Gina Romero: Restrictions affecting Right to Assembly and Youth Activism

In this episode of *Democracy in Question*, Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa joins Shalini Randeria to examine how digital platforms have transformed journalism and accelerated democratic decline. Drawing on her experience confronting Rodrigo Duterte’s government in the Philippines, Ressa explains how disinformation erodes facts, trust and shared reality, allowing online attacks to become real-world repression. She discusses the dangers posed by profit-driven algorithms and rapidly expanding AI systems, as well as the concentration of technological power in a handful of companies and countries. Ressa concludes with a call for regulation, collective action and public-interest technology that supports democratic communities without manipulating them.

In this episode of Democracy in Question, Shalini Randeria speaks with Austrian-German activist and philanthropist Marlene Engelhorn about inherited wealth, democratic legitimacy, and the concentration of power in contemporary societies. Engelhorn explains why inheriting a vast fortune made her uncomfortable, arguing that wealth acquired by birth rather than merit represents a fundamental democratic injustice. She discusses her involvement in the Tax Me Now initiative, which calls for stronger taxation of large fortunes and inheritances, and reflects on how the super-rich are socialized to view their privilege as normal while often overlooking the societal structures that sustain their wealth.

In this episode, Shalini Randeria speaks with political theorist Pratap Bhanu Mehta about the global rise of civilizational narratives — from India and China to Russia, Turkey, and parts of the U.S. They explore why governments increasingly invoke ancient civilizational identities, how this shift fuels soft authoritarianism, and what it reveals about the deeper crisis of liberal democracy. They also discuss how civilizational thinking erodes the historicity of the modern nationstate, replaces democratic negotiation with pregiven identity, and licenses new forms of exclusion and political violence. Mehta contrasts today’s nostalgic, essentialist civilizational claims with earlier Indian thinkers like Gandhi and Tagore, whose visions were futureoriented and emancipatory. A wideranging conversation on democracy, identity, and the dangerous seductions of civilizational politics.

In this episode of Democracy in Question, host Shalini Randeria speaks with political scientist Zsolt Enyedi about the landmark 2026 Hungarian elections, which ended Viktor Orbán’s 16-year rule.

In this episode of Democracy in Question, host Shalini Randeria speaks with Aishwary Kumar, Professor of History of Political Thought and Institutions at Cal Polyoma California, and director of its Democracy Institute, about his concept of “neo-democracy,” a mutation of liberal democracy defined by the return and acceptance of extreme inequality, the moralization of punishment, and organized cruelty carried out through law rather than outside it. Kumar links neo-democracy to neoliberalism and argues that majoritarian indifference enables legislative abandonment of vulnerable groups, the paramilitarization of violence, and a “jurisprudence of neglect” in which increasingly partisan courts recognize harm yet refuse redress, widening the gap between legality and justice. Tracing democracy’s global genealogy through anti-colonial struggles, he identifies the refugee as the key subject of this condition and calls for “moral institutionalism,” urging critical engagement with institutions rather than abandoning them.