Big Ideas for Democracy

  Register here Democracy and the More-Than-Human Carnivalesque Abstract From corporate zombies to mermaids to dead bees, political protests have frequently featured comic, ironic, grotesque, absurd and profane moments of the carnivalesque. Carnivalesque activities are said to open heterotopic spaces in which dominant values are subverted, conventions are transgressed, and civil disobedience is catalysed. The carnivalesque is interesting for […]

  Register here Building Democracy: Emotions and the Student Movement in Serbia 2024/25 My presentation focuses on the experiences and emotions of students involved in the student protests in Serbia 2024/25. The research looks at how emotions shaped both the mobilization of the movement and the students’ collective identity. What began as a student response […]

  Register here Beyond Strongmen: Masculinities, Backlash, and the Future of Democracy Abstract Across Europe and beyond, new “strongman” politics mobilize resentment, revive sexist stereotypes, and turn certain masculinities into weapons against gender equality and democracy. What happens to democracy when dominance, aggression, and exclusion are sold as the only “real” masculinity? This lecture asks […]

  Register here Democracy and resilience in Africa : Case study of Senegal Abstract Following the political and societal debates that have been taking place around the world since the 1960s, the project explores issues specific to Africa in the context of nation building, decolonisation and/or neocolonisation: underdevelopment and precariousness; socio-political changes; the Cold War […]

Register here Fake news and Asian perspectives: Lessons learned, problems persisting, and emerging threats This presentation reexamines the evolving landscape of misinformation and disinformation, focusing on the Asian region, drawing on insights from the COVID-19 pandemic, and extending into the current period shaped by rapid technological advancements, such as the rise of GenAI. Building on almost a […]

Register here Enhancing Quality Electoral Governance for Democratic Consolidation in Ghana’s Fourth Republic Abstract Ghana has made significant progress with democratic governance since returning to multiparty politics in 1992. Since then, competitive election has been the driving force behind its journey to democratic institutionalization. Yet what has obscured scholarly analysis is the grandiose web of […]

Register here Political Identity as a Feature of Democracy: Belonging, Rejection, and Absence  Political identities are often taken for granted as attachments to parties or ideological camps. Yet citizens differ profoundly in how much politics matters to who they are, in whether they define themselves through belonging or rejection, and in whether politics plays any […]

Register here When We Are Not in the Room:  Designing Feminist Institutional Change for Resilience and Reactivation  Feminist institutionalism has long shown that feminist institutional change is rarely one-shot, given the “genderedness” of organisations/institutions (Benschop & Verloo, 2006), the “nested newness” of reform efforts (Mackay, 2014), and multiple forms of resistance (Tildesley, Lombardo & Verge, 2022). Recent work argues that inclusive reforms tend to follow cycles of repetition through which […]

Register here The international norm of Gender-Sensitive Parliaments: Navigating Inequality and Inclusion in Democracies under Pressure Bio Petra Ahrens is Academy of Finland Research Fellow at Tampere University, Finland. Her research focuses on gender policies and politics in the European Union and its institutions, gender equality in Germany, gender-sensitive parliaments, and transnational civil society. Alongside […]

Register here Informational Autocracies and State-Sponsored Disinformation - On the Possibilities and Limits of Institutionalized Brainwashing Abstract In today’s information landscape, the rise of “spin dictatorships” or informational autocracies shows how state actors, economic elites, and digital platforms cooperate to sustain mass persuasion. Instead of relying mainly on repression, these regimes manage information, engineer public […]

Democratic Innovations Beyond Established Democracies: Challenges and Developments in Europe Democratic innovations, especially the direct and deliberative practices, gained momentum around the world in the last three decades. They slowly moved from experiments or isolated instances to routine tools in national and subnational governance. Their causes, functioning and consequences have received extensive attention in established […]