People Power?
The phrase “liberal democracy” has degenerated into an ideological cliché
Democracy is not an all-knowing and arrogant Ideology. It is its antidote. ...
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Bloodless Democracy?
A response to John Keane
Does democracy offer any kind of solution, however partial, to ecological challenges that are inherently global, not just national, never mind local?...
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Is Europe’s Democracy in Crisis?
Europe’s democracy is in a good place, but technological changes are challenging it
Democracy is currently not in crisis and, in fact, we live in one of its best times....
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How Democracies Die, Fast and Slow
“The troubling truth is that democracy can be destroyed in multiple ways, in different tempos”
Things are serious: the “great democratic revolution“ of modern times, as Tocqueville once called it, appears to be spluttering to a halt....
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The People of New York vs. Donald J. Trump
Why Now? With Claire Potter, Episode 19
The Former Guy put out a call for his supporters to protest his indictment: this is who showed up...
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It’s Never the Gun, Is It?
Analyzing the right’s Second Amendment shell game after the tragic Covenant school shooting
How do you square support for gun ownership, virtually without restriction, with this terrible, unjust tragedy?...
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A Fragile Hope for Democracy in Thailand
An election in May has put the Thai King, the government, and the constitution under pressure. But can the opposition win?
The May election will be a pivotal moment for Thailand’s democratic future....
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The Only Way War in Ukraine Can End
On Jessica Pisano’s Staging Democracy and the function of political theater
Zelenskyy’s approach to political leadership has been focused on creating conditions that allow people to self-mobilize and self-govern....
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The Russian Question
Reflections on the collective ‘Russian’ guilt and responsibility
The war, begun by Russia, had deprived life of all its connective tissue: nothing happening outside Ukraine held any meaning or had any weight....
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Canceling the West, Putin Aims to “Make Russia Great Again”
The fact that anti-Western rhetoric is increasingly popular in Russia should be a wake-up call for Europe and the U.S.
What is happening now in the country is the reappearance and radicalization of a centuries-old resentment of the West, in the context of the war in Ukraine....
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Notes on Kharkiv
An ethnographer’s reflections on communication in wartime
In this war, resistance to Russian aggression is equipped and organized and supported as much through volunteer networks as through the generous but slow-walked bankrolling from European countries whose promises and delays Ukrainian linguistic inventiveness has come to describe as “Macroning” and “Shultzing around.”...
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Paradoxes of Free Speech
How the amplification of limitless speech acts can silence others
Our culture’s fetishizing of self-expression, apparently without any limits, is paradoxically undermining free speech....
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