RevDem Podcast

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 d...

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 i...

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 Autho...

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. F...

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 s...

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...

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 in...

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 st...

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...

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...

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 u...

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, inc...

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...

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 challengeddom...

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 G...

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 inevi...

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 do...

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 foun...

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...

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 d...

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 str...

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 simultaneousl...

"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 fo...

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 democrac...

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 o...