Hosted on Zoom – Register for link
Tuesdays
October 4 – December 6, 2022
11:00am – 12:30pm Eastern Time
Description: Following a wave of democratic expansion after the Cold War, democracies have been in continuous retreat since 2005. This seminar provides an overview of the existing crisis of democracy. It examines analytical approaches used to understand the key challenges to democratic governance which include populism, polarization, radicalism, disinformation and increasing intolerance. It also discusses a broad range of political actors, cultures, institutions, and behaviors that foster the crisis of democracy. Each factor will be explored from a comparative historical perspective, with reference to the experiences of different societies, and a specific focus on the Middle East.
More Information:
Participants who attend at least 8 complete seminar sessions will receive a certificate of satisfactory completion from the Dean of The New School for Social Research. In order to obtain the certificate, participants must register and log in with the same email address each week.
Registration will remain open for the duration of the seminar. Registrants will receive a reminder email with the Zoom link each week.
The seminar sessions will be recorded and available to registrants on Vimeo the following week.
Dr. Selin Bengi Gümrükçü is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Center for European Studies Rutgers University in New Brunswick. She received her PhD degree from University of Zurich in 2014. She studies various aspects of social movements, political parties, the far right, violence, and Europeanization and Euroscepticism, mainly focusing on the case of Turkey. Her publications have appeared in journals like Terrorism and Political Violence, Turkish Studies, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, and in edited volumes. She is currently working on her first book, to be published with Routledge: Protest and Politics in Turkey in the 1970s: The Making of a Protest Wave.
Dr. Omar Sadr joined Center for Governance and Markets, University of Pittsburgh as a senior research scholar in October of 2021. Prior to this, he served as an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the American University of Afghanistan (AUAF). He is the author of Negotiating Cultural Diversity in Afghanistan (2020). His work has appeared in venues such as Fair Observer, The Atlantic Council and The National Interest. His primary research interests include democratic governance, governance of cultural diversity, intercultural dialogue, and multiculturalism, as well as the political history of Afghanistan. Dr. Sadr also served as a researcher at the Afghanistan Institute for Strategic Studies (AISS) and as a researcher at the Department of Peace Studies with the National Centre for Policy Research (NCPR) in Kabul University.
Oct 4, 2022 11:00 AM ET
Democracy and Crisis?
- Przeworski, Adam 2019. Crisis of Democracy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 1: Introduction. Pp. 1-21.
Recommended:
- Runciman, David. 2013. The Confidence Trap: a History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present, Princeton: Princeton University Press: Introduction: Tocqueville: Democracy and Crisis.
Oct 11, 2022 11:00 AM ET
Democracy in Retreat
- Diamond, Larry. 2015. “Facing Up to the Democratic Recession,” Journal of Democracy, Vol 26, No 1: Pp 141-155.
- Foa, Roberto Stefan and Yascha Mounk. 2016. “The Danger of Deconsolidation,” Journal of Democracy. Vol 27 No 3: Pp 5-17.
Recommended:
- Applebaum, Anne. 2021. “The Bad Guys Are Winning,” The Atlantic.
Oct 18, 2022 11:00 AM ET
Democracy and Liberalism
- Fukuyama, Francis. 2022. Liberalism and its Discontents. Farrar, Straus and Giroux . Chapter 1.
Oct 25, 2022 11:00 AM ET
Crisis of Liberalism
- Deneen, Patrick. 2018. Why Liberalism Failed, London: Yale University Press: Introduction: The End of Liberalism. Pp. 1- 20
Nov 1, 2022 11:00 AM ET
How do elected authoritarians shatter democratic institutions?
- Levitsky Steven and Daniel Ziblatt. 2018. How Democracies Die?, New York: Crown. Chapter 4; Subverting Democracy.
Nov 8, 2022 11:00 AM ET
Role of Formal Institutions: Elections, Courts, and Coercion
- Jennifer Gandhi and Ellen Lust-Okar. “Elections under Authoritarianism.” Annual Review of Political Science 12 (2009): 403-422.
Recommended:
- Tamir Moustafa, “Law and Courts in Authoritarian Regimes.” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 10 (2014): 281-299.
Nov 15, 2022 11:00 AM ET
Populism
- Rovira Kaltwasser, Cristóbal, Paul Taggart, Paulina Ochoa Espejo, and Pierre Ostiguy (eds.) 2017. The Oxford Handbook of Populism, Ch. 1.
Nov 22, 2022 11:00 AM ET
Social Movements and Democratization
- Moghadam, Valentine. 2013. “What is democracy? Promises and perils of the Arab Spring,” Current Sociology, 61(4):393-408.
Recommended:
- Beinin, Joel and Frederic Vairel, eds. 2011. Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa. Stanford UP. (Intro; Ch 1)
Nov 29, 2022 11:00 AM ET
Between Democratization and De-democratization
- Mako, Shamiran and Valentine Moghadam. 2021. After the Arab Uprisings Progress and Stagnation in the Middle East and North Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapter 3
Recommended:
- Josua, Maria & Mirjam Edel. 2021. “The Arab uprisings and the return of repression,” Mediterranean Politics 26 (5): 586-611.
Dec 6, 2022 11:00 AM ET
Failure of Democracy in Afghanistan
- Sadr, Omar. 2021. The Republic and Its Enemies: The Status of The Republic in Afghanistan, Kabul: AISS. Chapter 5: The Vicious Republic. Pp. 63- 89.
Recommended
- Coburn, Noah, and Anna Larson. 2014. Derailing Democracy In Afghanistan: Elections In An Unstable Political Landscape. New York: Columbia University Press.