My god…

Timely keynote by Donatella della Porta @ipsa.org : moral panic as a mechanism of repression of academic freedom.

2020 Polish Const. Tribunal imposes near-total abortion ban. 2022 U.S. Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade. Today Germany delays Const. Court appointment after anti-abortion groups target pro-choice nominee. Abortion rights under attack - court by court, country by country. p.dw.com/p/4xJLb

Indeed, measures similar to Reform's Trump-style book bans for children have already been found in breach of ECHR rights to freedom of expression - www.ilga-europe.org/news/europea...

Does higher state capacity go together with lower risk of democratic breakdown? Many political scientists certainly believe so! Yet, in an article just published in @polstudies.bsky.social , David Andersen, @skaaning.bsky.social and I highlight important nuances to this general relationship.

Our Element is out! 🎉 Why do authoritarian-leaning leaders target women’s and LGBTQ+ rights? Is there a systematic pattern that reaches beyond individual country cases, and how is this reflected in people’s attitudes and societal norms? www.cambridge.org/core/element...

A very important book. I’ll be putting on my reading lists

With @sarahbush.bsky.social & @laurenrprather.bsky.social we document the rise of low-quality election monitors who legitimate host elections regardless of fraud & show that authoritarian-led regional IOs--esp. those anchored by Russia--have pioneered the tactic link.springer.com/article/10.1...

The autocrat needs enemies. Great, short explainer by @pepinneff.bsky.social

Checking in from parental leave to share my latest paper with @carnegiedcg.bsky.social! What's behind the contemporary anti-gender backlash? How does it manifest across different countries and regions? And why has it been difficult to mount an effective response? 🔽 🔽 🔽

Gender conflict subtly but powerfully shaped South Korea’s election.

✍️Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser examines how far-right actors harness anti-feminist rhetoric to mobilize voters, resist the expansion of rights, and contest the very meaning of democracy. Read it 👉: tinyurl.com/8mbkfumm

The CJEU has ruled that Member States cannot prosecute asylum-seeking mothers who travelled on false documents with their children as people smugglers - in a judgment with broader implications for the criminalisation of immigration. My analysis: eulawanalysis.blogspot.com/2025/06/a-ca...

This is a very interesting observational paper for those working on gendered dynamics of far-right, descriptive rep & femonationalism Does women's descriptive rep. lower anti-gender discourse among far-right? No, it *increases* it (according to parl speech data 2009-2023) doi.org/10.1177/1465...

@politico.eu: "The bill says threats to national sovereignty include influencing public opinion, promoting democratic debate, or challenging state-defined values like Christian culture and traditional family roles."

Ecem Nazlı Üçok (@ecprgender.bsky.social) explores how student protests in Turkey, Serbia, and Georgia reflect more than isolated unrest — they reveal a transnational wave of political mourning 🙁, democratic erosion 📉, and Gen Z-led resistance ✊. ➡️ bit.ly/4d9s8uC

Some rare good news for trans people – the transphobic amendment to the Data Bill was defeated by a large margin. It would have forced trans people to out themselves virtually daily, putting people's safety and dignity at risk, so it's great to see MPs reject it comprehensively.

Is Ernst Fraenkel’s dual state theory a useful template for making sense of Trump’s assault on the rule of law? WILLIAM SCHEUERMAN on what the theory might have gotten wrong by presuming that capitalism and economic actors favor legal predictability. verfassungsblog.de/trump-2-0-as...

Germany's AfD's positions designated as "incompatible with the free democratic order" by the federal office for the protection of the constitution. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

🔴 The Conservatives knew their immigration plan would disproportionately impact LGBTIQ+ people. They did it anyway | Investigation by @sianushka.bsky.social www.opendemocracy.net/en/hostile-i...

Shock, but no surprise. The only unexpected thing about this is the timing #farright #radicalright #Germany

Germany's domestic intelligence service concludes that the AfD as a whole is "confirmed far-right" and in opposition to the free and democratic constitutional order of Germany. This is a big deal. www.tagesschau.de/inland/innen...

