This Authoritarian Life

🎙️ Our "Turning Points" season pivots from the dramatic electoral shifts in Hungary to a sudden constitutional crisis in Turkey. In an unprecedented move, a regional court has annulled the 2023 congress of the main opposition party (CHP), effectively decapitating its elected leadership and handing control back to a defeated old guard. In this episode, Erdem and Kristóf dissect how Erdoğa...

🎙️ Our Hungary election mini-series continues in the wake of a seismic result: Péter Magyar's Tisza party swept Fidesz from power with a two-thirds supermajority, ending sixteen years of Viktor Orbán's rule. In this episode, Kristóf is joined by his former party co-founder and political economy scholar Gábor Scheiring to make sense of what happened — and the treacherous transition ahead....

🎙️ Our Hungary election mini-series begins nine days before the April 12 vote. In this episode, Kristóf Szombati and Erdem Evren discuss what is actually at stake in Hungary's election — beyond the question of whether Viktor Orbán wins or loses. Drawing on Kristóf's recent trip to Budapest and his earlier ethnographic research on how Fidesz built power in rural Hungary, the conversation...

🎙️ Season 2 of This Authoritarian Life continues at another frontline: policing  as a site of concentrated state violence and neoliberal austerity management. In this episode, we speak with Alex Vitale — Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College, coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project, and author of the influential book The End of Policing . He joins us from New York, where he ser...

🎙️ Season 2 of This Authoritarian Life continues at another frontline: the university — where political repression and economic precarity work together to silence critical voices and disempower those who produce knowledge . In this episode, we speak with Aslı Vatansever — a sociologist of work who was dismissed from her position in Istanbul after signing the 'Academics for Peace' petitio...

🎙️ Season 2 of This Authoritarian Life continues at another frontline: culture — where authoritarian power doesn’t just silence dissent, but reshapes the institutions that decide what gets staged, funded, and celebrated. In this episode, we speak with Piotr Rudzki (dramaturg; formerly of the Polski Theater in Wrocław) and Kristóf Nagy (anthropologist; author of an ethnography of the Hungarian Acad...

🎙️ Season 2 of This Authoritarian Life continues one another urgent frontline: Serbia. In this episode, we speak with activist-journalists Anastazija Govedarica Antanasijević and Iskra Krstić about the student-led uprising that has reshaped political life in Serbia. What began with campus blockades after the collapse of a train-station canopy rapidly grew into a nationwide movement demanding syste...

🎙️ Season 2 of This Authoritarian Life begins at one of today’s most tragic frontlines: Gaza. In this episode, we talk with Guy Shalev , anthropologist and executive director of Physicians for Human Rights Israel , about how medicine has become a political weapon in Israel’s war on Gaza and in the broader occupation of Palestine. How has Palestinian healthcare been de-developed over the years and...

In this sixth episode of This Authoritarian Life we look at how language is used to entrench authoritarian power. Authoritarian leaders have long realized the power of propaganda, deploying radio, television and more recently social media to cement certain ideas as truths, to vindicate an exclusive right to lead the political community, to name threats and enemies, and to delegitimize critics and...

In this fifth episode of This Authoritarian Life we continue to investigate the impact of war on contemporary politics. We look at the case of Russia where our guest Arkadij Lomonosov has until recently worked as a journalist and anti-fascist activist. Reflecting on his own upbringing and personal infatuation with the young Putin in his teens, knowledge derived from long years of monitoring ultran...

In this fourth episode of This Authoritarian Life we focus on the destructive dimension of contemporary politics. Looking at the case of Israel and its latest campaign in Gaza, psychoanalyst Iris Hefets reflects on the post-1967 history of Israel as the gradual suspension of the superego and the displacement of internal aggression on Gaza, which, building on Freud, she describes as Israel’s ‘Id’....

Pursuing our exploration of the ‘Origins’ of authoritarianism, in this third episode of This Authoritarian Life we will continue to focus on the role of the body in authoritarian politics. More specifically, we will turn our attention to the female body, which functions as an object of control and a site of resistance, and look more closely at the example of the Islamic Republic of Iran, where ten...

Resentment may lay dormant for decades, before suddenly erupting and inundating public life. In this second episode of This Authoritarian Life, we continue to explore the ‘Origins’ of authoritarianism by asking how the past can exercise a decisive influence in and over the present. We do this by focusing on the case of East Germany, where guests 𝐀𝐧𝐧𝐚 𝐒𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐝𝐞 and 𝐄𝐥𝐬𝐤𝐞 𝐑𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐟𝐞𝐥𝐝 have conducted resea...

What drives ordinary people to espouse authoritarian figures? Join us, Kristóf Szombati and Erdem Evren, as we unravel this question through our personal journeys and anthropological studies in Hungary and Turkey. We kick off our new podcast by dissecting the spatial origins of right-wing authoritarianism, focusing on rural Hungary from 2006 onwards.  The countryside has often been seen as a space...