seems to escape human control or what mechanisms of blame, purification and boundary-drawing are activated.In our first podcast of this series, we discuss with Prof. John Blair, around his latest book Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World, published by Princeton University Press. John Blair reconstructs a world in which the dead were not metaphor but menace. His bookfollows the concept of restless bodies which stirred various social anxieties and created symbolic meanings.Drawing on both archeological sources and written sources,Prof. John Blair traces how reports of revenants and vampires spread across medieval England and later in Saxony, Bohemia and Transylvania. A particular revealing case is masticatione mortuorum (mastication of the dead), which meant the corpses that eat themselves. The book does not treat theseepisodes as a form of superstition. Instead, John Blair sees them as anthropological facts which are embedded in localconflicts and in turn reveal fragile systems of authority.Whilst one of the core tenets of Enlightenment was tofight superstition and Maria Theresa issued a ban on corpse-killing, John Blair underlines that the shifts were much more gradual. Reason did not replace fear.Blair shows that accusations of the undead surfaced where institutions were weak and explanations scarce. The exhumed body became a site of negotiation between fear and governance, even during the Enlightenment. What appearsirrational from a distance emerges, under scrutiny, as a structured response to crisis.

What counts as “real” participation in a revolution? To what extent does gender in a revolution nowadays? What are the outcomes of mass mobilization? How do Ukrainian women participate in a revolution? In our podcast, we attemptto find an answer to these questions with Olena Nikolayenko around her latest book, Invisible Revolutionaries: Women'sParticipation in Ukraine's Euromaidan.  Published in April 2025 by Cambridge University Press, her research focuses on the women's participation in the Ukrainian Euromaidan. In the podcast, Olena Nikolayenko places women's protest within a broader framework, which includes the Arab Spring and Belarus.Her claim is that age, class, region and political experience shape women's forms of engagement. Based on these observation, Invisible Revolutionaries distinguishesbetween three models of participation: patriarchal, emancipatory, and hybrid.The methodology received a particular focus in our conversation. The Ukrainian Euromaidan was accuratelydocumented through multiple projects, such as the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance's Maidan: Oral History  and Maidan.Testimonies. As art is equally a key component duringrevolutions, Olena Nikolayenko presents the main artistic projects of the Revolution of Dignity. Olena Nikolayenko claims that Euromaidan is not a singular moment in history. Instead, it belongs within the Ukrainian's longer history of women's activism, which starts from the 1917-1921 Ukrainian revolution to Orange Revolution. However, this legacy remained largely invisible in the English-language historiography. In this context, the conversation ends by emphasizing possible avenues. Researchers dealing with this topic should investigate the relationship between gender andnonviolence, and how nonviolent resistance participation influences subsequent engagement in armed conflict. The question of how women's activism evolves fromcultural and civic resistance to armed defense of national identity remains particularly relevant given Ukraine's ongoing struggle.

Ecuador has experienced one of the most dramatic surges in criminal violence in Latin America, alongside growing pressure on democratic institutions. In this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast—produced in cooperation with the Journalof Democracy—Gabriel Pereira speaks with Galo Mayorga and Kai M. Thaler about how state weakness, militarized security policies, and public fear are reshaping Ecuador's democracy. The conversation explores the roots ofEcuador's crisis, President Daniel Noboa's hardline response to crime, the risks of democratic erosion, and what Ecuador's experience reveals about the broader regional struggle to confront organized crime without sacrificing democratic guardrails.

Honduras has just gone through one of the most chaotic and contested electoral processes in recent memory. In this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast, GabrielPereira speaks with Rachel A. Schwartz about her recent Journal of Democracy article, “Why Honduras Is Facing Election Chaos.” They examine how logistical failures, elite conflict, and long-term democratic erosion combinedto produce uncertainty over the outcome, how US backing shaped post-election politics, and what the new government may mean for Honduras's democratic future.

As Review of Democracy turns its attention from 2025 to the uncertainties of 2026, our editors Adrian Matus (Democracy and Culture) and Anubha Anushree (Cross-Regional Dialogue) discuss the intellectual questions that might shape the year ahead. Building on RevDem's End of the Year Podcast 2025- Part I, the discussion focuses on the democratic developments, underestimated risks for democracy, includingAI literacy, an increasingly transactional political landscape, the emergence of contentious politics, and also the politization of education. The conversation also highlights questions that are yet to be solved in 2026: how should we understand the notion of authorship nowadays? How is the 'grammar' of democracy changing? Check our explorative conversation of the realm of possibilities of 2026.

