RevDem Podcast

Can a law be unjust and still be legitimate? And if we believe a law is unjust, does that mean the state has no right to enforce it? In this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast,Jonathan Quong discusses his new book PoliticalPhilosophy: The Puzzle of Legitimate Injustice which examinesthe uneasy relationship between two central concepts of political philosophy: justice and legitimacy. He explains why disagreement about justice is an unavoidable part of living together in free and pluralistic societies, and why even well-functioning democracies will inevitably produce laws and policies that some of us have good reason to regard as unjust. How, then, should societies deal with these unavoidable political mistakes?

Quong argues that rather than seeing justice and legitimacy as competing values, we should think about how theburdens created by our collective disagreements can be shared fairly. The conversation explores why some unjust laws may nevertheless remain legitimate, when injustice crosses the line into illegitimacy, and how we might distinguishreasonable political disagreement from laws rooted in prejudice, corruption, or self-interest. Finally, we discuss what this perspective can tell us about contemporary debates ranging from immigration and racial injustice to thegrowing role of artificial intelligence in government.

In our new podcast, Aline Sierp discusses central questions in contemporary European memory and surveys how EU institutions have attempted to deal with Europe’s past over the decades.

She also considers why the remembrance of European colonialism and imperialism remained marginal for so long – and what might be changing these days. The conversationalso focuses on how studying the politics of memory can contribute to our understanding of contemporary conflicts. Last but not least, she reflects on the rise of memory studies, whether it has become a discipline, and where it might be heading next.

Across the world, political actors are challenging rights in increasingly sophisticated ways. But are we looking in the right places? In this episode of Review of Democracy,Gabriel Pereira speaks with María Paula Saffon about how we should understand backlash against rights today. They discuss why familiar accounts of backlash may overlook some of its most consequential forms, explore the distinctionbetween backlash and pushback, and unpack the idea of veiled backlash—a concept that sheds light on how rights can be weakened through seemingly ordinary legal and institutional practices. The conversation draws on examplesfrom Latin America while reflecting on broader implications for democracy, the rule of law, and the future of rights.

Always a controversial and often a confusing topic inacademia, the rule of law has, since the late twentieth century, been elevated to almost a universal ideal. So much so that many of those once perceived as its staunchest enemies today claim to be rule of law enthusiasts. Large amounts ofmoney have been spent, and much work has been done to lay its foundations in many places and for various reasons. And yet, today, despite all these efforts, many see the rule of law as increasingly threatened. Often, the rule of law has beenpresented as an end in itself, with less consideration of the purposes for which it was invented. This might have eased the way for the current surge of practices, in numerous contexts, that appear to contradict it. In this conversation, Martin Krygier explains that the purpose of the rule of lawtraditionally was and should continue to be to temper power and prevent arbitrariness. Achieving this ideal, however, requires recognizing the rule of law’s limitations, not to abolish it, but to think of ways to temper powerbeyond it.

In this new episode of our podcast series produced in cooperation with the Journal of Democracy, Ferenc Laczó speaks with Kim Lane Scheppele about her article, “CanPéter Magyar Restore Hungary’s Democracy?”

The conversation discusses the major challenges and dilemmas that the new Hungarian government led by Péter Magyar faces after 16 years of illiberal rule and illiberal state-building by Viktor Orbán and his cronies; how the prospects ofHungarian democracy look in comparative perspective; how European law and European funds are shaping those prospects – and what has surprised Kim Lane Scheppele the most in recent months.

In our new podcast, Mark Leonarddiscusses the conclusions he has drawn concerning “the four Cs:” capital, climate, chips, civilizations. He talks about how Europeans could take inspiration from Chinese ways of thinking, what a new, more holistic approach to European security might prioritize, and what a new artisanshipcode would look like that would enable them to lean into disruption.

The Democracy Institute Annual Conference, held inBudapest on June 25–26, under the title Imaginary Exhaustion? asked whether contemporary democracies have become trapped by fear and exhaustion, and howcollective imagination might be renewed. The panel Rethinking CEU’s Legacy: Education, Engagement, and Democratic Transformations, reflected on the thirty-five years of CEU’s role in democratic change across Central and Eastern Europe. Scholars from different generations formed within the CEU’s framework revisited the principal moments of this history. Within this panel, Prof. István Rév discussedthe beginnings of the CEU.

The CEU’s forced departure from Budapest is a story well-known to the broader audience. What is perhaps less known is that one of its most remarkable affiliated institutions, the Blinken OSA Archivum, remained and continued its mission for democracy in Budapest.