Populism remains an important necessary concept to understand current political transformations. But analysts need to move away from it as the main focus. Authoritarian nativism, white supremacy, racism, sexism and fascism are the ideologies at the core of the current erosion of liberal democracy 1/

Can someone please revoke Hungary's access badges to the Council until it's a functional democracy again? How do they still have a vote?....

This is why Republicans in the House passed a law saying women can't register to vote if their last name is different from their birth certificate. Yes, that happened.

Sound the subnational authoritarianism klaxon

One thing I wish people understood about authoritarianism is life often looks more or less the same. Troops aren’t marching down the street every day; people go to restaurants, have their office jobs. But everyone knows that stepping out of line, even slightly, can derail your life with no recourse

If you want POTUS to hear your case on exceptions to tariffs, you might want to pay him a million for dinner with him www.wired.com/story/people...

Basically: I don’t think people understand that 36 hours from now it’s possible that America will have a formalized system for abducting enemies of the regime and stashing them in foreign gulags, indefinitely. www.thebulwark.com/p/bukele-abr...

From the current maelstrom, some kind of new political economic orthodoxy and reconfigured global order seems certain to emerge. I would really like that not to involve 3 expansionist, authoritarian superpowers battling for control of shipping and drilling in the Arctic as the ice melts.

Germany funding Eutelsat terminals in Ukraine as alternative to Starlink - expansion planned - www.aol.com/news/exclusi...

Hungary joins the outlaws.

This is where the lens of authoritarian politics is helpful. Not because I think the US is necessarily an autocracy now, but because it helps explain the curious lack of voice on the part of powerful interests. These actors are scared: threatened with retaliation and lacking coordination capacity

Last night & today are why I’m not convinced all the How Democracies Die is a particularly useful model for the US in this moment. You don’t consolidate control by blowing things up & inflicting pain on your own base. But that’s what Trump is doing & I can’t imagine how this helps his legitimacy

The standout madness in the general madness are the enormous tariffs on South East Asia which, if these stick, is going to magnify China's sphere of influence. Geopolitical lunacy.

US is using tariffs to coerce countries into adopting US anti-choice values. For example, trying to force the UK to overturn bubble zone laws that protect abortion clinics www.yahoo.com/news/trump-w...

The European Commission is "examining" the letters sent by the US government to several EU countries asking them to certify their companies don't implement DEI programmes. The internal analysis is done based on "general international rules and specific arrangements."

The most serious Nazi shit in this extremely Nazi shit executive order may be the idea, just slipped in there, that one of the "divisive narratives that distort our shared history" is that "race is not a biological reality but a social construct." www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

🚫🇺🇸 How times change: For the first time, the U.S. Embassy in Budapest didn’t sign a joint Western statement condemning Orbán’s Pride ban and Hungary’s curbs on peaceful assembly and free speech. Meanwhile, Poland, Czechia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania & Slovenia did. Central Europe is on a good path.👏

They revoked a Fulbright Scholar's visa because she wrote an op-ed they didn't like. I studied abroad as a graduate student and it never occurred to me that my legal status might depend on not criticizing government policy.

Seriously disturbing. “"We need Greenland for international safety and security. We need it. We have to have it," Trump told podcaster Vince Coglianese. "I hate to put it that way, but we're going to have to have it."” www.france24.com/en/live-news...

News Analysis: Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is making cuts to or shuttering organizations that China worried about most, leaving a vacuum Beijing can fill.

Ah yes, who could forget the obvious distinction between being an antisemite and "creating the feeling of safe harbor for far-right elements who unabashedly or in coded language express antisemitic sentiments"

Ha, things are moving! Europe’s digital sovereignty taking shape 👇

We're seeing a lot of very rapid geopolitical and geo-economic thinking going on right now in Europe about what the end of the US alliance means for its security, economy & diplomacy. I haven't seen any parallel thinking among the US Atlanticist community about what it means for the US. (Brief) 🧵

There is virtually no better commercial you can run for the European defense industry than these two sentences uttered by Trump. No matter with whom I’m talking about this on this side of the pond, the common understanding is that this is going to severely damage the US industry.