What does it mean to feel “at home” in aplace, and why does that matter for democracy? In this episode, historianJeremy DeWaal talks about Heimat, a German word that is famously hard to translate. It is often rendered as “home” or “homeland”, but it also points to a deeper sense of belonging, memory and emotional attachment to specificplaces. Drawing on his book Geographiesof Renewal: Heimat and Democracy in West Germany, 1945–1990 (Cambridge University Press), DeWaal explores different meanings of Heimat and explains how Heimat shaped post-war debates about democracy, federalism and Europe. Theconversation also looks at the role of expellee politics and the Anti-Heimat movement of the 1960s, and connects these histories to current debates about identity, migration, and nationalism. The discussion concludes with a reflectionon what the history of Heimat can reveal about the politics of place today.

In the Soviet Union, youth fashion meant more than just a way of expression. In our latest episode, we discusswith Alla Myzelev about the stiliagi, a flamboyant youth subculture that emerged in the late Stalinist and early post-Stalinist Soviet Union.Myzelev situates the stiliagi not simply as fashion-conscious rebels, but as a distinctly embodied and aesthetic form of dissent that challengeddominant socialist norms of respectability, discipline, and masculinity.Through their brightly coloured clothing, enthusiasm for jazz, and stylised modes of self-presentation, stiliagi exposed the fragility of Soviet ideals of the “proper” socialist male citizen. Rather than overt political opposition, their subversion operated through taste, leisure, and the body,revealing how cultural practices could quietly unsettle authoritarian norms even in highly regulated societies.Part II of the podcast emphasizes the differenttypes of primary sources used to investigate such a rich phenomenon. As well, it discusses the latest developments in the field of creative dissent, particularly Julianne Fürst's book Flowers Through Concrete. Lastly, Alla Myzelev explores what questions within the field remain unresolved.

Over the last two years, the world has witnessed atrocities beyond imagination. The killing of approximately 1,200 people by Hamas in Israel on October 7, 2023, was followed by a genocidal war in which the Israeli Defense Forces have, according to recent reports, killed over 67,000 Palestinians — nearly a third of them children. Israel's military hasdamaged or destroyed more than 90% of homes in Gaza and left countless people with life-altering physical and psychological injuries. Shocking as this is, Israel'sactions in Gaza have been met with overwhelming silence or even support from Western liberal democracies, which often portray themselves as champions of peace and a rules-based international order. Having warned of this potentialearly on, in this conversation Prof. Omer Bartov argues that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and criticizes Western leaders for their complicity.

In this episode of the Review of Democracy Podcast,historians Tara Zahra and Pieter Judson discuss their book TheGreat War and the Transformation of Habsburg Central Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025), which presents an intriguing reinterpretation of the First World War and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. Rather than treatingthe war as a mere endpoint or the Empire's dissolution as inevitable, the conversation explores how wartime social and political transformations reshaped everyday life and reconfigured relations between state and society. The episode examines fears of democratisation and elite decision-making, the management of refugees and mass displacement, and the emergence of new welfare practices and administrative experiments, showing how these processes laid the foundations for the post-1918 order. By foregrounding shared experiences of scarcity,mobilisation, and repression across the Monarchy, the discussion examines what the Empire's often improvised wartime policies reveal about processes ofdisintegration as well as unexpected capacities for adaptation.

In the Soviet Union, youth fashion meant more than just a way of expression. In our latest episode, we discusswith Alla Myzelev about the stiliagi, a flamboyant youth subculture that emerged in the late Stalinist and early post-Stalinist Soviet Union.Myzelev situates the stiliagi not simply as fashion-conscious rebels, but as a distinctly embodied and aesthetic form of dissent that challenged dominant socialist norms of respectability, discipline, and masculinity.Through their brightly coloured clothing, enthusiasm for jazz, and stylised modes of self-presentation, stiliagi exposed the fragility of Soviet ideals of the “proper” socialist male citizen. Rather than overt political opposition, their subversion operated through taste, leisure, and the body,revealing how cultural practices could quietly unsettle authoritarian norms even in highly regulated societies.Part I of the podcast emphasizes how gender andsexuality complicate standard readings of youth subcultures as purely liberatory. Myzelev stresses that stiliagimasculinities were both transgressive and ambivalent: while rejecting militarised postwar Soviet masculinity, they often reproduced hierarchies through consumerism, serial relationships, and the objectification of women.

