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This Authoritarian Life explores how people experience, adapt to, and resist authoritarian politics in their everyday lives.
Each month, anthropologists Kristóf Szombati and Erdem Evren speak with guests from around the world to understand what authoritarianism looks like up close — and how it can be contested.
Group winner of the 2025 New Directions Award of the American Anthropological Association, TAL combines ethnographic insight with accessible storytelling to reveal the textures of life under authoritarian stress.
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8 Episodes
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🎙️ Season 2 of This Authoritarian Life continues one another urgent frontline: Serbia. In this episode, we speak with activist-journalists Anastazija Govedarica Antanasijević and Iskra Krstić about the student-led uprising that has reshaped political life in Serbia. What began with campus blockades after the collapse of a train-station canopy rapidly grew into a nationwide movement demanding systemic change. How did students introduce direct democracy through plenums and zborovi? How did they...
🎙️ Season 2 of This Authoritarian Life begins at one of today’s most tragic frontlines: Gaza. In this episode, we talk with Guy Shalev, anthropologist and executive director of Physicians for Human Rights Israel, about how medicine has become a political weapon in Israel’s war on Gaza and in the broader occupation of Palestine. How has Palestinian healthcare been de-developed over the years and what did this mean for the residents of the West Bank and Gaza before the genocide? What were the p...
In this sixth episode of This Authoritarian Life we look at how language is used to entrench authoritarian power. Authoritarian leaders have long realized the power of propaganda, deploying radio, television and more recently social media to cement certain ideas as truths, to vindicate an exclusive right to lead the political community, to name threats and enemies, and to delegitimize critics and opponents. While they are not the only ones to deploy propaganda, they do this in particular ways...
In this fifth episode of This Authoritarian Life we continue to investigate the impact of war on contemporary politics. We look at the case of Russia where our guest Arkadij Lomonosov has until recently worked as a journalist and anti-fascist activist. Reflecting on his own upbringing and personal infatuation with the young Putin in his teens, knowledge derived from long years of monitoring ultranationalist and neo-fascist groups, Arkadij illuminates Putin's appeal and the narrower attraction...
In this fourth episode of This Authoritarian Life we focus on the destructive dimension of contemporary politics. Looking at the case of Israel and its latest campaign in Gaza, psychoanalyst Iris Hefets reflects on the post-1967 history of Israel as the gradual suspension of the superego and the displacement of internal aggression on Gaza, which, building on Freud, she describes as Israel’s ‘Id’. In turn, author Richard Seymour, drawing on his latest book Disaster Nationalism, sees cycles of ...
Pursuing our exploration of the ‘Origins’ of authoritarianism, in this third episode of This Authoritarian Life we will continue to focus on the role of the body in authoritarian politics. More specifically, we will turn our attention to the female body, which functions as an object of control and a site of resistance, and look more closely at the example of the Islamic Republic of Iran, where tensions over the policy of mandatory veiling have surfaced in a violent manner in the past years. O...
Resentment may lay dormant for decades, before suddenly erupting and inundating public life. In this second episode of This Authoritarian Life, we continue to explore the ‘Origins’ of authoritarianism by asking how the past can exercise a decisive influence in and over the present. We do this by focusing on the case of East Germany, where guests 𝐀𝐧𝐧𝐚 𝐒𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐝𝐞 and 𝐄𝐥𝐬𝐤𝐞 𝐑𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐟𝐞𝐥𝐝 have conducted research and staged artistic performances. How does the experience of a curtailed revolution inscribe ...
What drives ordinary people to espouse authoritarian figures? Join us, Kristóf Szombati and Erdem Evren, as we unravel this question through our personal journeys and anthropological studies in Hungary and Turkey. We kick off our new podcast by dissecting the spatial origins of right-wing authoritarianism, focusing on rural Hungary from 2006 onwards. The countryside has often been seen as a space where politics flows to, but does not grow out of. When it comes to the authoritarian righ...
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