RevDem Podcast

This podcast features Peter Schwartzstein, journalist andscholar, exploring how the climate crisis is reshaping the relationship between environmental stress, conflict, crime, migration and inequality. We discuss his book  Heat and Fury: On the Frontiers of Climate Violence , examining how water scarcity, competition over land, food insecurity and failures of governance can intensify existing soci...

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 r...

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...

The Democracy Institute’s annual conference, with the title Imaginary 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  KasiaNa...

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, opposi...

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...

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...

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 er...

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...

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...

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 soc...

In our new podcast, Brigitte Le Normand describes and interprets the main phases of migration in Europe since 1945; discusses what gendered and intersectional perspectives can reveal about labor migration; explains why a combined focus on “destination countries” and “countries of origin” is needed to understand labor migrants; and draws a preliminary balance sheet of the discriminatory,the exploit...

As the world becomes increasingly interconnected, our lives are increasingly influenced by decisions made outside our national constituencies. Today, government actionsare likely to affect many people who never participated in elections in which the government in question ran for office. This applies to various policy areas but seems especially true in the financial sphere. As the financial crisis...

Between 1914 and 1941, Bucharest’s population tripled,approaching one million inhabitants. This rapid growth created new neighborhoods and new opportunities but also brought new forms of poverty. While some historians portrayed the interwar Bucharest as ” the little Paris”, Alexandra Ghiţ’s book Welfare Work without Welfare: Womenand Austerity in interwar Bucharest provides a much more nuanced per...

The Arctic is undergoing a profound transformation. As the region literally unfreezes under the pressures of climate change, established political relationships, imaginaries and assumptions about its future are also being unsettled. In this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast,Anna Niia Varfolomeeva speaks with Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds about their book Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future o...

In the new episode of our series produced in collaboration with the  Journal of Democracy , Ferenc Laczó speaks with Christina Cottiero, Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, Stephan Haggard, and Christina J. Schneider about their article, “ Can the Liberal Order Survive America's Retreat? ” They discuss the United States’ disengagement from institutions of global governance and what that has meant for mul...

In this special-series podcast with SaeidGolkar, we discuss his latest essay “Why IRGC is the war’s Biggest Winner” published in the July issue of the Journalof Democracy .  Professor Golkar argues that Iran’s wars, security crises, and political upheavals have gradually transformed the IRGC from a revolutionary militia into a powerful institution that increasingly functions as a “state within the...

Can a law be unjust and still be legitimate? And if we believe a law is unjust, does that mean the state has no right to enforce it? In this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast,Jonathan Quong discusses his new book PoliticalPhilosophy: The Puzzle of Legitimate Injustice which examinesthe uneasy relationship between two central concepts of political philosophy: justice and legitimacy. He exp...

In our new podcast, Aline Sierp discusses central questions in contemporary European memory and surveys how EU institutions have attempted to deal with Europe’s past over the decades. She also considers why the remembrance of European colonialism and imperialism remained marginal for so long – and what might be changing these days. The conversationalso focuses on how studying the politics of memor...

Across the world, political actors are challenging rights in increasingly sophisticated ways. But are we looking in the right places? In this episode of Review of Democracy ,Gabriel Pereira speaks with María Paula Saffon about how we should understand backlash against rights today. They discuss why familiar accounts of backlash may overlook some of its most consequential forms, explore the distinc...

Always a controversial and often a confusing topic inacademia, the rule of law has, since the late twentieth century, been elevated to almost a universal ideal. So much so that many of those once perceived as its staunchest enemies today claim to be rule of law enthusiasts. Large amounts ofmoney have been spent, and much work has been done to lay its foundations in many places and for various reas...

In this new episode of our podcast series produced in cooperation with the  Journal of Democracy , Ferenc Laczó speaks with Kim Lane Scheppele about her article, “ CanPéter Magyar Restore Hungary’s Democracy? ” The conversation discusses the major challenges and dilemmas that the new Hungarian government led by Péter Magyar faces after 16 years of illiberal rule and illiberal state-building by Vik...

In our new podcast, Mark Leonarddiscusses the conclusions he has drawn concerning “the four Cs:” capital, climate, chips, civilizations. He talks about how Europeans could take inspiration from Chinese ways of thinking, what a new, more holistic approach to European security might prioritize, and what a new artisanshipcode would look like that would enable them to lean into disruption.

The Democracy Institute Annual Conference, held inBudapest on June 25–26, under the title Imaginary Exhaustion? asked whether contemporary democracies have become trapped by fear and exhaustion, and howcollective imagination might be renewed. The panel Rethinking CEU’s Legacy: Education, Engagement, and Democratic Transformations, reflected on the thirty-five years of CEU’s role in democratic chan...

In this episode with Durba Mitra, we discuss her latest book, The Future that Was (Princeton University Press, 2026). The podcast highlights the emergence of women's internationalism as both a political project and a mode of knowledge production that grew out of the crisis of Third World developmental nationalism in the 1970s and the search for new forms of international solidarity. We examine...