Anticipating Autocracies: Contradictions in Broken China

In this latest conversation, we speak with Minxin Peiabout his latest book, The Broken China Dream: How Reform Revived Totalitarianism (Princeton University Press, 2025),which challenges the enduring assumption that economic development naturally leads to democracy. Pei argues that China’s post-Mao reforms produced not political liberalization but a resilient, adaptive form of authoritarianism.Focusing on the Deng Xiaoping time, he shows how these changes also reinforced centralized authority, fostered corruption, and sidelined reformist actors—laying the groundwork for neo-authoritarian rule. The conversation turns to nationalism and the Patriotic Education Campaign, probing how nationalism in contemporary China has been mobilized to legitimize Xi Jinping’s totalizing control. We ask whether the features once seen as China’s strengths—partydominance and controlled markets—are now sources of fragility under Xi Jinping.Dwelling on the significance of the title of the book, we explore how the rise of China, counterintuitive to many in the West, is ultimately an example of contradictions inherent in modern as well as Chinese politics.

Artificial intelligence or the pandemics were two recentcrises framed as almost  magical non-human actors. They both reshaped the boundaries of human agency. By now,the language explaining them is often one of rupture and unprecedented transformation. AI or COVID-19 were described as opaque, autonomous and difficult to control. Both were imagined as operating beyond ordinaryaccountability, while still exerting real effects on collective life. In that sense, the anxiety does not result only from the fear of machines or unknown germs. It concerns the displacement of agency and the fragility of human beings tasked with governing forces they did not design and do not fully understand. Humans are unsettled when power seems to migrate beyond the human subject.Yet the fear of the non-human as a destabilising force isnot new. What we would like to pinpoint in our series it that societies, when confronted with such moments of rupture, authorize forms of exclusion and violence based on (ir)rationalism. Our focus throughout this series will fallon the vampire and witchcraft epidemics. European societies once confronted witches, revenants and vampires as threats to moral and political order. These figures emerged at moments of epidemic disease, religious fracture andinstitutional weakness. They offered an explanation for crisis. This new dossier revisits those episodes of collectiveanxiety. Whilst the differences between AI, pandemics and zombies, witches and undead are substantial, these moments reveal the fragile boundary between the rational state and collective hysteria. The imagery resulted can be a finebarometer of the how states respond when agency seems to escape human control or what mechanisms of blame, purification and boundary-drawing are activated.In our second podcast of this series, we have as guest Kateryna Dysa, with whom we will discuss her extremely fascinating book Ukrainian Witchcraft Trials: Volhynia, Podolia, and Ruthenia, 17th and 18th Centuries, published by the CEU Press in 2023. In this research, she reconstructs the history of witchcraft in Ukraine, with a particular focus on the three so-called “Ruthenian” palatinates of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Podolia, Ruthenia, and Volhynia. Our conversation begins with a conceptual question: what counts as a witch and who defines one? Kateryna Dysa reveals that geographical nuances need to be taken into account. In a region situated at the nexus between Catholicism andOrthodoxy, the definitions were less fixed as they emerged from the local community rather from theologians. The nature of primary sources also differs from thetraditional scholarship on this field. Drawing on 198 primary sources, most of them court books, Dysa reveals a judicial culture markedly different from the better-known Western European persecutions. In most cases, accusations did notculminate in execution. Often, only complaints were recorded; investigations were limited, and verdicts tended to be mild. Death sentences were rare and typically entangled withstark social hierarchies, where accusations flowed upward from elites against socially vulnerable individuals.The episode then turns to gender. Rather than endorsing a monolithic narrative of patriarchal persecution, Dysa emphasizes the social logic of witchcraft accusations as embedded in everyday tensions, including fears surrounding love magic, food, and bodily vulnerability. Finally, the discussion moves to the Enlightenment and Romanticism. In the eighteenth century, state centralization and rationalist reform curtailed formal prosecutions, but popular belief persisted, sometimes leading to extrajudicial violence. In thenineteenth century, Romanticism transformed the witch into a literary and folkloric figure, reshaping her image and symbolic function.

