RevDem Podcast

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In this episode of the Review of Democracy Podcast,historians Tara Zahra and Pieter Judson discuss their book TheGreat War and the Transformation of Habsburg Central Europe (Oxford University Press, 2025), which presents an intriguing reinterpretation of the First World War and the collapse of the Habsburg Empire. Rather than treatingthe war as a mere endpoint or the Empire’s dissolution as inevitable, the conversation explores how wartime social and political transformations reshaped everyday life and reconfigured relations between state and society. The episode examines fears of democratisation and elite decision-making, the management of refugees and mass displacement, and the emergence of new welfare practices and administrative experiments, showing how these processes laid the foundations for the post-1918 order. By foregrounding shared experiences of scarcity,mobilisation, and repression across the Monarchy, the discussion examines what the Empire’s often improvised wartime policies reveal about processes ofdisintegration as well as unexpected capacities for adaptation.

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 challenged dominant 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 I of the podcast emphasizes how gender andsexuality complicate standard readings of youth subcultures as purely liberatory. Myzelev stresses that stiliagimasculinities were both transgressive and ambivalent: while rejecting militarised postwar Soviet masculinity, they often reproduced hierarchies through consumerism, serial relationships, and the objectification of women.

In our latest episode of the special series producedin partnership with the Journal of Democracy, we discuss the recent article co-authored by Benjamin Gedan and Elias French, entitled “The Threat to Latin American Term Limits” (Journal of Democracy, Vol. 36, No.4, October 2025)The desire of leaders to remain in office indefinitelyhas haunted democracy since its inception. Politicians have found various ways to circumvent democratic accountability and sideline the people’s will for a change in leadership, from military coups to rigged elections or the installation of puppet leaders. One of the most widely used tools to constrainsuch practices is the establishment of presidential term limits. Many of today’s constitutions impose a limit on the number of times a person can run for office. However, as the Mexican experience with the practice of el dedazo shows, term limits and regular changes in the presidency are no guarantee of democratic turnover. Creative lawyers have often found legalpathways to circumvent such prohibitions. Benjamin Gedan and Elias French explain how, today, the judiciary is increasingly being used to challenge provisions that limit the amount of time individuals can serve as heads of theexecutive. Analyzing cases from Nicaragua, Honduras, Bolivia, and El Salvador, they show how constitutional courts have undermined this key safeguard of democratic survival, often by weaponizing international law and citizens’ political rights.

As 2025 draws to a close, RevDem editors Alexandra Kardos(History of Ideas), Gabriel Pereira (Cross-Regional Dialogue), and Kristóf Szombati (Political Economy and Inequalities) take stock of a turbulent democratic year through three keywords: imagination, frustration, and realignment. From Latin America’s shifting right and disillusionment with democratic “delivery” to renewed geopolitical pressuresand the growing visibility of China, they reflect on what is changing, why it matters, and what gets lost when Europe remains intellectually inward-looking.The conversation also highlights where democratic energy still surfaces—in civic mobilisation, investigative journalism, and grassroots organising. These reflections set the stage for Part II, which turns from diagnosis to the priorities and risks shaping democracy in 2026.