In the podcast following the conference, we turn ourattention to this archive. We begin by discussing the origins of OSA Archivum and the vision behind its collections. We then explore what makes the Archivum distinctive. As one of the founders of both Central European University and theBlinken Open Society Archivum, Rév reflects on how the OSA Archivum defended democratic culture by opening themselves to researchers, students, artists, and the wider public:

 ”we thought that we should try to turn the archive inside out and and have a public profile and show whatever we can to the public (...)  historical revisionism started alreadyimmediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall. And since we had access to historical documents, to historical facts, we thought that it was our duty to try to confront the newly emerging official interpretations of the past withhistorical documents in all sorts of different ways: organizing exhibitions conferences, study tours for both high school and university students, even organizing concerts inviting actors to stage theatrical plays in the archive even locally designed plays based on documents in the archive.”

Another point that István Rév explains is how OSA helpedform new generations of historians. In our conversation, he underlines that OSA Archivum is more than a repository of the past. Instead, it can shape how societies remember, contest, and imagine democratic futures.  In an archive, the historical evidence confronts political mythmaking.

Then, we turn to the topic of historical memory. Weasked Prof. Rév how would a new chapter of his influential book Retroactive Justice would be rewritten today, 20 yearsafter its publication. Another topic discussed is why political regimes are so much fascinated by death and commemorations.

In this episode with Durba Mitra, we discuss her latest book, The Future that Was (Princeton University Press, 2026). The podcast highlights the emergence of women's internationalism as both a political project and a mode of knowledge production that grew out of the crisis of Third World developmental nationalism in the 1970s and the search for new forms of international solidarity. We examined how changing ideas about women, the family, and social reproduction became central to postcolonial politics, while highlighting how women from the Global South emerged as strong actors for creating a vision of democratic internationalism. Durba talked about how feminist activists transformed international institutions through conferences, UN initiatives, policy research, and autonomous scholarship, even as these spaces increasingly redirected radical feminist inquiry toward technocratic development agendasunder the influence of foundations and global development institutions. The conversation concludes with reflecting on the legacies of Third World feminist internationalism in an era of NGOization, professionalized feminism, and privatized global capitalism, asking what has been lost and what remains vitalfor building democratic movements and emancipatory knowledge today.

Migration is usually discussed as a question of borders, identity, or national security. This angle might obscure other more fundamental aspects. The real question to poseis not simply who moves, but how decades of marketization transformed both labor and the politics of fear.

These ideas were at the heart of Atilla Melegh’s presentation at the the Democracy Institute Annual Conference, held in Budapest on June 25- 26. With the title Imaginary Exhaustion?, this event asked to what extenttoday’s democracies are trapped by fear and exhaustion and how we might rebuild our collective imagination to shape more hopeful democratic futures. Meleghspoke in the panel The People We Fear: Demography, Migration, and Civilizational Anxiety.

His central claim is that migration has become one of the defining contradictions of our age. Whilst mobility itself is not new, decades of marketization turned labor into a global commodity. In Eastern Europe particularly, the transitionto capitalism produced social dislocation, mass emigration, which in turn lead to what he calls ” an ontological insecurity”. These transformations, rather than migration alone, created fertile ground for anti-migrant nationalism.

Our conversation develops these arguments further. Firstly, Melegh situates the post-socialist transition within a broader global history of neoliberalism.Both East and West gradually abandoned the idea of reforming social institutions in favor of market fundamentalism. Then, he explains how economicanxieties were displaced onto migrants, allowing political elites to personalize structural contradictions instead of confronting them.

Our conversation also examines the transformation of demography into what he calls a ”science of population management”. As a solution, we need more criticaldemography that reconnects migration, labor markets, social reproduction, and human rights. Rather than treating migration as the problem, Melegh invites usto rethink the economic institutions that have made it the central political question of our time.

This spring, the House of European History – a flagship museum of the European Parliament – has opened a temporary exhibition under the title Postcolonial?that features unique artworks, historical objects, and personal stories.

Knowing the multifaceted and controversial legacies of European colonialism and being aware of just how closely intertwined the European integration project and thehistory of decolonization have been, this amounts to a significant and urgent intervention. The exhibition asks explicitly how Europeans preserved their power as their empires collapsed and aims to show how the “colonial matrix of power” continues to shape the world we live in. The exhibition ultimately ambitions no less than to help us rethink what it means to be European – and thus raises a host of essential and challenging questions. 

Our podcast features two of the exhibition’s main curators – Kieran Burns and Ayoko Mensah – and two eminent experts in colonial history, postcolonial theory, and questions of European and postcolonial memory – Diana Natermann and Aline Sierp. Moderated by Ferenc Laczó, they jointly examine this crucial new exhibition in depth – and consider what it means to have such an exhibition at the heart of the EU today.

The first part of the podcast explored some of the mostthought-provoking parts of the exhibition.

This second part focuses on the links between the main themes of the exhibition and the history of European integration; asks whether there might be a risk here ofoffering a dichotomous and too moralizing reading of history; and considers what a thorough rethinking in the light of colonial history of how to be European today would imply – and what might be most in need of revision in theHouse of European History itself in accordance with that process of rethinking.