Democratic Backsliding and Resilience

Module Title: Democratic Backsliding and Resilience

Module Leader: Dr Marietta van der Tol

Overview:

This course offers students an opportunity to explore ideologies and practices behind the label ‘democratic backsliding’ as well as strategies for democratic resilience. Students will study the contexts of Europe, Russia, the United States, India, Israel, Türkiye and Brazil, as well as engage the many transnational configurations of ideas, practices, and movements. As such, the course draws on a combination of comparative politics and international relations.

The course will equip students to handle a spectrum of concepts with a measure of sophistication, including ‘illiberalism’, ‘conservatism’, ‘anti-liberalism’, and ‘authoritarianism’, ‘nationalism’, ‘populism’, ‘civilisationalism’. Through engagement with literature as well as policy briefings, students will learn about the importance of language and how language may be used flexibly to speak to a wide range of constituencies.

The course provides students with a robust introduction to legal, governmental, and especially constitutional dimensions to democratic backsliding and resilience, and how these impact ‘liberal’ and ‘illiberal’-leaning democracies differently. Students will learn about the difference between legality and legitimacy, study threats to judicial independence, and take a deep dive into the much-debated ‘Project-2025’.

Students will engage with transnational and geopolitical aspects of democratic backsliding, its relevance for the Russo-Ukrainian war, and new fault lines emerging in global politics. Finally, students will study the different roles that religion plays as a source of both democratic backsliding and resilience, which inevitably question the binary of religion and secularity, and open conversations about diffuse meanings of religion in politics.