Every summer, I teach a graduate comparative politics course. Now that the government is snatching graduate students off the street and putting them in cages, I’ll be adding to the course more material about dictatorships and how to fight them.
Two books immediately come to mind:
- How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship, by Ece Temelkuran, documents the rise of populist demagoguery and subsequent democratic disintegration in Turkey, where today hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets to protest the arrest of Istanbul’s mayor.
- From Dictatorship to Democracy, by Gene Sharp, is a blueprint for dismantling a repressive regime through nonviolent resistance. The book has guided pro-democracy movements in countries as divergent as Serbia, Indonesia, and Egypt.
There are also the sources listed in this blog’s Teaching Trump series from 2017, many of which are, unfortunately, still relevant.
I’ll be disclosing my many potential biases on this topic at the beginning of the course. Here are a few of them:
- Marriage to an immigrant who happens to be Arab and a devout Muslim.
- Being friends for decades with many other people who came to the USA from different parts of the world, some of whom are resettled refugees.
- Witnessing first-hand what life can be like under authoritarian governments.
- Having respect for human rights and the rule of law.
Thank you for this! I very much appreciate this brief post and the reading suggestions. I also really like the way you talk about your potential biases. It is really challenging teaching political science right now as we watch our democracy being undermined at every turn. Students need the tools to understand the gravity of what we are living through and what they can potentially do about it. Peace!
Thank you for this blog. It is essential that we, in the UK, hear more about the challenge of teaching in Higher Education in the US, so that we can support you and guard against the threats that you are facing coming to face us here, in the UK. Please do continue to share your experiences.