In our latest episode of the special series producedin partnership with the Journal of Democracy, we discuss the recent article co-authored by Benjamin Gedan and Elias French, entitled “The Threat to Latin American Term Limits” (Journal of Democracy, Vol. 36, No.4, October 2025)The desire of leaders to remain in office indefinitelyhas haunted democracy since its inception. Politicians have found various ways to circumvent democratic accountability and sideline the people's will for a change in leadership, from military coups to rigged elections or the installation of puppet leaders. One of the most widely used tools to constrainsuch practices is the establishment of presidential term limits. Many of today's constitutions impose a limit on the number of times a person can run for office. However, as the Mexican experience with the practice of el dedazo shows, term limits and regular changes in the presidency are no guarantee of democratic turnover. Creative lawyers have often found legalpathways to circumvent such prohibitions. Benjamin Gedan and Elias French explain how, today, the judiciary is increasingly being used to challenge provisions that limit the amount of time individuals can serve as heads of theexecutive. Analyzing cases from Nicaragua, Honduras, Bolivia, and El Salvador, they show how constitutional courts have undermined this key safeguard of democratic survival, often by weaponizing international law and citizens' political rights.

As 2025 draws to a close, RevDem editors Alexandra Kardos(History of Ideas), Gabriel Pereira (Cross-Regional Dialogue), and Kristóf Szombati (Political Economy and Inequalities) take stock of a turbulent democratic year through three keywords: imagination, frustration, and realignment. From Latin America's shifting right and disillusionment with democratic “delivery” to renewed geopolitical pressuresand the growing visibility of China, they reflect on what is changing, why it matters, and what gets lost when Europe remains intellectually inward-looking.The conversation also highlights where democratic energy still surfaces—in civic mobilisation, investigative journalism, and grassroots organising. These reflections set the stage for Part II, which turns from diagnosis to the priorities and risks shaping democracy in 2026.

In this latest conversation with Golnar Nikpour, we discuss her book, The Incarcerated Modern: Prisons and Public Life in Iran (Stanford University Press, 2024). We discuss how modern Iranian prisons illuminate broader questions about political modernity, state formation, and democratic aspiration. The conversation examines the contemporary stakes of the book'spublication and its intervention in debates on authoritarianism, penal reform, and democracy, while probing the author's concept of the “public life” of prisons as active producers of political subjectivity and belonging. Thedialogue questions the analytical distinction between political and ordinary prisoners, using this to reflect on how societies define the “political” and confront the ethics of incarceration. It also foregrounds the foundational roleof institutions like Qasr prison in shaping Iran's modern state and explores the transnational circulation of penal ideas that informed Iran's carceral system. Further, it delves into the tension between secular and religious framings of incarceration, the paradoxes of technocratic reformism andharm-reduction strategies under authoritarian regimes, and the criteria by which the modern Iranian carceral project might be understood as a “failure.”The conversation positions prisons as key sites where democratic hopes, disciplinary projects, and visions of social order converge and collide.

In this exclusive end-of-year conversation with ourCo-Managing Editor Ece Özbey, Nobel Prize–winning political economist Daron Acemoğlu reflects on what 2025 revealed, and failed to resolve, about the state of democracy. From Trump's global impact to the limits of personalizedpolitics, from institutional decay to AI-driven distortions of political judgment, he explores why liberal democracy is struggling across regions and where renewal might still begin. He offers a concise yet wide-ranging assessment of democracy's present, defined by the widening gap between ambitious promises and lived outcomes—and the uncertainty ahead.