In our new podcast, Ferenc Laczó speaks with Erica Chenoweth and Matthew Cebul about their Journalof Democracy article, “Why Gen-Z Is Rising.” Erica Chenoweth and Matthew Cebul discuss the politicalprofile of Gen-Z protesters, what ignited their recent protests across the globe, and how those protests unfolded invarious places. They reflect on the promises and perils of those protests – and how the related question of violence and non-violence has played out. In closing, Erica and Matthew consider what kind of political transformations weare likely to see as members of Gen-Z will take on ever greater roles in the coming years.

In this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast, political theorist Shuk Ying Chan (UCL) discusses her new book Postcolonial Global Justice (Princeton University Press, 2026), which develops an account of postcolonial global justice as social equality by thinking with anticolonial leaders Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Kwame Nkrumah and JawaharlalNehru. Chan explains her method of “historically inflected normative theorising”, which treats specific historical actors as interlocutors in developing normative principles for the present. The discussion also explores how the nation-state was often an instrument used by these thinkers to pursue abroader ideal of relational equality, and Chan’s conceptualisation of postcolonial global justice as a matter of social equality, focusing on the ability of individuals and groups to “stand as equals”. Finally, the conversation turns to contemporary problems of undemocratic global governanceand Chan’s proposal to rethink global democracy in terms of horizontal inequalities of power between groups, rather than only a vertical gap between individuals and global institutions.

Artificial intelligence or the pandemics were two recentcrises framed as almost magical non-human actors. They both reshaped the boundaries of human agency. By now,the language explaining them is often one of rupture and unprecedented transformation. AI or COVID-19 were described as opaque, autonomous and difficult to control. Both were imagined as operating beyond ordinaryaccountability, while still exerting real effects on collective life. In that sense, the anxiety does not result only from the fear of machines or unknown germs. It concerns the displacement of agency and the fragility of human beings tasked with governing forces they did not design and do not fully understand. Humans are unsettled when power seems to migrate beyond the human subject.Yet the fear of the non-human as a destabilising force isnot new. What we would like to pinpoint in our series it that societies, when confronted with such moments of rupture, authorize forms of exclusion and violence based on (ir)rationalism. Our focus throughout this series will fallon the vampire and witchcraft epidemics. European societies once confronted witches, revenants and vampires as threats to moral and political order. These figures emerged at moments of epidemic disease, religious fracture andinstitutional weakness. They offered an explanation for crisis. This new dossier revisits those episodes of collectiveanxiety. Whilst the differences between AI, pandemics and zombies, witches and undead are substantial, these moments reveal the fragile boundary between the rational state and collective hysteria. The imagery resulted can be a finebarometer of the how states respond when agency seems to escape human control or what mechanisms of blame, purification and boundary-drawing are activated.In our first podcast of this series, we discuss with Prof. John Blair, around his latest book Killing the Dead: Vampire Epidemics from Mesopotamia to the New World, published by Princeton University Press. John Blair reconstructs a world in which the dead were not metaphor but menace. His bookfollows the concept of restless bodies which stirred various social anxieties and created symbolic meanings.Drawing on both archeological sources and written sources,Prof. John Blair traces how reports of revenants and vampires spread across medieval England and later in Saxony, Bohemia and Transylvania. A particular revealing case is masticatione mortuorum (mastication of the dead), which meant the corpses that eat themselves. The book does not treat theseepisodes as a form of superstition. Instead, John Blair sees them as anthropological facts which are embedded in localconflicts and in turn reveal fragile systems of authority.Whilst one of the core tenets of Enlightenment was tofight superstition and Maria Theresa issued a ban on corpse-killing, John Blair underlines that the shifts were much more gradual. Reason did not replace fear.Blair shows that accusations of the undead surfaced where institutions were weak and explanations scarce. The exhumed body became a site of negotiation between fear and governance, even during the Enlightenment. What appearsirrational from a distance emerges, under scrutiny, as a structured response to crisis.

