RevDem Podcast

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 erosion while also providingresources for resistance. It then turns to conservative and right-wing legal mobilization, examining how actors beyond government use courts, rights claims, and other legal strategies to advance political projects and contest existingunderstandings of rights.

Finally, the discussion steps back to ask a broader question: how new is any of this? Against the familiar image of law as a vehicle for democratization and social transformation, the episode considers its longer-standing and more ambivalentrelationship with political power in Latin America.

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 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 items. Their catalogue is available online.

OSA is not only an archive. It is one of Europe’s leading research centers on the history of the Cold War, statesocialism, human rights, and surveillance. The OSA Archivum also provides fellowships for promising researchers that want to investigate the archival funds. Particularly the Visegrad Fellowship supports scholars, engaged artists, journalists, scholars at risk who want to work directly with these materials.Since its start in 2010, the Visegrad Scholarship has been awarded to more than 290 fellows from over 65 countries.

In our series, we will invite the Visegrad Fellows that will share us their experience with working with this fascinating archive.

In our third episode, we invited John Bessai, who researched the impact of the 1975 Helsinki Final Act. Signed by 35 states from both sides of the Cold War divide, the agreement aimed to reduce tensions between East and West in the process called détente. Beyond security issues, it also included commitments on human rights, information, and contacts between people.

The human rights commitments contained in the HelsinkiFinal Act had consequences that reached far beyond diplomacy. They encouraged the emergence of citizen groups dedicated to monitoring state behavior and documenting rights violations. Over time, these initiatives developed intoorganizations such as Helsinki Watch and eventually the International Helsinki Federation for Human Rights, the central focus of John Bessai’s research. As he mentioned in our podcast:

 this organization [...] was composed by individuals and groups who found voice thanks to the Helsinki Accords. It was connected to the creation of human rights organizations which actually followed the protocols that were within the Helsinki agreements and it continued on until 2007.

The Records of the International Helsinki Federation forHuman Rights, held by the OSA Archivum, revealed how reports, testimonies, and public documentation became important tools in Cold War politics. John Bessai’s readingof these archival materials is fresh, as he shifts attention away from military confrontation and toward procedures, communication, and the growing role of civil society:

[IHFHR] did fundamental work in ensuring that human rights were being observed. In a nutshell, the HelsinkiAccords provided a foundation for legitimizing human rights within the Eastern Bloc. This was counterposed to the Western Bloc, or NATO, on one hand, and the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact on the other. This sort of breakthroughthrough the Helsinki Accords (...) opened the door to the discourse of human rights within the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union.

In our conversation, we discuss the Helsinki process,the role of culture and dissident networks, the challenges of archival research, and what the archives can reveal about the changing nature of international politics during the late Cold War.

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, in the self-image of people, in aspirations of self, and many other aspects of our modern experience.” Thus, the question arises: how can we dismantle and break out of this structure? Constitutionalism has traditionally been seen as one of the main paths to emancipation for a people. In defining a collective political identity and laying the ground rules for their society, they could overcome oppression by strongmen. But can constitutionalism also serve the purposes of fightingcoloniality, or is it a Western concept whose application imposes on formerly colonized societies the epistemology of their oppressors? In this conversation, Ronnie Yearwood analyzes the persistence of coloniality in Caribbeanconstitutionalism and asks what a decolonial constitutionalism, able to overcome the past and think the “new,” must look like.

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 social democratic policies reclaim the debate on social reproduction?

These questions were at the core of Kristijan Fidanovski’s presentation at the Democracy Institute’s Annual Conference, held in Budapest on June 26. With the title, Imaginary Exhaustion?, this event explored to what extent today’s democracies are trapped by fear and exhaustion and how we might rebuild a more democratic future. Fidanovski spoke in the panel The People We Fear: Demography, Migration, and Civilizational Anxiety.

In our conversation following his panel, we explore the implications of the low fertility rate. This demographic reality often morphs into an anxiety, which in turn politicians instrumentalize it. In this framework, he proposes the concept of “progressive pronatalism”. As Fidanovski stated for Review of Democracy,

"we have a below replacement fertility rate, which means less than two point one children per woman (…). It is in essence an observable and measurable demographic trend, which has led to certain policy responses (…).The concept of progressive pronatalism seeks to capture some of these policy trends, but it also seeks to critique them in some important ways. Many policy responses have tended to be quite ideological in a similar manner, as all of them have been introduced by self-declared conservative governments."

