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Luigi Einaudi Distinguished Lectures

Destroying Democracy by Law | May 2, 2024

Luigi Einaudi Distinguished Lecture

Poster for event

A recording of this event is available here

Description
In her forthcoming book Destroying Democracy by Law, Kim Lane Scheppele explores the countries in which aspirational autocrats have undermined democracies. With examples from Hungary, Poland, Venezuela, Ecuador, Turkey, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States and beyond, Scheppele shows how democracies no longer die with tanks in the streets. Instead, democracies die when aspirational autocrats come to power through elections and then use legal methods to undermine constraints on their power. With law as their weapon, aspirational autocrats damage the institutions that provide checks and balances, compromise the independence of the judiciary, stifle civil society, muzzle the press and use the power of the state against those who might challenge their monopoly on power. Scheppele explains how the new legal tools work, how they circulate from one budding autocracy to another and why international observers have been slow to recognize the problem. She also provides some ideas for reversing these processes through law wielded by new democratic movements.

Speaker
Kim Lane Scheppele, Princeton University


Soviet Collapse in the Fullness of Time: Lessons for Putin's Russia, Xi's China, and Beyond | September 13, 2023

Luigi Einaudi Distinguished Lecture

Poster for event

A recording of this event is available here.

Description
What lessons have Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping drawn from the Soviet collapse, and what lessons are they failing to draw? Renowned historian Stephen Kotkin, Kleinheinz Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and Professor in History and International Affairs emeritus at Princeton University, will talk about how we might see the Soviet collapse, looking back more than three decades. Was the collapse predictable?  Did a new world order emerge, and is one emerging now? Could such a collapse be repeated? How can we use history to illuminate the present, and potential futures, and when does history fail us? 

Speaker
Stephen Kotkin, Stanford University