What counts as “real” participation in a revolution? To what extent does gender in a revolution nowadays? What are the outcomes of mass mobilization? How do Ukrainian women participate in a revolution? In our podcast, we attemptto find an answer to these questions with Olena Nikolayenko around her latest book, Invisible Revolutionaries: Women’sParticipation in Ukraine’s Euromaidan.  Published in April 2025 by Cambridge University Press, her research focuses on the women’s participation in the Ukrainian Euromaidan. In the podcast, Olena Nikolayenko places women’s protest within a broader framework, which includes the Arab Spring and Belarus.Her claim is that age, class, region and political experience shape women’s forms of engagement. Based on these observation, Invisible Revolutionaries distinguishesbetween three models of participation: patriarchal, emancipatory, and hybrid.The methodology received a particular focus in our conversation. The Ukrainian Euromaidan was accuratelydocumented through multiple projects, such as the Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance’s Maidan: Oral History  and Maidan.Testimonies. As art is equally a key component duringrevolutions, Olena Nikolayenko presents the main artistic projects of the Revolution of Dignity. Olena Nikolayenko claims that Euromaidan is not a singular moment in history. Instead, it belongs within the Ukrainian’s longer history of women’s activism, which starts from the 1917-1921 Ukrainian revolution to Orange Revolution. However, this legacy remained largely invisible in the English-language historiography. In this context, the conversation ends by emphasizing possible avenues. Researchers dealing with this topic should investigate the relationship between gender andnonviolence, and how nonviolent resistance participation influences subsequent engagement in armed conflict. The question of how women's activism evolves fromcultural and civic resistance to armed defense of national identity remains particularly relevant given Ukraine's ongoing struggle.

Ecuador has experienced one of the most dramatic surges in criminal violence in Latin America, alongside growing pressure on democratic institutions. In this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast—produced in cooperation with the Journalof Democracy—Gabriel Pereira speaks with Galo Mayorga and Kai M. Thaler about how state weakness, militarized security policies, and public fear are reshaping Ecuador’s democracy. The conversation explores the roots ofEcuador’s crisis, President Daniel Noboa’s hardline response to crime, the risks of democratic erosion, and what Ecuador’s experience reveals about the broader regional struggle to confront organized crime without sacrificing democratic guardrails.

Honduras has just gone through one of the most chaotic and contested electoral processes in recent memory. In this episode of the Review of Democracy podcast, GabrielPereira speaks with Rachel A. Schwartz about her recent Journal of Democracy article, “Why Honduras Is Facing Election Chaos.” They examine how logistical failures, elite conflict, and long-term democratic erosion combinedto produce uncertainty over the outcome, how US backing shaped post-election politics, and what the new government may mean for Honduras’s democratic future.

As Review of Democracy turns its attention from 2025 to the uncertainties of 2026, our editors Adrian Matus (Democracy and Culture) and Anubha Anushree (Cross-Regional Dialogue) discuss the intellectual questions that might shape the year ahead. Building on RevDem’s End of the Year Podcast 2025- Part I, the discussion focuses on the democratic developments, underestimated risks for democracy, includingAI literacy, an increasingly transactional political landscape, the emergence of contentious politics, and also the politization of education. The conversation also highlights questions that are yet to be solved in 2026: how should we understand the notion of authorship nowadays? How is the ’grammar’ of democracy changing? Check our explorative conversation of the realm of possibilities of 2026.

What does it mean to feel “at home” in aplace, and why does that matter for democracy? In this episode, historianJeremy DeWaal talks about Heimat, a German word that is famously hard to translate. It is often rendered as “home” or “homeland”, but it also points to a deeper sense of belonging, memory and emotional attachment to specificplaces. Drawing on his book Geographiesof Renewal: Heimat and Democracy in West Germany, 1945–1990 (Cambridge University Press), DeWaal explores different meanings of Heimat and explains how Heimat shaped post-war debates about democracy, federalism and Europe. Theconversation also looks at the role of expellee politics and the Anti-Heimat movement of the 1960s, and connects these histories to current debates about identity, migration, and nationalism. The discussion concludes with a reflectionon what the history of Heimat can reveal about the politics of place today.