Like other regions of the world, academic freedom is on the decline in Africa. While there are some generic factors accounting for this phenomenon worldwide, others are fundamentally unique to the African context. These are related principally to the subject matter of coloniality of higher education on the continent. This study addresses these matters by, among others, discussing the origins of the university in pre-modern Africa and the place of academic freedom in it. This development is followed by the emergence of university education in Europe through the application of the liberal script and which contributed to the sidelining and eventual general demise of higher education institutions with their roots in pre-modern Africa. The work contends that while one may trace the origins of the university/academic freedom to Africa, academic freedom as it stands today is shaped by the liberal script with hardly any reference to the root of higher education in Africa. Therefore, the meaning, understanding and application of academic freedom do not reflect the realities of higher education in Africa. This work proposes the adoption of a relative universalist approach, as opposed to the liberal approach, which is clothed with universality, but in reality, it is a reflection of a European idea of academic freedom. This approach is considered necessary to reflect the African reality of academic freedom which will help to identify effective advocacy tools to promote and protect academic freedom in Africa and thereby make academic freedom more meaningful for application in the region.

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) is often viewed as a revered champion of opposition to autocratic reforms in the Member States. In the context of the rule of law crisis in Poland, however, its resolute support for judicial independence contrasts notably with the limited improvements for judges on the ground. As the present investigation suggests, this discrepancy can be explained by a mode of incremental adjustments at national level that has allowed Polish lawmakers to repeatedly neutralise the effects of the Court’s interventions. Resulting from this strategy are several instances of mutually responsive interaction between the Court of Justice and autocratic national lawmakers that have shaped developments in the rule of law crisis, both at national and supranational level. At national level, lawmakers have incrementally adjusted reforms to comply – at least superficially – with supranational judicial interventions, whereas the Court refined its interpretation of supranational safeguards of judicial independence in response to incremental adjustments in Polish law. Yet, more recently, this interaction of inadvertent mutual inspiration may have come to a halt. Rather than changing national law to superficially respond to supranational judicial interventions, Polish authorities may increasingly deny the Court’s authority to adjudicate in matters of judicial independence in the Member States altogether.

After Ekrem İmamoğlu won as Istanbul’s mayor, the contestation between the city and central government resembled other cases of liberal mayors winning in illiberal populist regimes. To expand liberal democracy, the mayor sought to reinvigorate effective democratic citizenship by increasing access to information, creating more inclusive governance networks through public participation opportunities, limiting the regime’s clientelism and rent-seeking opportunities in real estate and contracting, and (re)creating social solidarity. The national government responded by extensively covering “scandals” and continuing populist rhetoric to maintain polarization, limiting the city’s financial resources, and moving power and projects to agencies they still controlled. This article uses Istanbul to develop this model and illustrate how İmamoğlu has made progress in each area despite the central government’s effort to constrain his administration.

This article is part of the collaborative research project Populist Publics. Housed at Carleton University (www.carleton.ca/populistpublics), it applies a data-driven analysis of online hate networks to trace how false framings of the historical past, what we call historical misinformation, circulates across platforms, shaping the politics of the center alongside the fringes. We cull large datasets from social media platforms and run them through a variety of different programs to help visualize how harmful speech and civilizational rhetoric about race, ethnicity, immigration, multiculturalism, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ rights are circulated by far-right groups across borders, noting specifically when and how they are taken up in the mainstream as legitimate discourse. Our interest is in how the distortion of the historical record is used to build alternative collective memories of the past so as to undermine minority rights and cultures in the present. We began with a basic question: To what extent is this actually new? As much as the atomized publics of our current day create ideal conditions for radical ideas to fester and circulate, it was obvious to us that we needed to look for linkages across time, drawing on interdisciplinary methods from the fields of history, media and communication, and data science to identify the tactics, strategies, and repertoires among such groups and individuals. By analyzing German-Canadian relations in particular, what follows is a first attempt to piece together some of these connections, with a focus on far-right hate groups—homegrown and imported—in the settler colonial project that is today's Canada.

