Where is the IEP-CATÓLICA COLLOQUIA being held?

The colloquium is taking place in the city of Lisbon, PRT.

What is the primary focus of the colloquium?

The colloquium focuses on "Restless World, Restless Democracies," addressing the challenges and transformations impacting democratic governance globally.

What kind of event format is this?

This event is a colloquium, indicating a formal academic conference or seminar for scholarly discussion.

IEP‑CATÓLICA COLLOQUIA – “Restless World, Restless Democracies”

Name: IEP‑CATÓLICA COLLOQUIA – “Restless World, Restless Democracies”
Start: 2026-05-08T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-05-08T00:00:00Z
Location: Lisbon

May 8, 2026Lisbon, PortugalIn-person

Registration open

The IEP-CATÓLICA COLLOQUIA, hosted in Lisbon, PRT, gathers scholars and practitioners to dissect the multifaceted challenges confronting contemporary democracies. Under the theme "Restless World, Restless Democracies," the colloquium aims to foster a rigorous academic exchange on the pressures and transformations impacting democratic governance globally. Participants will engage with critical analyses of democratic resilience and vulnerability in an increasingly volatile international landscape.

Committees & topics

Topics
Democratic Challenges in the 21st Century · Democratic Backsliding · Erosion of Liberal Institutions · Constitutional Stress and the Limits of the Rule of Law · Political Polarization and Affective Division · Populism and the Challenge to Liberal Democracy · Radicalization and Political Violence · The Crisis of Representation

Why it matters

In an era characterized by rapid geopolitical shifts and internal societal pressures, understanding the dynamics of democratic stability and change is paramount. This colloquium provides a crucial platform for examining the forces that contribute to democratic erosion and the strategies that can bolster democratic institutions. The discussions will delve into how global events, technological advancements, and evolving social norms interact to shape the future of governance.

The insights generated from these discussions are vital for policymakers, academics, and civil society leaders seeking to navigate the complexities of modern democracy. By bringing together diverse perspectives, the event facilitates a deeper comprehension of both the universal challenges and the context-specific nuances affecting democratic systems. This collective intellectual effort is essential for developing informed responses to the threats facing democratic ideals and practices worldwide.

How to prepare

Participants preparing for this colloquium should focus on developing a nuanced understanding of the various internal and external pressures on democratic systems. This includes examining historical trends, contemporary case studies, and theoretical frameworks related to democratic governance. A strong grasp of the concept of democratic erosion, as well as the factors contributing to authoritarian backsliding, will be particularly beneficial.

Consider how different political, economic, and social factors intersect to create unique challenges for democracies in various regions. For instance, analyzing how economic inequality or social polarization can exacerbate political instability would be a valuable approach. Engaging with the lesson on "Hidden Stakeholders" could provide a framework for identifying less obvious actors influencing democratic processes, while "Engagement Strategies" might offer insights into how to strengthen democratic participation and resilience. Furthermore, a review of "What Is Stakeholder Mapping?" could help in understanding the complex web of actors involved in democratic governance.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 4 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Portugal

As the host nation, PRT provides a European democratic context for discussions on global democratic challenges.

Role in topic

PRT offers a stable democratic example within Europe, providing a backdrop for discussions on how established democracies navigate contemporary pressures and maintain institutional integrity amidst global shifts.

United States

A foundational democracy facing internal and external pressures, its experiences are central to understanding global democratic trends.

Role in topic

The USA's democratic experience, including recent challenges to its institutions and norms, serves as a significant case study for examining issues of polarization, electoral integrity, and the resilience of democratic frameworks in a globalized world.

India

The world's largest democracy, its challenges with diversity and governance offer critical insights.

Role in topic

IND's vast and diverse democratic landscape presents unique challenges related to representation, federalism, and social cohesion, making it a crucial example for understanding how democracies function and adapt under immense demographic and societal pressures.

Germany

A leading European democracy, its post-war democratic consolidation offers lessons in resilience.

