RevDem Podcast

About RevDem Podcast

RevDem Podcast is brought to you by the Review of Democracy, the online journal of the CEU Democracy Institute. The Review of Democracy is dedicated to the reinvigoration, survival, and prosperity of democracies worldwide and to generating innovative cross-regional dialogues. RevDem Podcast offers in-depth conversations in four main areas: rule of law, political economy and inequalities, the history of ideas, and democracy and culture.

Publisher

Review of Democracy

Category

news

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

5 Jan 2021

Latest episode

2 Nov 2026

Latest episodes

453 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   2 Nov 2026

   Grieving the Countryside – Irina Velicu on Eco-grief, Peasant Dispossession and the Politics of Rural Loss

   We are delighted to bring you a new episode of the Review of Democracy podcast, born out of an encounter at the CEU Democracy Institute’s annual conference in Budapest. In this discussion with Irina Velicu, a political ecologist at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra whose work brings critical theory into conversation withpolitical ecology, we examine the slow unmaking of rural lifeworlds across the European countryside. Drawing on interviews with peasant activists in Romania and Portugal, as well as on her own family history as “a child of the transition,” Velicu explains how subsistence farming came to be cast asshameful, how small landholders were pushed out of agriculture through “pinprick” land grabbing and subsidy regimes, and why their lament should be understood not only as a response to injustice but also as a form of grief. Wediscuss why land-grabbing in Eastern Europe has attracted so little attention compared with Latin America, what the Roșia Montană anti-mining movement reveals about the difficulty of building coalitions, and how unaddressed humiliation and anger in the countryside are being channeled into nationalistand far-right politics.

2. 

   29 Oct 2026

   After 1989, Who Imagined the Future?- A Conversation with Dorine Schellens

   The Blinken Open Society Archives (https://archivum.org/), or the OSA, is a complex archival institution. On one hand, it is a repository of vast collections that document how power operated across the twentieth century. OSA holds 10,000 linear meters ofarchival material, 17,000 hours of audiovisual recordings, and 15 TB of digital records, as well as 150,000 photographs, 6000+ documentary film titles and 22,000 library items. Their catalogue is available online (https://catalog.archivum.org/). OSA is not only an archive. It is one of Europe’s leading research centers on the history of the Cold War, statesocialism, human rights, and surveillance. The OSA Archivum also provides fellowships for promising researchers who want to investigate the archival funds. Particularly the Visegrad Fellowship supports scholars, engaged artists,journalists, and scholars at risk who want to work directly with these materials. Since its start in 2010, the Visegrad Scholarship (https://archivum.org/academics/visegrad-scholarship-at-osa) has been awarded to more than 290 fellows from over 65 countries. The next application deadline for the Visegrad Scholarship at the Blinken Open Society Archivum (OSA) in Budapest is November 10, 2026, at 12:00 PM In our series, we will invite Visegrad Fellows to share their experience working with this fascinating archive. Alternative histories of 1989 became much more prevalent in the last decade. The Netflix series Kleo (https://www.netflix.com/hu/title/81216677), the Instagramaccount DDR Mondbasis (https://www.instagram.com/ddr_mondbasis/?hl=en), or the book Stealing the Future (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/791243/stealing-the-future-by-david-morris/) propose a new version of late socialism and transitiontowards capitalism. Our guest today, Dorine Schellens, thinks this is not merely generational shift or a matter of taste. Instead, the stakes are deeper: they challenge theconsequential historical framework. During her Visegrad Fellowship at the Blinken OSAArchivum,  Dorine Shellens worked on her book project “Beyond Post-Communism, Imagining the Future in Times of Transition”, where she examines alternative futures imagined by cultural actors in Soviet Russia and East Germany duringthe 1980s and early 1990s. Throughout our conversation, the overarching questionis: When an old world suddenly disappears, how do people begin to imagine a new future? As our guest emphasizes, the answer for this question might be provided by the German historian Reinhart Koselleck: [Koselleck] argued that our relationship with the future is notdefined by one particular model or one particular framework. Instead, in our societies we have multiple narratives, models of the future that coexist and sometimes also start competing with each other. We relate to the future (...) with a range of different emotional responses. The topic of the possible futures of socialism is extremely actual and has a longer history than we might have thought. For instance, historians explored this methodological avenue to understand the stakes of perestroika. Yet, most of the studies on this topic have focused so far only on strictly understanding the experts’ take. Dorine Schellens argues that dissidents and writers alsoenvisioned divergent paths for their societies. Their projects ranged from reformed versions of socialism to radical nationalist ones. So far, few historians have used the Koselleck’s approach to understand them. In this context, the OSA Archivum proves to be extremely valuable in providingnuances: until 1991, we are dealing with a very tightly controlled publicspace. Literary landscape (...) excluded many people through persecution, through censorship, through self-censorship. And this is where I think the archives really come in and are really important because so many people tried to contribute or contributed for themselves on paper, but their voices werenever heard- in many cases until today publicly. Throughout the podcast, Dorine Schellens also expandson the methodological challenges of working in the archive, particularly how to reconstruct ideas that were suppressed or unpublished.

3. 

   26 Oct 2026

   The Politics of Europe’s Panic- A Conversation with Francesco Trupia

   The Democracy Institute’s annual conference, with the titleImaginary Exhaustion? (https://democracyinstitute.ceu.edu/articles/imaginary-exhaustion) asked to what extent today’s democracies are trapped by fear and exhaustion, and how we might rebuild our collective imagination to shape more hopeful democratic futures. The panel The People We Fear: Demography, Migration, and Civilizational Anxiety hadthree guests: Kristijan Fidanovski (https://revdem.ceu.edu/2026/09/24/progressive-pronatalism/), Attila Melegh (https://revdem.ceu.edu/2026/07/13/politicians-migration-markets/) and  KasiaNarkowicz. They unpacked the genealogies and present-day legacies of the “demography as destiny” mantra and examined how manufactured fear corrodes democratic imaginaries from within. In our podcast, Francesco Trupia explained the logicbehind this interesting panel. Demography has become an extremely important watchword in today's political debate. (...) The idea was to have this conversation on how migration is shaping political debate in Europe, where we have a crisis of liberal democracy. The panel revealed the tension between the overload ofdata and the overconfidence in narratives. On one hand, demographers and statisticians such as Kristijan Fidanovski (https://revdem.ceu.edu/2026/09/24/progressive-pronatalism/) reveal the demographic decline, ageing societies, and migration flows. On the other hand, as Attila Melegh (https://revdem.ceu.edu/2026/07/13/politicians-migration-markets/), Kasia Narkowicz or Francesco Trupia argue, we witness a certain fascination with  narratives, often which end in claims aboutcivilizational survival, cultural replacement, or other statements that use pathos instead of reason. The solution to solve this tension, lies in intersectionality. As Francesco Trupia stated for Review of Democracy, intersectionality and interdisciplinarity (...) can really help usunravel this data (...) and perhaps to not fall into the trap of identity politics, which sometimes uses data in order to double down on certain people and to pursue certain vested interest by manipulating this data. The misleading interpretations could also be a part ofthis problem. Our conversation expands on his previous Review for Democracy podcast with Marina Simakova (https://revdem.ceu.edu/2025/09/29/cooptation-gramsci-far-right/),where they discuss how Gramsci’s ideas were co-opted by the contemporary far-right. In our episode,  Francesco Trupia, expands this argument and gives the example of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau, who provide a mimicryinterpretation of Karl Marx or Antonio Gramsci. the far-right actors and those who are supporting the concept of remigration, for instance, are openly using leftist and Marxist philosophers to express their ideas. Then, our conversation moves to his research. Based onhis fieldwork, Francesco Trupia argues that the experiences of minority could provide us with a different lens on democracy that majoritarian perspectives systematically miss.

Who has been a guest on RevDem Podcast

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Paolo Sosa-Villagarcia
• Moisés Arce
• Balázs Trencsényi
• Simina Bădică
• Leigh Jenco

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

5.0 / 5

3 ratings

Spotify

4.5 / 5

14 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 64 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

95

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

85

Contact RevDem Podcast

Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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