The threat of the far-right dominates politics in Germany today. The ascendance of the AfD marks the first time since the end of World War II that such a force has attracted a considerable share of the German electorate. This regularly leads politicians from centrist parties to emphasizethe importance of preventing German history from repeating itself. However, these same actors have simultaneously brought far-right policies into the mainstream and adopted practices that resemble the playbook of autocrats. Suchpractices have been particularly visible in the repression of pro-Palestinian voices over the last two years. In recent articles, Prof. Robin Celikates has argued that these developments indicate an authoritarian turn in contemporaryGermany.In part 1 of this podcast, Prof. Celikates discussed the German government's repression of pro-Palestinian protests and voices, Germany's broader protest culture, and the notion of Staatsräson.The second part focuses on the role that the weaponization of antisemitism—or, as some have called it, “anti-antisemitism”—plays in fueling racism, real antisemitism, and underminingfreedom of expression. The discussion concludes with an analysis of whether contemporary Germany might be trending toward authoritarianism.

"We care witnessing in the digital news reports a major shift since the COVID-19 crisis. (…). During the COVID crisis, the main information source became social media. With social media, you have many, many difficulties in finding the rightinformation or the correct information”, stated Raluca Radu, a Professor of Journalism and Communication Studies at the University of Bucharest, speaker for the Budapest Forum and contributor to the Reuters Institute Digital Report.  In a conversation for the Review of Democracy, she explains how social platforms like TikTok, WhatsApp groups, and AI-driven chatbots reconfigure the trust towards information. As Raluca Radu clearly emphasizes, COVID-19 marked a shiftin media consumption. During the pandemic, the main source of information became the short-form video content on platforms such as TikTok. Some newsrooms recognized that their audiences migrated elsewhere and rushed to follow. They tried to adapt to this changing landscape by establishing social media presence. By now, social media is not only an additional channel of dissemination but, in some cases, the only way to reach citizens who do not read traditional websites or watch TV. Thus, social media and algorithmsredefine the public sphere worldwide. This poses new problems. Whilst seemingly the AI data appears to be neutral, it might often be biased. Thus, this shift might need new conceptual approaches. Throughout her research, Raluca Radu puts a strong emphasis on the topic of trust. As she explains, this concept can be extremely valuable. For instance,  trust in media tends to decrease duringpolitical crises, particularly when politicians attack media companies. Economic divides complicate this already fragile situation. The misinformation and radicalization is also created by the lack of access to good quality information. Whilst the Nordic countries show high subscription rates and mediatrust, the Romanian model follows a different model. Here, the audiences expect free and high-quality information. In this context, investigative journalism relies more often on crowdfunding than on paywalls. Consequences are visible. Romania's 2024 elections showed that the rise of fringe political figures such as Călin Georgescu was driven less by overt campaigning (grassroots) than coordinated comment networks and WhatsApp chains (known as astroturfing). The comments on the posts were often AI-generated. Such tactics were much more difficult to spot by researchers and electoral regulators. Raluca Radu is not merely diagnosing the problem. Instead, as a researcher in PROMPT, she is contributing to developingan AI-assisted tool that tracks harmful narratives across languages and platforms. Throughout the podcast, Raluca Radu's emphasis is that the public sphere seems to be fragmented, but not beyond repair. Understanding the newframeworks of information consumption is the first step towards building strong, trustworthy content.

In this episode, Pedro Abramovay offers a wide-ranging analysis of the rise of illiberal forces in Latin America and the democratic vulnerabilities they exploit. Drawing on theBrazilian experience, he discusses what is genuinely new about today's illiberal actors, why they resonate with voters, and why resisting them requires more than electoral victories. Abramovay argues for reimagining democracy itself—recovering its promise, renewing its agenda, and building stronger alliances across civil society.

We are thrilled to bring you the next episode of our monthly special in cooperation with the Journal of Democracy. Inthe framework of this new partnership, our editors discuss outstanding articles from the newest print issue of the journal with their authors. In this discussion with Nate Schenkkan, an independentauthority on human rights and global authoritarianism and former senior director of research at Freedom House,we examine the growing issue of transnationalrepression—a practice wherein states pursue individuals and groups beyond their own borders whom they regard as threats to those in power. Although much of the international public's awareness stems from prominent incidents such asthe assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, our discussion underscores the significance of more routine methods, including digital intimidation and attempts to suppress dissent among diaspora communities. We examine the factors that contribute to the rise of transnational repression and outline strategies to protecttargets, such as digital security, diaspora organizing, and theimportance of local-level initiatives in building community defenses against state harassment.

