RevDem Podcast

In this conversation with RevDem editor Ferenc Laczó, Martin Schulze Wessel – author of the new book Der Fluch des Imperiums. Die Ukraine, Polen und der Irrweg in der Russischen Geschichte (Imperial Curse. Ukraine, Poland, and the False Paths in Russian History) – traces the ideas that have shaped Russian imperialism and reflects on their devastating contemporary force; explores key moments in the...

In this conversation with RevDem editor Ferenc Laczó, Thomas Biebricher – author of the new book Mitte/Rechts: Die international Krise des Konservatismu s (Center/Right: The International Crisis of Conservatism) – discusses conservatism’s various types and how each relates to the political center and to authoritarianism; illuminates the contemporary crisis of the center right in three major Europe...

In conversation with RevDem editor Kasia Krzyżanowska, Dr. Stephanie DeGooyer discusses her recent publication Before Borders: A Legal and Literary History of Naturalization (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022).

Formal Rule of Law backsliding in Hungary and Poland has been well-publicized. Yet this is just the tip of the iceberg of a system of informal power connections that are undermining the Rule of Law and democracy. In this RevDem Rule of Law podcast Oliver Garner discusses this informal power with Edit Zgut-Przybylska.

In this conversation with RevDem editor Ferenc Laczó, George Steinmetz – author of the major new monograph The Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought. French Sociology and the Overseas Empire – sketches the manifold entanglements of French sociology with the French Empire and colonialism; discusses the key ideas and innovations that have emerged in this context; dissects how indigenous scholars...

In the latest RevDem Rule of Law podcast Oliver Garner discusses the work of the Hungarian Helsinki Committee . András Kádár is an attorney at law and co-chair of the Committee. Amongst other engagements and positions he is the Hungarian member of the European Network of Legal Experts in the Non-Discrimination field. Márta Pardavi is the other co-chair of the Committee and she also co-leads the Re...

In the last months the Israeli public has demonstrated regarding a series of proposed judicial reforms. The protests led to the suspension of the government’s plans for the Passover break of the Israeli Parliament. The Knesset will reconvene this week and the next chapter of this saga will commence.   In this podcast, Assistant Editor of the Rule of Law section Teodora Miljojkovic discusses the re...

In this conversation with assistant editor Lorena Drakula, Vjosa Musliu discusses her book Europeanization and State Building as Everyday Practices. Performing Europe in the Western Balkans (Routledge, 2021). The conversation critically examines mechanisms of Europeanization, discourses surrounding international interventions, and the processes of EU enlargement to the Western Balkans.

In this interview with RevDem assistant editor Giancarlo Grignaschi, Clara Mattei – Assistant Professor in the Economics Department of The New School for Social Research – talks about her new book The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism (University of Chicago Press, 2022). The manuscript explores the historical origins of austerity and its intellectual und...

In this conversation with Ferenc Laczó and Vera Scepanovic, Quinn Slobodian – author of the new book Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy – discusses the unusual legal spaces and peculiar jurisdictions that have multiplied in recent decades and the libertarian ideas that propelled their rise; dissects the relationship of such zones to existing states and...

In this conversation with RevDem editor Ferenc Laczó, Daniel Chandler – author of the new book Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like? – discusses key principles that a better and fairer society could be based on; shows what makes John Rawls’ ideas so exceptionally relevant today and how they could help improve the democratic process; explains how placing questions of power, control,...

In this conversation with RevDem editor Kasia Krzyzanowska, Aleksandra Lewicki discusses her recently published article “East-west inequalities and the ambiguous racialization of ‘Eastern Europeans’”.  Lewicki elaborates on the racialized imaginary of the Western European discourses on migration, talks about how the stereotype of hard-working Eastern Europeans negatively impacts their labor condit...

In this conversation with Kasia Krzyżanowska, Zoltán Gábor Szűcs discusses his newest book Political ethics in illiberal regimes. A realist interpretation . He explains the internal logic of an illiberal regime, the importance of studying its ethics, discusses the role of the policy experts, civil servants and judges in illiberal regimes, and elaborates on the problem of playing hardball by illibe...

“What we ended up with in recent decades are fragmented structures: educators who are not listening to academic knowledge production because their time is just spent on reproducing knowledge; researchers who don't feed back their knowledge into the educational sphere because they are bought out or are buying themselves out from education; civil society which is not listening to academic knowle...

In this episode of the party cooperation series, Zsolt Enyedi talks with Murat Somer, professor at Koç University working on polarization, religion, ethnic conflicts, democracy, and democratic erosion. He is an advisor to various civil society organizations and opposition political parties.   Turkey is a country with a long experience of cooperation among parties both in the government and outside...

In this conversation with RevDem assistant editor Lorena Drakula, Michael Freeden – leading political theorist and author of the new book Concealed Silences and Inaudible Voices in Political Thinking – discusses the various forms of political silences; the problems of superimposing and inventing voices; the effects of the unnoticeable and the unknowable in political thinking, with the aim of under...

In this conversation with Kasia Krzyżanowska, Johannes Voelz discusses his theory of the aesthetics of populism, explains how Pierre Bourdieu and Norbert Elias can help us understand contemporary populism, elaborates on the concept of a (Trump) rally, talks about the culture of a dichotomized world, and shares his insights on the role of culture in helping to ease the deep political conflicts.

In this conversation with Kasia Krzyżanowska, Martin Loughlin discusses his newest book Against Constitutionalism (Harvard University Press 2022).

In this conversation with RevDem editor Ferenc Laczó, Aakar Patel – author of The Anarchist Cookbook. A Toolkit to Protest and Peaceful Resistance – discusses why he considers dissent essential to improving society; what lessons we can draw from successful recent examples of protest; which options activists have to amplify and maximize their efforts; and how egregious laws on the book, practices o...

In this conversation with RevDem editor Ferenc Laczó, Tara Zahra – author of the new monograph Against the World: Anti-Globalism and Mass Politics Between the World Wars – discusses the common features of anti-globalist agendas between the 1910s and the 1930s; explains what the main phases of anti-globalism looked like and how its various forms related to globalization; shows why centering women –...

In this latest RevDem Rule of Law podcast, Oliver Garner speaks to Jakub Jaraczewski about the European Commission’s latest actions to defend the EU’s values against backsliding Member States. Jakub is a Research Coordinator at Democracy Reporting International , a Berlin based NGO, and one of the coordinators of the “ re:constitution ” programme.

In the conversation with Vilius Kubekas, Jerry Z. Muller discusses the life of German Jewish intellectual Jacob Taubes. In his newest book Professor of Apocalypse: The Many Lives of Jacob Taubes (Princeton University Press, 2022), Muller develops an in-depth interpretation of Taubes, the person and the intellectual, uncovering the extensive intellectual networks Taubes contributed to, and clarifyi...

RevDem assistant editor Giancarlo Grignaschi in conversation with Dóra Piroska, assistant professor at CEU in Vienna at the department of International Relations, about her chapter on financial nationalism in the Elgar Handbook of Economic Nationalism, edited by Andreas Pickel.

In this conversation with RevDem editor Ferenc Laczó, Shadi Hamid – author of the new book The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea – addresses democratic dilemmas that cannot be wished away; explains how he distinguishes between liberalism and democracy and why he proposes a democracy-first strategy; assesses the democratic record of Islamist political...

In this conversation with RevDem editor Ferenc Laczó, Dan Stone – author of the new book The Holocaust: An Unfinished History – discusses various ways the history of the Holocaust has been misunderstood; addresses the challenges of narrating the Holocaust and clarifies his own interpretative framework; sketches the European dimension of the genocide and how German and non-German perpetrators inter...