ABOUT THIS PODCAST 🔗
This Authoritarian Life explores how people experience, adapt to, and resist authoritarian politics in their everyday lives.
Each month, anthropologists Kristóf Szombati and Erdem Evren speak with guests from around the world to understand what authoritarianism looks like up close — and how it can be contested.
Group winner of the 2025 New Directions Award of the American Anthropological Association, TAL combines ethnographic insight with accessible storytelling to reveal the textures of life under authoritarian stress.
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Update frequency:
monthly
Average audio length:
59 minutes
Guest interviews
LATEST EPISODE 🔗
🎙️ Our "Turning Points" season pivots from the dramatic electoral shifts in Hungary to a sudden constitutional crisis in Turkey. In an unprecedented move, a regional court has annulled the 2023 congress of the main opposition party (CHP), effectively decapitating its elected leadership an…
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PREVIOUS EPISODES 🔗
🎙️ Our Hungary election mini-series continues in the wake of a seismic result: Péter Magyar's Tisza party swept Fidesz from power with a two-thirds supermajority, ending sixteen years of Viktor Orbán's rule.
In this episode, Kristóf is joined by his former party co-founder and political e…
🎙️ Our Hungary election mini-series begins nine days before the April 12 vote.
In this episode, Kristóf Szombati and Erdem Evren discuss what is actually at stake in Hungary's election — beyond the question of whether Viktor Orbán wins or loses. Drawing on Kristóf's recent trip to Budapes…
🎙️ Season 2 of This Authoritarian Life continues at another frontline: policing as a site of concentrated state violence and neoliberal austerity management.
In this episode, we speak with Alex Vitale — Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College, coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Proj…
🎙️ Season 2 of This Authoritarian Life continues at another frontline: the university — where political repression and economic precarity work together to silence critical voices and disempower those who produce knowledge.
In this episode, we speak with Aslı Vatansever — a sociologist of work who w…
🎙️ Season 2 of This Authoritarian Life continues at another frontline: culture — where authoritarian power doesn’t just silence dissent, but reshapes the institutions that decide what gets staged, funded, and celebrated.
In this episode, we speak with Piotr Rudzki (dramaturg; formerly of the Polski…
🎙️ Season 2 of This Authoritarian Life continues one another urgent frontline: Serbia.
In this episode, we speak with activist-journalists Anastazija Govedarica Antanasijević and Iskra Krstić about the student-led uprising that has reshaped political life in Serbia. What began with campus blockades…
🎙️ Season 2 of This Authoritarian Life begins at one of today’s most tragic frontlines: Gaza.
In this episode, we talk with Guy Shalev, anthropologist and executive director of Physicians for Human Rights Israel, about how medicine has become a political weapon in Israel’s war on Gaza and in the br…
In this sixth episode of This Authoritarian Life we look at how language is used to entrench authoritarian power. Authoritarian leaders have long realized the power of propaganda, deploying radio, television and more recently social media to cement certain ideas as truths, to vindicate an exclusive…
In this fifth episode of This Authoritarian Life we continue to investigate the impact of war on contemporary politics. We look at the case of Russia where our guest Arkadij Lomonosov has until recently worked as a journalist and anti-fascist activist. Reflecting on his own upbringing and personal …
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