All over the world, we are currently observing deepening crises of liberal democracies and an intensification of authoritarian and neo-fascist tendencies. Emergencies of Authoritarianism is an international and interdisciplinary research project dedicated to deepening our understanding of this contemporary global constellation of authoritarianisms. ‘Emergencies’ implies emergences: It captures the heterogeneous genealogies of authoritarianism both in their spatial specificity and their temporal transformations and shifts. More importantly, ‘Emergencies’ also connect scientific analysis with democratic intervention: An emergency is an urgent situation that demands an immediate response. We therefore strive in to combine scientific analysis with the search for practical perspectives for policy making, alliance building and concrete solidarity.
All over the world, we are currently observing deepening crises of liberal democracies and an intensification of authoritarian and neo-fascist tendencies. Emergencies of Authoritarianism is an international and interdisciplinary research project dedicated to deepening our understanding of this contemporary global constellation of authoritarianisms. ‘Emergencies’ implies emergences: It captures the heterogeneous genealogies of authoritarianism both in their spatial specificity and their temporal transformations and shifts. More importantly, ‘Emergencies’ also connect scientific analysis with democratic intervention: An emergency is an urgent situation that demands an immediate response. We therefore strive in to combine scientific analysis with the search for practical perspectives for policy making, alliance building and concrete solidarity.
Dispatches of Authoritarianism
In the second episode of our new series “Dispatches of Authoritarianism”, our project member Gisela Catanzaro lays out the differences between the chainsaw authoritarianism of Milei, which baths itself in the oceanic feeling of the brutal limitlessness of chaos, and authoritarian movements in the “Global North” that are centred around bordering what is conceived as homogenous national space. Confronted with such a landscape, the task of critical thinking is located in the concrete analysis of the cracks of locally specific authoritarianisms, which are never as omnipotent nor as arbitrary as they present themselves.
Scholar Debaditya Bhattacharya (Delhi) discusses the current political conjuncture in India as a shift from the carceral to the custodial state, the crackdown on Kashmiri students, and the role of the University. Part of the research project “Emergencies of Authoritarianism”, facilitated by the International Consortium of Critical Theoy Programs and the FU Berlin, funded by the VolkswagenFoundation.
Emergency Calls
Emergencies of authoritarianism require not only a precise theoretical analysis, but also an urgent political response. In our series ‘Emergency Calls’, we talk to non-academic partners to ask them for advice: What is changing under authoritarian rule, especially for marginalized and vulnerable groups? What are the international connections of different authoritarian conjunctures? And above all: What is to be done?
In our first episode, we talk to Silky Shah, Executive Director of the Detention Watch Network in the USA, about Trump’s attack on immigrant rights, migrant self-organization, and perspectives on the antifascist struggle.
Silky Shah is the Executive Director of Detention Watch Network, a national coalition building power to end immigrant detention in the United States, and the author of Unbuild Walls: Why Immigrant Justice Needs Abolition. She has been working as an organizer on issues related to racial and migrant justice for over two decades and has appeared in numerous national and local media outlets, including The Washington Post, NPR, and MSNBC.
Photo credit: Detention Watch Network
Mission Statement
Authoritarian, right-wing populist, and fascist tendencies are currently gaining strength all over the world. The task is not only to analyze authoritarianism critically, but also to respond to it politically. For this purpose, this project proposes the novel concept of Emergencies of Authoritarianism. Emergencies implies emergences, the development of authoritarian tendencies out of their “normal” latency and enabling conditions. We adopt a critical perspective that analyzes local trajectories in their transversal global entanglements and complex interactions in order to avoid both methodological nationalism and Eurocentric bias. At the same time, emergencies imply urgencies: they demand an immediate response. Authoritarianisms cannot be reduced to past times, nor to distant places, but can emerge, with new victim groups, anywhere.
Over the coming years, the project will organize workshops and conferences at different locations around the globe and present its results in various publication formats. As a transnational network with equal partners from the Global South, we work closely with non-academic actors such as NGOs, cultural institutions, and journalists, using locally generated knowledge to develop robust responses to the threat of authoritarianism.
Emergencies of Authoritarianism is a project of the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs (ICCTP). The ICCTP aims to document and facilitate the new global contours of critical theory today by supporting critical thought both inside and outside the university in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and science and technology studies.
The project team is coordinated by Judith Butler (Berkeley), Robin Celikates (Berlin), Daniel Loick (Amsterdam), and Zeynep Gambetti (Istanbul), and involves Debaditya Bhattacharya (Delhi), Gisela Catanzaro (Buenos Aires), Denise Ferreira Da Silva (New York), Rosaura Martínez (Mexico City), and Eva von Redecker (Berlin). “Emergencies of Authoritarianism” is funded by the VolkswagenStiftung (Germany).
Partners