Many democracies are witnessing the rise and continuing success of parties and politicians who oppose fundamental principles of liberal democracy. Recent research finds that voters support illiberal politicians, because they trade off policy congruence against attitudes toward liberal democracy. Other studies, however, suggest that authoritarian and populist voters might actually have a preference to vote for illiberal candidates. We argue that both factors interact: Authoritarian and populist voters are more willing to trade off policy representation against support for liberal democracy. To test this mechanism, we rely on a survey experiment conducted in Germany. The results clearly demonstrate that voters indeed trade off policy congruence against liberal democracy. Moreover, this effect is particularly strong for populist and authoritarian voters. Overall, the results have important implications for understanding when and which voters support or oppose liberal democracy.

This article argues that the governance project of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) oscillates between rule-based formalism and anti-formalist scepticism about rule-based governance. In this dichotomy, anti-formalist arguments support CCP leaders’ efforts to maintain and increase the Party’s influence over the judiciary and other state organs, which is a key justification for the Party’s power. Formalist language, in contrast, supports Party leaders’ attempts to constrain lower-level cadres’ uses of power within the Party. Formalist language is particularly prominent in the writings of Party ideologues on the interpretation of the Party’s internal regulations, including the CCP Constitution. At the same time, Party ideology also provides for various anti-formalist arguments about rule-based governance within and outside the Party. Paradoxical as it may be, the Party leadership seeks to exert rule-transcending political leadership through formal rules. While the focus of this article is on China, it argues that other illiberal regimes may also be studied in terms of similar, potentially incoherent approaches to rule-based governance.

This Article uncovers the normative political theory underlying the legal doctrine of constitutional pluralism, as it is used in the EU today. Constitutional pluralism, once described as a semi-official legal doctrine in the EU, is now being used by some member states to challenge its authority and rules. By reconstructing the political thought of one of its founders, N. MacCormick, this Article takes issue with two most common interpretations of constitutional pluralism: On the one hand, it has been claimed that the normative political content of constitutional pluralism is virtually identical, or at least compatible, with that of Kantian rights-based cosmopolitanism; on the other, it has been contended, especially with regard to its uses in Hungary and Poland, that it was an inherently dangerous, illiberal, normative theory. This Article offers to move away from current legal debates to go back to the origins of constitutional pluralism. It argues that constitutional pluralism is not a purely liberal theory indeed. But neither is it inherently illiberal. Rather, both liberal and illiberal readings are possible, but partial, interpretations of MacCormickian constitutional pluralism. A more systematic interpretation shows that constitutional pluralism opens a path to move beyond this somewhat archetypical divide.

Red Guard newspapers and pamphlets (wenge xiaobao) were a key source for early research on the Cultural Revolution, but they have rarely been analysed in their own right. How did these publications regard their status and function within the larger information ecosystem of the People's Republic, and what is their role in the history of the modern Chinese public sphere? This article focuses on a particular subset of Red Guard papers, namely those published by radical groups within the PRC's press and publication system. These newspapers critiqued the pre-Cultural Revolution press and reflected upon the possible futures of a new, revolutionary Chinese press. Short-lived as these experiments were, they constitute a test case to re-examine the functioning of the public in a decidedly “uncivil” polity. Ultimately, they point to the ambiguous potential of the public for both consensus and conflict, liberation and repression, which characterizes the press in 20th-century China.

“Illiberalism” has assumed an invigorated if unanticipated significance in the 21st century. Aspects of illiberalism populate not only states long known as indifferent to such principles as personal liberty, human equality and the rule of law but have expanded in “liberal” democracies as their rulers employ purportedly “illiberal” practices more frequently than in the recent past. Indeed, the term “illiberal” seems to have lost its negative aura in the context of state action. We contend that illiberalism represents either an opposition to procedural democratic norms—as disruptive illiberalism—or an ideological struggle—termed ideological illiberalism. We first discuss the term as used in the vast literature on regime types in the debate on authoritarian/democratic hybrid-regimes. We then turn to the key puzzle in what one may call “illiberalism studies”: the rise of illiberal practices and policies in liberal democracies. To inform our analysis empirically, we investigate the ways in which illiberal arguments and institutions (notably camps) were deployed historically and in immigration policy. We conclude with an example of illiberal policy from modern day Hungary.