University Foundation for Development Cooperation (USOS)

Debating Development 2025

Authoritarian currents: Power, control and resistance in times of crisis

Conversation series on Tuesday evenings

Register to attend one or more sessions in person

Short outline

Modern authoritarianism often operates insidiously, cloaked in the language of progress, efficiency, and market logic. It embeds itself within technocratic institutions, digital governance, and corporate policy, quietly managing dissent and eroding public accountability. This system, sustained by repressing solidarity and criminalizing protest, treats resistance as a threat. It operates across political, economic, and ecological domains, using crises to justify control. However, this series highlights how communities, artists, and activists are contesting these structures and subverting dominant narratives to rethink power and justice.

Through a series of public conversations with scholars, artists, activists, and practitioners, we seek to unpack how authoritarianism operates and mutates today, and how it can be resisted. By bridging historical critique and present-day struggles, the series invites us to collectively rethink power, freedom, and justice in a world increasingly shaped by authoritarian rule.

Programme 2025


Tuesdays from 6.30 to 8.30 pm at R.002 - Stadscampus 

Full outline

The New Face of Authoritarianism

Authoritarianism is on the rise - but not always in the ways we might expect. While the brute force of strongman rule, violent repression, and democratic dismantling dominates headlines and political life in many parts of the world, authoritarian power today also takes more insidious forms - hiding in plain sight, cloaked in the language of progress, efficiency, and even sustainability. It embeds itself in spaces presumed to be democratic: in the technocratic routines of global development institutions, the algorithmic governance of digital infrastructures, and the corporate capture of climate policy. Under the banner of pragmatism, dissent is managed, decisions are insulated from public accountability, and political possibility is confined to what aligns with market logic. The result is a quieter, more normalized authoritarianism - one that redraws the boundaries of what can be said, done, and imagined, without ever declaring itself as such.

Authoritarianism as Structural Oppression

This authoritarianism is not separate from structural oppression - it is one of its most adaptive expressions. What often appears as neutral governance or necessary order is sustained by the repression of solidarity movements, the criminalization of protest, and the shielding of power from accountability. These are not anomalies in democratic settings, but features of a political order that increasingly treats resistance as a threat. Under the guise of security, stability, or economic reason, the space for democratic engagement is steadily eroded - while authoritarian logics continue to operate both behind closed doors and in full view.

Authoritarianism Across Multiple Domains

This year’s Debating Development series casts a critical eye on the many faces of authoritarianism across political, economic, ecological, cultural, and epistemic domains. As overlapping crises deepen and governing elites call for order and control, authoritarian tendencies find fertile ground: green agendas are used to justify land grabbing and dispossession; digital technologies reinforce surveillance and discipline; global financial institutions entrench unequal power structures in the name of development. Repressive carceral policies and patriarchal regimes further institutionalize exclusion and injustice. Even within universities and spaces of knowledge production, authoritarian impulses emerge in the silencing of dissent and the narrowing of critical thought.

Resistance and Counter-Narratives

Yet authoritarianism is not without contestation. This series also highlights the resistance and imagination of those who challenge authoritarian structures - from communities defending land and life to artists and activists who subvert dominant narratives through aesthetics, satire, and collective action.

About Debating Development

Debating Development is a public platform for reflection & dialogue on global development. With this series, the University of Antwerp encourages its own community, as well as the wider public, to engage in conversations on contemporary societal issues and in particular in their global dimension.

Each year we address a different overarching theme. The broad theme is explored through various panel discussions, which allows for different perspectives to be covered. Each topic is introduced on the basis of a presentation by a renowned speaker. One or more discussants set the stage for further conversation or debate. At the end there is room for questions and comments from the audience. 

Everyone is welcome to attend these conversations. University of Antwerp also offers the series as an elective for third bachelor students of all faculties. Debating Development is part of the university-wide, interdisciplinary courses, the so-called korfvakken.

Debating Development is a course of the Institute of Development Policy (IOB) under academic supervision of Gert Van Hecken. USOS helps to bring the series to the wider public.