The threat of the far-right dominates politics in Germany today. The ascendance of the AfD marks the first time since the end of World War II that such a force has attracted a considerable share of the German electorate. This regularly leads politicians from centrist parties to emphasizethe importance of preventing German history from repeating itself. However, these same actors have simultaneously brought far-right policies into the mainstream and adopted practices that resemble the playbook of autocrats. Suchpractices have been particularly visible in the repression of pro-Palestinian voices over the last two years. In recent articles, Prof. Robin Celikates has argued that these developments indicate an authoritarian turn in contemporaryGermany.In Part 1 of this podcast, Prof. Celikates examines the German government's repression of pro-Palestinian protests and voices, discusses Germany's broader protest culture, and reflects on the notion of Staatsräson.

On 1 June 2025, Karol Nawrocki, an independent candidate backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party, was elected President of Poland. His victory came as a surprise to many in the country. Some pinned it on widespread disenchantment with what was perceived as an overly lengthy implementation of reforms aimed at restoring the rule of law – a key issue the ruling coalition had campaigned on.In response to these critiques, on 24 July, Prime Minister Donald Tusk carried out a government reshuffle, which saw Adam Bodnar replaced as Minister of Justice and Prosecutor General by the former judge Waldemar Żurek.In this podcast, Jakub Jaraczewski examines the progress the Bodnar ministry made in undoing the consequences of eight years of Law and Justice rule. He also discusses thechallenges that lie ahead for Minister Żurek, with Nawrocki being widely seen as more confrontational than his predecessor in the Presidential Palace, Andrzej Duda.

In this conversation with Professor Maya Tudor—part of our special series produced in partnership with the Journal of Democracy—we discuss her recent article published in the journal's October 2025 issue (Vol. 36, No. 4). Tudor explores the factors behind the recent, alleged erosion of democratic ideals worldwide. Drawing on her experiences as an educator, Tudor argues that today's decline in trust in democracy stems from misconceptions about its achievements—such as expanding education, extending life expectancy, promoting relative peace, and fostering economic progress. Challenging the belief that autocracies deliver more effectively on these outcomes, she contends that such regimes are often short-lived and unstable. Tudor ultimately urges us to view democracy not as a purely normative ideal, but as a pragmatic system best suited to advancing human well-being.Maya Tudor is Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and a Fellow of St. Hilda's College, University of Oxford. She is the author of The Promise of Power: The Origins of Democracy in India and Autocracy in Pakistan (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Varieties of Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 2023), as well as numerous articles in academic journals and popular media outlets.The interview was conducted Anubha Anushree. Lilith Hakobyan edited the audio file.

To what extent does Zohran Mamdani's recent election represent a turn in American politics? In an interview for the Review of Democracy, Fabian Holt (Associate Professor at Roskilde University) discusses the political platform that made Zohran Mamdani's victory possible. Throughout our conversation, Holt maps the evolution of the Democratic Socialists of America, as presented in his latest book “Organize or Burn: How New York Socialists Fight for Climate Survival”, published last month by NYU Press.  Throughout the podcast, you can hear the reasons why Holt became interested in studying DSA, as his initial focus was on music festivals and their relationship to the neoliberal framework. As he notes, Organize or Burn is the firstethnographic work on DSA. The discussion then focuses on the strengths and limitations of conducting ethnographic fieldwork on such an evolving phenomenon.  Holt argues that first-hand experience is essential in understanding grassroots movements. Another point tackled in the podcast is climate apathy and how the DSA sought to raise awareness about climate change in a sustained way. As Fabian Holt argues, thisis the meaning behind his book's title, Organize or Burn, which captures a key component of DSA's campaign to support Mamdani.For those interested in better understanding how the DSA shaped its discourse and expanded its base, this podcast can provide a good insight. As well, it answers the question to what extent this movement is bound to large cities or canaddress a broader electorate.

In this new episode of the “When the Far Right and the Far Left Converge” series, which shares fresh research from aworkshop organised by the CEU DI Democracy in History Work Group, we discuss with Dr Ashton Kingdon and Dr BalšaLubarda how both the far right and the far left mobilise ecological ideas, often drawing from the same language of resistance. Based on their paper “Co-optationwithout Ownership: The Idea of Resistance in Multimodal Radical Right and Left Ecological Argumentation,” the conversation explores how environmentalismbecomes a battleground of competing ideologies, revealing surprising overlaps in how radical movements frame their struggle against perceived systems of oppression. The episode also examines how the use of similar imagery bydifferent groups can become dangerous in democracies, leading to confusion or disorientation among citizens and making it harder to interpret images and slogans outside their original context.

