Democracy for Sale: Death by Dark Money

On this edition of Ctrl Alt Deceit: Democracy in Danger, we are live at the Royal United Services Institute. Nina Dos Santos and Owen Bennett Jones are joined by a world-class panel to discuss the dangers posed by the waves of dark money threatening to overwhelm our democratic institutions.Panelists:--Tom Keatinge, Director, Centre for Finance and Security, RUSI--Darren Hughes, Chief Executive, Electoral Reform Society--Gina Neff, Executive Director, Minderoo Centre for Technology & Democracy at the University of Cambridge, and Professor of Responsible AI, Queen Mary University London Producer: Pearse Lynch Executive Producer: Lucinda Knight Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey speaks with Stephen Hanson and Jeffrey Kopstein, co-authors of The Assault on the State: How the Global Attack on Modern Government Endangers Our Future (Polity Press, 2024). In this conversation, they discuss how today’s right-wing movements, from the United States to Hungary, are waging a new form of politics that undermines the very foundations of the modern, rules-based state. Drawing on Max Weber’s concept of “patrimonialism,” Hanson and Kopstein explore how these leaders erode public trust, demolish impersonal bureaucracies, and replace rational governance with personal loyalty and whim. Along the way, they examine the role of conspiracy theories, the rise of “deep state” narratives, and the uneasy alliances connecting libertarians, Christian nationalists, and advocates of an all-powerful executive. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Emergency in Transit: Witnessing Migration in the Colonial Present (University of California Press, 2024) by Dr. Eleanor Paynter responds to the crisis framings that dominate migration debates in the global north. This capacious, interdisciplinary open-access study reformulates Europe's so-called "migrant crisis" from a sudden disaster to a site of contested witnessing, where competing narratives threaten, uphold, or reimagine migrant rights. Focusing on Italy, a crucial port of arrival, Dr. Paynter draws together testimonials from ethnographic research—alongside literature, film, and visual art—to interrogate the colonial, racial logics that inform emergency responses to migration. She also examines the media, discourses, policies, and practices that shape lived experiences of migration well beyond international borders. Centering the witnessing of Black Africans in Italy, Emergency in Transit reveals how this emergency apparatus operates and posits a vision of mobility that refutes the notions of crisis so often imposed on those who cross the Mediterranean Sea. This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Liberalism is in trouble. As a set of ideas, it has lost much of its historical authority in guiding public policy and personal behaviour. In this post-liberal climate, Russell Blackford asks whether liberalism is truly over. How We Became Post-Liberal: The Rise and Fall of Toleration (Bloomsbury, 2023) examines how Western liberal democracies became nations where traditional liberal principles of toleration (religious and otherwise), individual liberty and freedom of speech are frequently dismissed as outdated or twisted to support conservative policies. Blackford traces the lineage of liberalism from problems of toleration that emerged when Christianity triumphed in the late centuries of classical antiquity, with comparison to non-Western civilizations. The political and philosophical story culminates in the recent development – over the past 30 to 50 years – of post-liberal ideologies in the West. At each stage, Blackford discusses arguments for and against liberal principles, identifying why no argument to date has been totally successful in convincing opponents, while maintaining that liberalism's ideas and language are still worth saving. From campus wars over academic freedom to the Charlie Hebdo attack and the murder of Samuel Paty, this is an indispensable guide for anyone wanting to understand the why, what and how of the post-liberal world. Russell Blackford is a philosopher, legal scholar, literary critic based at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia. He is the author of Freedom of Religion and the Secular State (2012), Humanity Enhanced (2014), The Mystery of Moral Authority (2016), and Science Fiction and the Moral Imagination (2017). In 2014, he was inducted as a Laureate of the International Academy of Humanism. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube channel. Twitter. Let's face it, most of the popular podcasts out there are dumb. NBN features scholars (like you!), providing an enriching alternative to students. We partner with presses like Oxford, Princeton, and Cambridge to make academic research accessible to all. Please consider sharing the New Books Network with your students. Download this poster here to spread the word. Please share this interview on Instagram, LinkedIn, or Bluesky. Don't forget to subscribe to our Substack here to receive our weekly newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The starting point of this book is the 'civil war' of ideas that broke out during the early 2010s about the purpose and even the desirability of the European Union as a polity, with a number of right-wing populist formations openly advocating for exiting the Union. The sovereign debt crisis triggered a spiral of ideological decommunalization: national leaders seemed to have lost that sense of 'togetherness' and mutual bonds that had been laboriously developed over decades of integration.  