On this episode, Dr. Rao welcomes Professor John Keane. They will discuss the distressing state of democracy across the globe.
Prof. John Keane, noted political theorist and professor of politics at the University of Sydney in Australia and at the Wissenschaftzentrum, Berlin, offers a seminal analysis of the aberrations of democracy in his latest book, The New Despotism published by Harvard University Press last year.
Prof. Keane has spent decades tracking the trajectory of democracy across the globe and mapping the changes it has undergone in different settings. Drawing on his sustained engagement with democratic institutions, Prof. Keane subverts received scholarly wisdom that depicts the dystopian anomalies of democracy as ‘authoritarianism’, ‘populism’, ‘totalitarianism’, or ‘dictatorship.’ Instead, he characterizes them as ‘the new despotism.’
