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.
In the fifth episode of “Dispatches of Authoritarianism”, Adriana Zaharijević discusses transactional authoritarianism in Serbia under Aleksandar Vučić and the Serbian Progressive Party. In this system, governance increasingly operates through exchanges of access to jobs, services, and opportunities in exchange for loyalty to the ruling party. Although institutions such as parliament, elections, and opposition remain in place, their role in shaping political life has steadily been hollowed out. The result is a system in which citizens become clients, public goods become resources for private gain, and political thinking is discouraged. However, the Serbian student movement challenges this logic by resisting the idea that everything and everyone has a price.
In the fourth episode of our series “Dispatches of Authoritarianism”, our project member Rosaura Martínez Ruiz elaborates on her concept of Antigonia as a modification and politicization of Freud´s notion of mourning, which enables us to perceive the political claim to mourn put forward by the collectives of buscadoras in Mexico as an anti-authoritarian struggle.
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
