Event Date: February 27, 2023 - 6:00pm to 7:30pm
Location: FSS 4004; in person only

Presented by CIPS

The fall of communism at the end of the 1980s was celebrated as a victory for democracy over the last major authoritarian ideology of the twentieth century. Thirty years later, Central European countries, which in the meantime have become members of the European Union, are falling one after the other into a new kind of authoritarianism: that of “illiberal democracies.” How to explain this paradox, and how to consider the advent of this illiberal alternative to the western model of democracy?

This event will take place in English.

Guest Speaker:

Roman Krakovsky is Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Ottawa and since 2022 the holder of the Research Chair in Slovak History and Culture. He holds a PhD from the Sorbonne University (2012). In his research, he focuses on mechanisms of social cohesion and modernization strategies in Central and Eastern Europe. Prof. Krakovsky is the author of Le Populisme en Europe centrale et orientale (2019), State and Society in Communist Czechoslovakia: Transforming the Everyday from WWII to the Fall of the Berlin Wall (2018), and L’Europe centrale et orientale de 1918 à la chute du mur de Berlin (2017).

Moderator:

Alexandra Gheciu is a Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, and Associate Director of the Centre for International Policy Studies. Her research interests are in the fields of international security, international institutions, Euro-Atlantic relations, global governance and the liberal order, the Global Right, state (re)building, and International Relations theory.