Role in topic

DEU's journey of democratic consolidation and its current role as a key player in European and global governance provide valuable insights into maintaining democratic stability and addressing contemporary challenges like populism and migration within a robust institutional framework.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Democratic Challenges in the 21st Century

Since the post-Cold War expansion of democracy peaked in the mid-2000s, successive global indices — including those produced by Freedom House, V-Dem, and the Economist Intelligence Unit — have recorded a sustained contraction in the quality and reach of democratic governance. The 2008 financial crisis, the migration and Eurozone shocks of the 2010s, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the return of major interstate war in Europe have each tested the resilience of democratic states, eroding public trust in elites and exposing the limits of liberal multilateralism. Digital platforms have simultaneously transformed political communication, accelerating disinformation, foreign interference, and affective polarization. The contemporary challenge is not a single revolutionary threat but a layered one: authoritarian competitors like China and Russia openly contest the universality of liberal democracy; established democracies face internal disaffection, declining turnout among the young, and the rise of anti-system parties; and emerging democracies struggle with state capacity, corruption, and captured institutions. The question facing democratic societies today is whether their procedural and substantive commitments — free elections, rights protection, rule of law, and pluralism — can be renewed in an era of geopolitical rivalry, economic insecurity, and technological disruption.

Democratic Backsliding

Democratic backsliding refers to the incremental, often legal, dismantling of democratic institutions by elected leaders — a phenomenon scholars such as Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, and Nancy Bermeo have documented since the early 2010s. Unlike classical coups, contemporary backsliding typically proceeds through executive aggrandizement: packing courts, weakening independent agencies, capturing public media, redrawing electoral rules, and harassing civil society. Hungary under Viktor Orbán since 2010 became the paradigmatic European case, with the EU eventually invoking Article 7 proceedings and conditionality on rule-of-law grounds. Poland under PiS (2015–2023), Turkey after 2013, and India under successive Modi governments have featured in V-Dem's autocratization lists. The Americas have produced their own variants: Venezuela's transition from competitive politics to consolidated authoritarianism, Nicaragua's closure of civic space, and concerns over institutional erosion in El Salvador under Nayib Bukele following his confrontation with the judiciary and re-election in 2024. The January 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol underscored that backsliding pressures exist in consolidated democracies as well. The current debate centers on which institutional safeguards — judicial independence, federalism, electoral administration, and supranational oversight — most effectively arrest the slide, and how democratic publics can be remobilized once polarization makes pro-democracy coalitions difficult to assemble.

Key players

Erosion of Liberal Institutions

The liberal institutional order built after 1945 — domestic constitutional courts, independent central banks, ombudsman offices, professional civil services, and international bodies such as the UN, WTO, ICC, and regional human rights courts — relied on a broad elite consensus that countermajoritarian institutions enhance, rather than constrain, legitimate self-government. That consensus has frayed. Domestically, governments in Hungary, Poland (until 2023), Israel (judicial reform crisis of 2023), and the United States have challenged the authority of constitutional courts and independent regulators. Internationally, the WTO Appellate Body has been paralyzed since 2019, the ICC has faced sanctions from member and non-member states alike, and the UN Security Council remains deadlocked on Ukraine and Gaza. Critics across the political spectrum argue that liberal institutions have become unaccountable, technocratic, or captured by partisan interests; defenders warn that their erosion removes the very guardrails that protect minority rights and credible commitments. The contemporary debate concerns how to reform — rather than dismantle — these institutions to restore both effectiveness and democratic legitimacy, particularly in an era when executives invoke popular mandates to bypass them.

Key players

Constitutional Stress and the Limits of the Rule of Law

Constitutional orders worldwide are under unusual strain. In Israel, the Netanyahu government's 2023 judicial reform package triggered the largest protest movement in the country's history before being partly struck down by the Supreme Court in January 2024. In the United States, debates over presidential immunity, the Fourteenth Amendment's insurrection clause, and the role of the Supreme Court have made the constitution itself a partisan battleground. France's repeated use of Article 49.3 to pass legislation without a vote, and the 2024 dissolution and hung parliament, have exposed strains in the Fifth Republic's semi-presidential design. Latin American constitutions have been amended or reinterpreted to permit indefinite re-election in several states. Underlying these episodes is a structural tension: constitutions are designed to be rigid and countermajoritarian, but they govern societies that are increasingly fragmented, distrustful, and impatient with veto points. Reform proposals range from new constituent processes (as attempted twice unsuccessfully in Chile in 2022 and 2023) to incremental amendment, while defenders of existing arrangements warn that constitutional engineering during periods of high polarization tends to entrench, rather than resolve, conflict.

