RevDem Podcast

Review of Democracy
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RevDem Podcast is brought to you by the Review of Democracy, the online journal of the CEU Democracy Institute. The Review of Democracy is dedicated to the reinvigoration, survival, and prosperity of democracies worldwide and to generating innovative cross-regional dialogues. RevDem Podcast offers in-depth conversations in four main areas: rule of law, political economy and inequalities, the history of ideas, and democracy and culture.

  1. Digging Up the Dead: What Vampire Panics Reveal About Power

    22 HR AGO

    Digging Up the Dead: What Vampire Panics Reveal About Power

    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.

    33 min
  2. Women’s participation in Ukraine’s Euromaidan- A Conversation with Olena Nikolayenko

    9 FEB

    Women’s participation in Ukraine’s Euromaidan- A Conversation with Olena Nikolayenko

    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.

    31 min
  3. Crime, Crackdowns, and Democracy in Ecuador

    2 FEB

    Crime, Crackdowns, and Democracy in Ecuador

    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.

    50 min
  4. Why Honduras Is Facing Election Chaos

    29 JAN

    Why Honduras Is Facing Election Chaos

    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.

    40 min
  5. End of Year Podcast Part II- – Looking Ahead to 2026

    27 JAN

    End of Year Podcast Part II- – Looking Ahead to 2026

    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.

    47 min
  6. Heimat Revisited: Jeremy DeWaal on Place, Belonging and Post-war Politics in West Germany

    22 JAN

    Heimat Revisited: Jeremy DeWaal on Place, Belonging and Post-war Politics in West Germany

    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.

    39 min
  7. Stiliagi and Soviet Masculinities- A Conversation with Alla Myzelev

    19 JAN

    Stiliagi and Soviet Masculinities- A Conversation with Alla Myzelev

    In the Soviet Union, youth fashion meant more than just a way of expression. In our latest episode, we discusswith Alla Myzelev about the stiliagi, a flamboyant youth subculture that emerged in the late Stalinist and early post-Stalinist Soviet Union.Myzelev situates the stiliagi not simply as fashion-conscious rebels, but as a distinctly embodied and aesthetic form of dissent that challengeddominant socialist norms of respectability, discipline, and masculinity.Through their brightly coloured clothing, enthusiasm for jazz, and stylised modes of self-presentation, stiliagi exposed the fragility of Soviet ideals of the “proper” socialist male citizen. Rather than overt political opposition, their subversion operated through taste, leisure, and the body,revealing how cultural practices could quietly unsettle authoritarian norms even in highly regulated societies. Part II of the podcast emphasizes the differenttypes of primary sources used to investigate such a rich phenomenon. As well, it discusses the latest developments in the field of creative dissent, particularly Julianne Fürst’s book Flowers Through Concrete. Lastly, Alla Myzelev explores what questions within the field remain unresolved.

    22 min
  8. On Genocide: Omer Bartov in Conversation about Palestine, Israel, and Germany

    15 JAN

    On Genocide: Omer Bartov in Conversation about Palestine, Israel, and Germany

    Over the last two years, the world has witnessed atrocities beyond imagination. The killing of approximately 1,200 people by Hamas in Israel on October 7, 2023, was followed by a genocidal war in which the Israeli Defense Forces have, according to recent reports, killed over 67,000 Palestinians — nearly a third of them children. Israel’s military hasdamaged or destroyed more than 90% of homes in Gaza and left countless people with life-altering physical and psychological injuries. Shocking as this is, Israel’sactions in Gaza have been met with overwhelming silence or even support from Western liberal democracies, which often portray themselves as champions of peace and a rules-based international order. Having warned of this potentialearly on, in this conversation Prof. Omer Bartov argues that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and criticizes Western leaders for their complicity.

    54 min
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About

RevDem Podcast is brought to you by the Review of Democracy, the online journal of the CEU Democracy Institute. The Review of Democracy is dedicated to the reinvigoration, survival, and prosperity of democracies worldwide and to generating innovative cross-regional dialogues. RevDem Podcast offers in-depth conversations in four main areas: rule of law, political economy and inequalities, the history of ideas, and democracy and culture.

Information

  • Creator
    Review of Democracy
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    397
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Review of Democracy
  • Show Website
    RevDem Podcast