In this episode of our special series produced in partnership with the Journal of Democracy, we explore “AI's Real Dangers for Democracy,” the new article penned by Dean Jackson and Samuel Woolley (Journal of Democracy, Vol. 36, No. 4, October 2025)Jackson and Woolley discuss the ways in which AI could strain, or even crack, the foundations of democracies; reflect on how the debate surrounding AI is structured and how it has evolved; and recommend practical steps through whichthose potential harms could be limited.The podcast was recorded on October 9, the same day when Jackson and Wooley published an analysis in TheGuardian on how AI threatens elections.

In the opening episode of Review ofDemocracy's new podcast series on EU-funded research, Alexandra Kardos speaks with Professor Zsolt Boda, Director of the ELTE Centre for Social Sciences, about the MORES Moral Emotions in Politics  project, a Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Action exploring how emotions shapedemocratic life. The conversation delves into the project's central ideas of moral emotions and moralised political identities, the dangers of both emotional detachment and over-emotionalization in politics, and how thesedynamics influence trust, polarisation, and civic engagement. Professor Boda also discusses MORES' innovative tools – including MORES Pulse AI – designed to help policymakers, journalists, and citizens navigate the emotional undercurrents of contemporary democracy by assessing the moral-emotional tone of their own or others' communication.

In our podcast, Rachel Myrick, the Douglas & Ellen Lowey Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University, discusses with us how extreme partisan polarization threatens not only domestic governance but also global stability. Drawing on her new book, Polarization and International Politics: How Extreme Partisanship Threatens Global Stability (Princeton University Press, 2025), Myrick argues that polarization in democracies affects foreign policymaking.The conversation begins with a striking example:each year, the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group publishes a list of the world's top geopolitical risks. The 2024 report placed as the highest risk not the Russian aggression, Middle Eastern conflict, but ‘the United States versus itself'. This diagnosis, Myrick suggests, encapsulates the central claim of her book: extreme party polarization erodes the institutional foundations that once made democracies stable and credible actors abroad. Throughout the podcast, the author unfolds how polarization affects the three pillars that democracies used to have in international relations: the ability to keep foreign policystable over time, to credibly signal information to adversaries and the reliability with partners in international politics. Then, the discussion moves to the ways in which polarization affects foreign policies. In a healthy democracy, leaders are incentivized to provide public goods and act in the national interest.Instead, in extremely polarized environments, politicians do not „target messaging at the median voter and instead work to mobilize their political base”. Voters increasingly view politics as a contest between moral enemies rather than legitimate rivals, caring more about their side's victorythan about performance or accountability. While the United States provides her primary example, Myrick points to similar patterns across Europe. In younger democracies such as Hungary or Poland, polarisation fuels “executive aggrandizement,” as ruling parties rewrite rules to secure permanent advantage.In established democracies, it simply makes governments less predictable partners internationally. Rachel Myrick ends the conversation with a warning: the greatest threat to international order may no longer come from authoritarian powers, but from democracies unable to govern themselves and to be effective partners.

The end of the last century brought about what scholars have called a “unipolar moment.” With the fall of the Soviet Union, liberalism lost its enemy on the global stage, which led the United States to try to establish an international liberal order by promoting liberalism transnationally. This latter approach has not only been harshly criticized for often being executed hypocritically and sometimes causing disastrous wars, but also ultimately seems to have failed. While Cold War restorationism might be dangerous and mistaken, today's world again features different authoritarian global powers, with the U.S. seemingly on the path to becoming one itself. Moreover, while democracy promotion by Westernliberal states is deteriorating, scholars have argued that authoritarian powers are increasing their collaboration on theglobal stage to extend authoritarian rule across space and time. In this conversation, Professors Alexander Dukalskisand Alexander Cooley argue that the project to spread liberalism around the world has caused a snapback, in which authoritarian regimes aim to capture and repurpose the actors, tools, and norms once created by liberal democracies for their own ends. Their book, Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics, was published byOxford University Press in September 2025.

