This Authoritarian Life

This Authoritarian Life explores everyday human stories to make sense of authoritarian politics. Once a month, anthropologists Kristóf Szombati and Erdem Evren, relying on their own experience from Hungary and Turkey, invite guests from all over the world to shine light on the following questions:

What are the roots of authoritarianism? What does the rise of authoritarianism look like up close? How can everyday people navigate authoritarian spaces? And how can authoritarianism be confronted?

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It’s about understanding: giving you a better grasp of the deeper causes driving authoritarianism. It’s about insight: offering a glimpse into the difficulties of navigating authoritarian lifeworlds. It’s about hope: examples of people who work toward a more humane world.

Host

Kristóf Szombati

Kristóf Szombati is a scholar, educator and practitioner based in Berlin. After spending a decade in the Hungarian environmental movement, he co-founded the green LMP party and was an elected member of the Steering Committee which initially led the party. He left LMP in 2011 to pursue a doctoral degree focusing on the rise of racist and authoritarian politics in rural Hungary. Since defending his PhD at the Central European University (CEU) in 2016, Kristóf has been active as both a scholar and democracy practitioner. He has published extensively on right-wing politics, taught courses on de-democratization at universities in the US and Europe, and supported a series of re-democratization initiatives in his native Hungary and more recently in Germany where he has been living since 2022. His current employer is the Humboldt University, and he is acting Editor for Political Economy at the Review of Democracy.