Quo Vadis, Democrats?In 2017, I was an exchange student—or, as my Lisbon classmates would kindly correct me with their European references, I was doing my “Erasmus” at the Portuguese Catholic Universi...

Is Fighting Corruption Authoritarian? The fight against corruption is often presented as the natural path to strengthening democracy. It is not uncommon to hear that, if we eliminate bribery, favoriti...

When I pursued my undergraduate degree in International Relations in Brazil, between 2016 and 2019, I encountered a curious narrative. Years later, I would hear it again from Egyptian, Congolese, Salv...

I recently published an international politics analysis for the Österreichisches Institut für Internationale Politik, in which I explored the possibility of an autocracy emerging not from executive ag...

In the column “What to Do When They Vote Against Your Right to Vote,” I described a cold morning in Vienna, a train bound for Budapest, and a lecture that dismantled some of the most comfortable certa...

My maternal grandfather, a man endowed with singular historical knowledge and a sharp curiosity about domestic and global politics, began almost all of our encounters with the same warning: one had to...

It was an early Friday in Vienna. The autumn chill was slowly making its presence felt, and with a hot coffee in hand, I waited for the train that would take me to Budapest, crossing the border betwee...

“As we were saying in our last class” was the sentence with which Gaetano Salvemini, political scientist and historian from southern Italy, opened his class at the University of Florence on November 1...

In the last column… In the last column, of the same name but Part I, we discussed the reasons for simplifying all dictatorships under the single label of “dictatorships,” how such simplification can b...

The proposal In one of my first columns for DPolitik, aptly titled “Is Dictatorship Pop(?)” (references below), I briefly touched on the topic of the variety of dictatorships around the world. But thi...