Dictatorship Archives - Public Seminar

In I’m Still Here, a Mother Refuses to Let a Dictatorship Rewrite Reality

Political engagement must not preclude the fullness of life

April 9, 2025 • by Sonali Chakravarti

Put on earrings. Go out for ice cream. Swim. Expose the conditions of torture. For Eunice Paiva, the protagonist of 2024 Brazilian film I’m Still Here, the fight against dictatorship has a rhythm. After being interrogated about her association with communists and terrorists, she must now try to find out where ...

In <em>I’m Still Here</em>, a Mother Refuses to Let a Dictatorship Rewrite Reality

Politics

The Perfect Dictatorship

The perfect dictatorship is not one in which there are no elections. The perfect dictatorship is one in which the government does not lose elections

June 2, 2021 • by Francisco Rodríguez

_____ It was during the presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, whom many saw as one of the champions of economic reforms (even today, some people remember him that way), that Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa decided to break one of the unwritten rules of Mexican politics. In a televised discussion ...

Europe & Central Asia

Hungary Is on the Edge of Dictatorship

Viktor Orbán’s coronavirus power grab

April 11, 2020 • by Kim Lane Scheppele

Orbán sought an expedited procedure to ram through this law when the parliament opened on Monday 24 March. The opposition united and denied Orbán the 4/5ths vote he needed to pass the law without the requisite parliamentary procedure. The coronavirus emergency law -- called by its critics the “Enabling Act” with ...

Democracy

The Cultural Counter Revolution in Brazil

Fascism’s advance in education

February 20, 2020 • by Daniel Peres

The government is not only restricting our freedom of expression, though. It is more than that. They are attacking our educational system, and thus attacking our common culture. Brazil is a very diverse country, in terms of culture, and unequal, in terms of wealth and opportunities. It is not at ...

The Cultural Counter Revolution in Brazil

Democracy

Is Democracy in Italy Secure?

Fascism’s appeal to Italian youth is a worrisome trend

January 13, 2020 • by Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi

Beginning in the early 1990s, however, a normalizing trend has overturned these institutional guarantees, undermining the legacy of all those who struggled to reestablish democracy. Coinciding with the ascent to the government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, naive, if not altogether nostalgic, recollections of Mussolini and his regime have become ...

Uncategorized

During A Trial Not Resembling Any Other, in a Court Unlike Any Other

The first elected Egyptian president has died

July 11, 2019 • by Gamal Eid

In a building much-feared by political prisoners, infamous for being a torture pit during former dictator Hosni Mubarak's reign -- partially transformed later to a court; former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has died. In a glass cage inside an iron cage, in a court inside the Ministry of Interior’s Police Academy, ...

Feature

A Place of Grief and Revolution

A Review of Gina Apostol’s Filipino novel, Insurrecto

February 7, 2019 • by Jen Mediano

When you crack open Gina Apostol’s Insurrecto, there’s an old-timey cast of characters and a listing of parts and chapters set off by florid fonts and curlicues. The reader thinks this will serve to orient her. If I use this key, you think, I will know who the main and minor ...

Feature

From Velvet Revolution to Velvet Dictatorship

Reflections on Democratic Regression

May 3, 2018 • by Adam Michnik

Let me start by describing how communism died. The first thing to perish was the communist faith. And this faith had two dimensions. It was a faith in the project of a just world, a world of solidarity and freedom. And it was a conviction that people had finally deciphered ...