Summer Semester 2025 | Tuesday, 10 AM – 12 AM | Room 3.06.S23
The current global situation is characterised by the resurgence of reactionary ideologies and movements that not only weaken democratic political systems, but also drastically reduce oppositional political spaces for civil society. Although these events represent a continuation of existing authoritarian patterns and practices, in the years following the financial crisis of 2008-2009, they have acquired a specific historical expression that require new conceptualisations.
Broadly speaking, we can affirm that we are witnessing the erosion of the neoliberal optimism of past decades and of the technocratic utopias that predicted a ‘frictionless’ capitalism and the extension of liberal democratic orders to more and more regions of the globe. The crisis of this project can be exemplified by the rise of extreme-right forces in practically all European countries, as well as in India, Turkey, Israel, Russia, Argentina, or the authoritarian outcome of the Arab Spring. Donald Trump’s second presidency seems to be inaugurating a new phase in this already grim panorama, which some observers characterise as a process of fascistization.
There is a lack of consensus when it comes to contextualising and explaining this phenomenon. This is partly because of its different concrete expressions, partly because of its permanent mutations, and partly because it expresses a situation of multiple, overlapping and interconnected crises (ecological crisis, pandemic crisis, hegemonic crisis, crisis of democracy, civilisational crisis, etc.). The concrete conditions and processes of the globalisation of these multiple crises have not been sufficiently analysed, and most research is still tied to methodological nationalism, or discusses authoritarian developments as endogenous problems of particular societies.
Faced with this problem, the present seminar aims to offer a space for discussion of perspectives and conceptual tools capable of approaching the current authoritarian turn from interdisciplinary and critical perspectives and in its global interconnections. However, we will not only attempt to critically characterise crises and authoritarianisms, but also to think about the forms of resistance and counter-strategies that are made possible and necessary in this new historical cycle.
- Kursleiter*in: Börries Nehe