Key players

Political Polarization and Affective Division

Political polarization has shifted from a primarily ideological phenomenon to what scholars term 'affective polarization' — the tendency of citizens to view partisan opponents as morally suspect, untrustworthy, or threatening. Survey data from Pew, Edelman, and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems show steep increases in out-party hostility across the United States, Brazil, Turkey, Poland, and parts of Western Europe over the past two decades. Drivers include sorted partisan identities aligned with religion, race, geography, and education; the fragmentation of media into ideologically homogeneous environments; algorithmic amplification of emotive content; and elite incentives to mobilize through grievance. The consequences are tangible: legislative gridlock, declining acceptance of electoral defeat, the normalization of political violence in several democracies, and the weakening of cross-cutting civic associations. The 2022 Brazilian election and its January 8, 2023 aftermath, the U.S. 2020 and 2024 cycles, and persistent street confrontations in countries from France to Argentina illustrate the pattern. Depolarization strategies — deliberative mini-publics, electoral reform, media regulation, and elite de-escalation — remain contested both in effectiveness and in democratic legitimacy.

Key players

Populism and the Challenge to Liberal Democracy

Populism, in the influential definition offered by Cas Mudde, is a thin ideology that pits a virtuous 'people' against a corrupt 'elite' and rejects pluralism in favor of a unitary popular will. Its contemporary wave dates to the late 1990s and early 2000s — Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy — and accelerated after 2008 with the rise of figures and movements across the ideological spectrum: Trump in the United States, Le Pen and Mélenchon in France, Orbán in Hungary, Erdoğan in Turkey, Modi in India, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Milei in Argentina, and Meloni in Italy. Left-populist variants (Podemos, Syriza, parts of Latin America's Pink Tide) coexist with a more electorally successful right-populist family that fuses cultural conservatism, immigration restriction, and economic protectionism. Populism is not inherently anti-democratic — it can mobilize excluded constituencies and force responsiveness — but it tends to corrode liberal-democratic norms such as minority rights, media independence, and the legitimacy of opposition. The current debate concerns whether mainstream parties should cordon sanitaire populist forces, co-opt their agendas, or compete with them on substance, and whether populism is a symptom of deeper representational failures rather than a cause of democratic decay.

Key players

Radicalization and Political Violence

Radicalization — the process by which individuals or groups come to embrace extremist ideologies and, in some cases, violence — has evolved significantly since the post-9/11 era's focus on jihadist networks. Europol, the U.S. FBI, and the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism now identify right-wing extremism, accelerationist movements, and conspiracy-driven actors (including QAnon-adjacent networks) as among the fastest-growing terrorism threats in Western democracies, alongside persistent jihadist activity from ISIS-K and al-Qaeda affiliates in the Sahel and South Asia. The Christchurch (2019), Buffalo (2022), and Bratislava (2022) attacks, the January 6, 2021 Capitol assault, and the January 8, 2023 Brasília storming illustrate the convergence of online radicalization, conspiracy theory, and offline violence. Digital platforms, encrypted messaging, gaming environments, and AI-generated content have lowered the cost of recruitment and ideological reinforcement. At the same time, governments face genuine tensions between security responses, civil liberties, and the risk that broad 'extremism' definitions are weaponized against legitimate dissent. The policy debate ranges across prevention (P/CVE) programming, platform regulation under instruments like the EU Digital Services Act, deradicalization and reintegration, and the harder question of how mainstream political rhetoric contributes to the normalization of violence.

Key players

The Crisis of Representation

Across consolidated and emerging democracies, the institutions designed to translate citizen preferences into policy — political parties, legislatures, trade unions, and civic associations — are weakening. Party membership has collapsed across Europe since the 1980s; volatility in vote shares has reached record highs in countries such as France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Chile; and trust in parliaments and parties sits near historic lows in OECD surveys. New movements rise and fall within a single electoral cycle, while traditional center-left and center-right families that structured 20th-century politics have fragmented or collapsed outright (PASOK in Greece, the French Socialists and Republicans, Italy's pre-2013 party system). The representational gap has multiple sources: socioeconomic transformations that dissolved class-based electorates; the technocratization of policy through central banks, EU institutions, and international agreements; the personalization of politics around leaders and platforms rather than programs; and the rise of identity cleavages that cut across traditional party alignments. Proposed responses include electoral system reform, citizen assemblies and deliberative democracy experiments (notably in Ireland and France), stronger party finance and internal democracy rules, and devolution of decisions closer to citizens. The underlying question for democracies is whether 20th-century representative architecture can be retrofitted for a 21st-century public, or whether new institutional forms are required.

Key players