The discussion next tackles common misconceptions about the term, addressing critics who view the concept progressive pronatalism with skepticism. Afterwards, we focus on the political implications:

"just because national conservative actors today as well, not just historically, are very alarmist about demography and sometimes exaggerate the objective, the otherwise objective socioeconomic challenges associated with demography, that does not mean that these are not realities. (…) If populations in developed countries continue to have below replacement fertility rates (which will happen), I think it is very unlikely that we will ever go back to above replacement fertility levels."

Fidanovski argues that progressives make a strategic error by abandoning the demographical question explicitly. To counter this, Fidanovski advocates transforming demography from an instrument of population management into an ideologically neutral policy space.

Kristijan Fidanovski is an economist at Vienna Institute for International Economic Studies focusing on tobacco taxation in Eastern Europe and the political economies of the Western Balkan countries. He holds a PhD from the University of Oxford’s Department of Social Policy, where he examined pronatalist policies and politics in (Eastern) Europe. His other research interests include population aging, EU integration, and electoral systems.

The interview was conducted by Adrian Matus. Alina Young edited the audio file.

Photo: Daniel Vegel / CEU Democracy Institute

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 exploitative and the more emancipatory aspects of female labor migration.

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 in the late 2000’s has shown, the absence of governmental oversight regardingfinancial activities in a country can have consequences far beyond its borders.One mechanism to address this is transnational peer review of financial regulators. Such peer review aims to enable supervisory convergence and dissemination of best practices. Yet, mechanisms of transnational governance themselves are often claimed to undermine democracy by giving decision-making power to experts and thereby taking it out of the hands of publicly elected officials. In this conversation, Yane Svetiev analyzes processes of peer review of financial regulators – both their peril and their promise.

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 perspective about this city by focusing on the women’s role in welfare work.

As she states in our podcast: ”the city had a larger modern area with beautiful governmental buildings and bloc houses (...) . Beyond the city center, there were large popular neighborhoods made up of small houses, many ofthem with a small yard (..). Increasingly, there were very precarious improvised neighborhoods. Such small housing might coexist with very clumsy barrack-like organized dwellings, which were covered with corrugated cardboard, without running water, where the tram and public transform does not really reach well, extremely dusty in the summer and very muddy in the autumn and winter”.

While some celebrated the quick modernization, thelabor market was fragile and the welfare system struggled to respond. Bucharest was” a city without welfare but with plenty of welfare work”. In this context, the real engine of welfare was not the state at all. As the book argues, women created and sustained a welfare system through volunteer work, political advocacy, and sheer endurance. To explain this situation, Alexandra Ghiţ advances the concept of ”austerity welfare work”, which means” intensified labor for thewell-being of others under circumstances of great economic instability”.

In our podcast, she introduces the internationalactors, religious groups and foundations that brought their contribution. Among them, we discuss the case of Veturia Manuilă, who is extremely illustrative about the ideological and social nuances of interwar Romania.

Alexandra Ghiț’s book challenges the familiar image of Bucharest as simply a modernizing “little Paris”. Behind the city’s new architecture stood a much less glamorous reality, which included precarious work, but also a welfaresystem sustained to a remarkable extent by women’s largely invisible labor.

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 of the Arctic . Together, they explore who gets to shape the region at this critical moment: as governments and globalpowers increasingly look northwards, whose interests guide its transformation?And how can northern and Indigenous communities retain meaningful agency over the places they call home?  Movingbetween geopolitics and everyday realities, Bennett and Dodds challenge portrayals of the Arctic as an empty wilderness or simply a new arena of great-power competition. Instead, they invite us to see it as a complex and lived space whose future is being negotiated at multiple levels, and to pay closer attention to whose voices and visions are heard as that future takes shape.

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 multilateral support for human rights and democracy;what main forms the strengthening of authoritarian forms of multilateralism has taken in the meantime; whether a new liberal coalition could emerge in the aftermath of the US’ disengagement; and what key threats a more fragmentedworlds are likely to bring.

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 state.” Rather thanweakening authoritarian rule, external threats have expanded the Guards’ political, economic, intelligence, and security roles, steadily reducing meaningful civilian control and shifting the balance away from elected and clerical institutions. This has contributed to Iran’s evolution from an ideologically driven theocracy toward a more security-centered authoritarian system, particularly as leadership succession approaches. While a cohesive IRGC may make the regime more resilient in the short term, its growing dominance canalso create elite rivalries, public alienation, and new internal vulnerabilities.The broader lesson is that militarization does not always occur through coups, as the Iranian case shows. The military can gradually absorb state functions while preserving the formal appearance of civilian and constitutional institutions.