About the Episode

Introducing “Voices from the 2024 Global Democracy Conference,” a special series from Global Stage featuring panelists and students who participated in the inaugural GDC, hosted by the Kellogg Institute between May 20-22, 2024. In this introductory episode, Kellogg Institute Director Aníbal Pérez-Liñán is interviewed by doctoral affiliates and Global Stage co-organizers Isabel Güiza-Gómez and Patrick McQuestion on his take-aways from the conference proceedings. Pérez-Liñán describes the motivation behind organizing this international conference, reflects on some key moments and debates, and describes plans for the next GDC in 2025.

Show Notes

Welcome to Global Stage, a podcast highlighting academic and policy-oriented international research on democracy and human development. Global Stage is brought to you by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. Your hosts today are Kellogg Doctoral Student Affiliates Patrick McQuestion and Isabel Güiza-Gómez, both PhD students in political science and peace studies. This episode is part of a special series on Global Stage featuring some of the participants in the inaugural Global Democracy Conference (GDC), which took place May 20-22 at Notre Dame. This series includes insights on the current state of democracy in various countries, highlights pressing issues, discusses the upcoming US election, and more. In today’s episode, Isabel and Patrick welcome guest Aníbal Pérez-Liñán, the director of the Kellogg Institute for International Studies and professor of political science and global affairs at the University of Notre Dame.

To begin, Aníbal shares that the subject of democracy is one of the priorities for Notre Dame for the next decade, with a desire to have a strong voice in this conversation. The Kellogg Institute’s GDC supports the university’s goals in this area. The GDC was created because, while there have been many academic conferences centered around democracy, there really hasn’t been a space where academics and practitioners can have a fluid conversation about how to work through and protect democracy. This is the hole the GDC hopes to fill. There were many interesting conversations throughout the two and a half days of the conference, but one of the main questions the conference helped answer is why democracy is in crisis now. Democracy is struggling where we thought it would, but also crumbling in other countries where we thought democracy was advanced and stable. There has been a historical transformation in technology with social networks and artificial technologies. This has made radical politicians very visible in this space and moderate voices are overcome by more radical, louder ones. These voices are affecting democracy and, ultimately, a reconfiguration of power with a weakening of the influence of the US.

Next, Aníbal discusses the global diagnosis of democracy, and who supports and endangers it. He says the main themes and the old questions that we have discussed for decades still remain important, which includes a connection between economic development and democracy. There is also the importance of the military as a threat and defense of democracy. If we want to think about what we can do, think about which ways academic work can help practitioners and guide their actions. He says we need to identify the most viable strategies and think systematically about how to support democracy. Lastly, Aníbal states the goal of the future Global Democracy Conference is that academics will have a space to serve practitioners and policy makers with research, and in turn they can provide real world experience to inform academics and their research trajectories.

The next Global Democracy Conference will be held in May 2025 in Washington, DC. They are excited about the location where more policy makers can participate and invite everyone to attend. 

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