Politics and Social Visions: Ideology, Conflict, and Solidarity in the EU (Oxford UP, 2024) explores this politically disruptive process from an ideational perspective, on the assumption that symbols and visions play a crucial role. In processes of polity formation, ideologies offer competing partisan views, but tend to converge along the 'communal' dimension, which defines the nature and boundaries of the emerging polity. This convergence has been a challenge for the EU since its origins, as it has required the construction of a coherent and acceptable image of Europe as a compound polity of nation-states with a divisive past. Maurizio Ferrera offers a reconstruction of how the main ideological currents have struggled - and often failed - to reconfigure their horizontal profiles (i.e. their images of the national within Europe) into a new vertical profile (i.e. an image of the European within the national). The challenge has been especially demanding for European left-wing parties, which have been largely unable to forge a shared and recognizable 'social vision' of the European Union. Only during the COVID pandemic have the seeds of a novel communal consensus emerged that might prove capable of defeating the anti-communal views of Eurosceptic ideologies and free market technocrats. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Radical nationalism is on the rise in Europe and throughout the world. Living Right: Far-Right Youth Activists in Contemporary Europe (Princeton University Press, 2024) provides an in-depth account of the ideas and practices that are driving the varied forms of far-right activism by young people from all walks of life, revealing how these social movements offer the promise of comradery, purpose, and a moral calling to self-sacrifice, and demonstrating how far-right ideas are understood and lived in ways that speak to a variety of experiences. In this eye-opening book, Agnieszka Pasieka draws on her own sometimes harrowing fieldwork among Italian, Polish, and Hungarian militant youths, painting unforgettable portraits of students, laborers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and activists from well-off middle class backgrounds who have all found a nurturing home in the far right. Providing an in-depth account of radical nationalist communities and networks that are taking root across Europe, she shows how the simultaneous orientation of these groups toward the local and the transnational is a key to their success. With a focus on far-right morality that challenges commonly held ideas about the right, Pasieka describes how far-right movements afford opportunities to the young to be active members of tightly bonded comradeships while sharing in a broader project with global ramifications. Required reading for anthropologists and anyone concerned about the resurgence of far-right militancy today, Living Right sheds necessary light on the forces that have made the growing appeal of fascist idealism for young people one of the most alarming trends of our time. Agnieszka Pasieka is assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Montreal. * This episode is part of a special collaboration between the New Books Network and the Society for the Anthropology of Europe, a section of the American Anthropological Association. Together, we’re highlighting exciting new work in Europeanist anthropology—featuring authors from across the field, including winners of the William A. Douglass Book Prize and contributors to the European Anthropology in Translation series published by Berghahn Books. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How do separatist conflicts arise and spread? When does separatism become a cover for a foreign aggression? How do local communities respond when state institutions collapse, and militants take over? The armed conflict in Eastern Ukraine, which started eight years before Russia's full-scale invasion, contains unique evidence to address each of these questions. In Seize the City, Undo the State: The Inception of Russia's War on Ukraine (Oxford UP, 2015), Serhiy Kudelia offers an authoritative study of the conflict at its initial stage--2013-14--based on a meticulous comparison of mobilization dynamics in over dozen towns of Donbas as well as in two major cities outside of it: Kharkiv and Odesa. Through his extensive travels and numerous interviews with conflict witnesses and participants, Kudelia explains how a small group of Russian agents and local militants succeeded in eliminating state control over the largest and most densely urbanized region of Ukraine but failed to do it elsewhere. Kudelia challenges the conventional accounts of the armed conflict in Donbas, which portray it either as an interstate conflict entirely manufactured by Moscow or as a civil war that broke out without any external influence. Instead, he argues that local actors prepared ideological and organizational basis for the uprising, but the successful spread of separatist control resulted from the covert intervention of Russian agents and widespread collaboration with them of town administrators and community activists. His findings also show that when enough members of local communities organized to resist militant takeovers, the separatist challenges there quickly dissipated. A fine-grained and highly original on-the-ground analysis of the origins of the wider Russian-Ukrainian war that broke out in 2022, this book offers broader insights into the conditions under which external intervention may trigger the rise of an armed insurgency in a society torn apart by political and ideological disagreements. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Live from the Frontline Club in London, Ctrl Alt Deceit is back for its second season. Hosts Nina dos Santos and Owen Bennett-Jones host a fascinating discussion on the myriad threats to democracy, particularly in light of Trump's re-election. Joined by Gabriel Gatehouse is an award-winning BBC journalist and broadcaster, formerly International Editor of Newsnight and host of the award winning podcast The Coming Storm. And Connor Tomlinson is a commentator and writer, contributing to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's Courage Media and presenting the Deprogrammed podcast at the New Culture Forum. He previously hosted Tomlinson Talks on LotusEaters.com In this provocative and timely discussion, big ideas collide as our panel tackles the fault lines shaking the foundations of the democratic world. As power shifts, authoritarianism rises, and ideological battles intensify, is liberal democracy collapsing under its own contradictions—or is it still the best system we’ve got? From Silicon Valley’s techno-libertarian ambitions to the push for a return to a more rigidly defined Western identity, our panel will explore the competing visions for the future. Has democracy been hijacked by global institutions that sideline voters? Was the dream of a liberal world order always doomed to fail? And if democracy is in decline—what comes next? Producer: Pearse Lynch Exec Producer: Lucinda Knight Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Liberal democracies don’t age gracefully. Established systems of governance like those of the UK and the US which once served as blueprints are today experiencing a profound crisis of legitimacy. In Britain, a landslide general election result was quickly followed by a catastrophic tumble in approval ratings. In the US presidential campaign, meanwhile, voters were told that democracy itself was on the ballot, with both candidates suggesting the election might well be the last one ever. The consensus underpinning the world’s most powerful democracies is, indeed, waning. The populaces have developed a deep dissatisfaction with their governments’ political procedures, yet no credible alternatives have emerged. In his latest book Legitimacy in Liberal Democracies (Edinburgh UP, 2024), Benjamin Studebaker argues that the kinds of disagreements which historically led to political violence today instead just linger throughout the state and society. Without alternatives, liberal democracy’s legitimation crisis leads to neither reform nor revolution. Studebaker depicts a legitimacy crisis rife with state capacity problems, in which citizens tell each other many conflicting legitimation stories as they search for ways to live with a dissatisfying political system they cannot replace. As different factions try to ‘save’ democracy in their own ways, they appear authoritarian to one another. Efforts to build legitimacy thus only spark greater inequality, pluralism, and ever-tighter gridlock. Benjamin Studebaker is a political theorist. He holds a PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Cambridge. He has written for Aeon, Sublation, Compact, Current Affairs, The Bellows, and Huffington Post, among others. He hosts Political Theory 101 and co-hosts the film podcast The Lack. Benjamin is also the author of The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy which we spoke about in 2023. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Though European administrative laws have gained global significance in the last few decades, research which provides both theoretical analysis and original empirical research has been scarce. The Common Core of European Administrative Laws Retrospective and Prospective (Brill/NIjhoff, 2023) an important account of the evolution of judicial review and administrative procedure legislation, using a factual analysis to shed light on how the different legal systems react to similar problems. Discussing the concept of a ‘common core’, Giacinto della Cananea reveals the commonalities in, and differences between, the foundational assumptions of European administrative adjudication and rule-making. This is the fourth book in the series, Comparative Law in Global Perspective published by Brill Niehoff, and it is available open access here. Giacinto della Cananea is a full professor in the department of law at the University of Bocconi. He holds a PhD in European law from the European University Institute (1994) and a law degree from the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ (1989). He is a public lawyer, with research interests in administrative law, European Union law and global administrative law, with specific focus on three areas: the comparative law of administrative procedures, the general principles of law, and budgetary issues. He and Mauro Bussani are co-editors of the series Comparative Law in Global Perspective, published by Brill Niehoff Jessie Cohen holds a Ph.D. in History from Columbia University. She is an editor at the New Books Network Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices