Fellow Wolverines,
As you might imagine, my seven years as Director of the Center for Emerging Democracies (@umichDemocracy) have exposed me to a steady diet of gallows humor. “Emerging democracies?!?”, friends and colleagues endlessly guffaw at me. “Emerging autocracies would be more like it!” Or: “Shouldn’t you make that the Center for Eroding Democracies?!?”
Believe me, I get it. It’s a hard time to sustain the optimistic spirit about democracy that inspired our Center’s founding way back in the mid-2000s. The whole world seems to have shifted – not least America itself. Democracy is under assault, globally and locally.
What I like to remind people is that when I assumed this position in 2018, my inaugural lecture was entitled “Emerging Democracies and Their Opposites.” The first conference I organized was called “Democracies Emerging and Submerging.”
My starting point was simple: if we want to understand how and why democracy emerges, we need to understand all the different ways and reasons it doesn’t. Why are so many democracies submerging nowadays? Why are so many autocracies enduring? What makes autocracies emerge in the first place? Only by understanding these negative outcomes can we hope to explain – and generate! – the positive ones.
Sadly, the 2020s have brought us negative cases galore of democratic erosion and autocratic deepening. This doesn’t mean a Center for Emerging Democracies is obsolete. Quite the contrary. It means we have more important work to do – and more negative cases for us to try to make sense of – than ever before.
I warmly welcome everyone in the University of Michigan community to join us in this vital collective and interdisciplinary work. You can learn more about who we are (brilliant postdocs, faculty advisors, student fellows), what we do (public events, policy collaborations, a thriving book series, a widely-distributed APSA newsletter), and what we have in store for autumn semester at these links on our website.
Most immediately, we’re kicking off the year quickly with a public lecture by incoming Emerging Democracies Postdoctoral Fellow Leydy Diossa-Jimenez next Tuesday, September 2nd, from 4-5pm in Weiser 555: “Beyond Violence, Borders, and Silence: How Exiles Confronted Authoritarianism in Argentina and Colombia, 1970-1991.” We’ll also be hosting a welcome reception both right before and right after Leydy’s talk. Please come say hello!
Also, please save the date for a stimulating roundtable featuring three recent Emerging Democracies book-series authors on September 30th: “Elections Against the Grain.”
Defending democracy is always the work of us all. A time like this – when democracies are submerging far more often than emerging – is the best time for us all to gather forces.
Dan Slater
Director, Center for Emerging Democracies (@umichDemocracy)
International Institute
