Eric Lee, "The August Uprising, 1924: The Georgian Anti-Soviet Revolt and the Birth of Democratic Socialism" (McFarland, 2025)
For three years following the Russian Revolution, the small South Caucasian country of Georgia was a democracy, but Stalin later ordered the Red Army to invade and to bring the country back under Russ...
11 Nov 20251h 15min
Paula Oppermann, "Thunder Cross: Fascist Antisemitism in Twentieth-Century Latvia" (U Wisconsin Press, 2025)
Founded in 1932, the Pērkonkrusts ("Thunder Cross") was the largest and most prominent right-wing political party in Latvia in the early twentieth century. Its motto--"Latvia for Latvians!"--echoed th...
29 Okt 20251h 2min
Democratic Dialogues: Pathways of Democratic Backsliding, Resistance, and (Partial) Recoveries
A podcast from Cornell University’s Brooks School of Public Policy Center on Global Democracy About the Podcast Each week, co-hosts Rachel Beatty Riedl and Esam Boraey bring together leading scholars,...
28 Okt 202539min
Democracy After Illiberalism: A Warning from Poland
Why are illiberal governments able to retain support? How are they defeated at election time? And how do (and should) governments driven by a desire to undo illiberalism proceed? For all interested in...
28 Okt 202555min
Mark Mazower, "On Antisemitism: A Word in History" (Penguin Press, 2025)
What do we mean when we talk about antisemitism? A thoughtful, vital new intervention from the award-winning historian. For most of history, antisemitism has been understood as a menace from Europe’s ...
26 Okt 202543min
Danny Orbach, "Plots Against Hitler" (Mariner, 2016)
In his new book, Plots Against Hitler (Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016), Danny Orbach, Senior Lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem offers a profound and complete examination of t...
19 Okt 20251h
Lorenzo Castellani, "Alberto Beneduce, Mussolini's Technocrat: Power, Knowledge, and Institutions in Fascist Italy" (Routledge, 2025)
Should "good" people work for authoritarians? Does their implicit endorsement do more harm than their replacement by someone potentially worse? This was a common debate during Donald Trump's first ter...
18 Okt 202544min
Gianna Englert, "Democracy Tamed: French Liberalism and the Politics of Suffrage" (Oxford UP, 2024)
Does good democratic government require intelligent, moral, and productive citizens? Can our political institutions educate the kind of citizens we wish or need to have? With recent arguments "against...
15 Okt 20251h 14min
