Democracy in Danger

In 1905, Austrian baroness Bertha von Suttner won the Nobel Peace Prize, which she had helped convince Alfred Nobel to establish. Largely forgotten among antiwar activists, she was an outspoken critic of efforts to make combat merely less brutal. Today, Yale legal scholar Samuel Moyn finds inspiration in Suttner’s story for his own provocative stance against the logic of “humanizing” war with technological innovations like drone strikes. He says we’re only making conflicts more frequent and longer-lasting.

Listen to Siva’s full conversation with Haiti expert Laurent Dubois, co-director of the UVA Democracy Initiative. Dubois narrates the early history of slave revolt in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, the founding of Haiti and the country’s history up through a brutal intervention of the U.S. Marines in the early 20th century. This past, he says, helps put into context the current crises in Haiti, where conflicting models of political and economic autonomy have been in tension for 230 years.

In 1791, the people of Saint-Domingue threw off the yoke of slavery and revolted against their French masters, eventually founding a new nation with the radical promise of universal freedom: Haiti. Then came the hard reality of a world-system that would plague the country with debt, discord and military interventions, including a 19-year occupation by the United States. Three scholars — Marlene Daut, Laurent Dubois and Robert Fatton — help us consider Haiti’s burdened past and its echoes in the present.

It’s hard not to see shades of Saigon in the frenetic evacuation of Kabul last month — and wonder why U.S. leaders seem not to have learned from bungled foreign wars and nation-building efforts. In this second part of a series reflecting on the debacle in Afghanistan, Will and Siva speak with two historians of the post-Vietnam era. They shed light on the grandiose and self-interested visions America has tried to realize abroad and ask what hope there may be for a future of soft power and humanitarian goals.

The “forever war” in Afghanistan claimed 243,000 lives and cost $2.3 trillion over two decades, ending with the chaotic withdrawal of U.S. troops last week. But what about the costs you can’t count? In this first of a series on lessons inscribed in America’s foreign military ventures, Will and Siva speak with Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Spencer Ackerman about the fallout on the home front from the war on terror. Ackerman says the enterprise was built on lies and has disfigured our political culture.

Well, it’s our final rebroadcast of the summer... For the one million young people who have grown up in the United States undocumented, feeling like they really belong here remains a dream deferred. This time, we hear from two of them living in limbo. Plus, legal scholar Amanda Frost unearths the unsettling stories of Americans who have had their citizenship taken away — because of their politics, their race and even because of whom they choose to marry.

Srdja Popovic was 16 and playing guitar in a goth-rock band when Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic came to power. A decade later — after a series of brutal civil wars — Popovic and a few friends launched a resistance movement that grew to tens of thousands and helped topple a reign of terror. What can the secret of their success say about all the protests we see going on around the world today? Popovic shares his story, his principles and his hopes, in this rebroadcast of one of our favorite episodes.

Last month the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a pair of Arizona laws limiting voter access to the polls, emboldening Republican-led states to pass restrictive measures that discourage election participation. As scholar Carol Anderson explained in Season One, such laws hark back to America’s long history of disenfranchising minorities. She says the core safeguards of the 1965 Voting Rights Act are unraveling — even as citizens across the country keep fighting to protect the kernel of democracy: their ballots.

After a violent crackdown on protestors, Donald Trump posed for a photo-op with a bible in front of a church. A year later, a federal judge has tossed most of the civil complaints against the former president. But the image remains telling. Today we replay our interview with religion scholar Matthew Hedstrom on the ideology of Christian nationalism and its harder-core variety, dominionism. Hedstrom says a muscular resistance to pluralism — not ideas about piety — lies at the core of this belief system.