Anna Dobrowolska's new book Polish Sexual Revolutions. Negotiating Sexuality and Modernity behind the Iron Curtain, published at the Oxford University Press this year, reveals fresh perspectives in the scholarship about the socialist states. In our podcast, she explains how Poland and Eastern Europe developed their own distinct approaches to sexual modernity under state socialism.While Western observers assumed sexual liberation was incompatible with communist rule, Poland was quietly developing its own sophisticated approach to sexual modernity. In her book, Anna Dobrowolska aimed to map these differences and nuances. Throughout the conversation, we learn that the conventional narrative of state oppression versus societal resistance proves to be inadequate when examining Poland's sexual revolution. Dobrowolska's archival research reveals a complex ecosystem of actors: sexologists, journalists, cultural institutions, who negotiated sexual discourse largely independent of central party directives. These middle-level negotiations created unexpected spaces for sexual expression within the socialist framework, as the book shows. Perhaps most surprisingly, censorship archives reveal that sexual content often received official approval precisely because it served broader state modernisation goals. Conservative citizens frequently petitioned authorities for stricter moral oversight, only to find officials defending more liberal positions.

Borders are rarely born in conference halls. As thenewly edited book The Disputed Austro-Hungarian Border: Agendas, Actors, and Practices in Western Hungary/Burgenland after World War I, published this yearby Bergahn Books shows that the borders are created by wars and conflicts and then changed by clerks, soldiers, smugglers and villagers trying to make sense of a new world order. By focusing on one of the seemingly post-1918 quieter frontiers, the line separating Austria from Hungary, the bookchallenges the narrative that the Treaty of Trianon neatly decided everything with a stroke of the pen. As two of the editors, Hannes Grandits and Katharina Tyran underline throughout our podcast, the creation of Burgenlandwas a complicated process stretching over several years, entangling ideology, class and everyday survival. The volume's nine chapters, written by Ibolya Murber, Michael Burri, Ferenc Jankó, Sabine Schmitner-Laszakovits, Gábor Egry, Melinda Harlov-Csortán, Katharina Tyran, Hannes Grandits and Ursula K. Mindler-Steiner, explore this border-making through a tangle of sources from international commission reports, localtestimonies to administrative records. Hannes Grandits notes that although the decision to transfer parts of western Hungary to Austria was made in 1919, it remained unimplemented for nearly two years. In the meantime, loyalties shifted, black markets thrived, and even a brief Bolshevik experiment in Hungary complicated the decision-making process.Throughout this period, identities shifted. Katharina Tyran provides the example of Ivan Dobrović, a Croatian culturalactivist who changed the spelling of his name depending on context. As she emphasizes, this small act captures the fluid identities the new nation-states tried to erase. Other contributors trace the social consequences. The Esterházyfamily saw their estates shrink; local bureaucrats slipped down the social ladder; peasants and artisans, newly politicised, wavered between social democracy and nationalism. Minority communities, Croats, Jews, Roma, foundthemselves suddenly reclassified by powers that barely understood them. This book reads the border negotiation as an anatomy of transition. The conclusion of our conversation is that borders are not only documents, but lived experiences, shaped by people who rarely appear in diplomatic archives. The lesson ofBurgenland is that borders are performed, contested and reimagined every day.

In this episode, we sit down with Professor Mohammad Ali Kadivar to explore the urgent and timely question of popular protests amid global democratic backsliding. Drawing from his acclaimed monograph, Popular Politics and thePath to Durable Democracy, Kadivar poses the following questions: What role does dissent play in sustaining democracies? Do protests reinforce or underminedemocratic institutions? The book offers a compelling and often counterintuitive analysis of how mass mobilizations shape democratic trajectories. Through a rich comparative lens—examining cases from Egypt, Tunisia, Pakistan, South Africa, and Poland—Kadivar argues that prolonged prodemocratic mobilizations can in fact fortify democracies. Rather than destabilizing political systems, these extended collective protest movements build the organizational infrastructure and civic capacity necessary for democratic consolidation.Kadivar emphasizes that sustained mobilization fosters stable leadership, cultivates diverse civic participation, and compels states to engage meaningfully with popular demands. By revisiting pivotal uprisings, such as the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt, this conversation reveals underexploreddynamics at the heart of democratic transitions—and challenges conventional assumptions about the disruptive role of protest.