Debating Development 2025

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

• 30/Sep  Power Concentrated: Global Inequality and Authoritarianism      
  • Koen Bogaert (UGent) 
  • Nicola Pratt (University of Warwick)    
    
    
• 7/Oct  Authoritarianism in the Global Order: Colonial legacies, institutional violence, and radical alternatives         
  • Amber Murrey (University of Oxford) 
  • Siddharth Tripathi (Universität Erfurt) 
                    
• 14/Oct  Climate as Cover: Green Colonialism       
  • Hamza Hamouchene (Transnational Institute) 
                
• 21/Oct  Control and Consent: Patriarchy and Power        
  • Nitasha Kaul (University of Westminster) 
  • Stephanie Lamy (Sciences Po Toulouse & Institut des Sciences Sociales du Politique Paris Nanterre)
      
• 28/Oct  Architectures of control: technopower, surveillance and digital dispossession
  • Lisa Garbe (WZB Berlin Social Science Center) 
  • Azadeh Akbari (Goethe University Frankfurt) 
  • Saif Shahin (University of Tilburg)
    
    
• 18/Nov  Art as Resistance: Aesthetics and Authoritarianism           
  • Brigitte Herremans (UGent/UAntwerpen) 
  • Shayma Nader Albess (Institute of Development Policy - UAntwerp) 
  • Joachim Ben Yakoub (Sint Lucas Antwerpen School of Arts KdG)
    
    
• 25/Nov  Disciplining the World: Authoritarianism in Global Carcerality             
  • Julienne Weegels (University of Amsterdam) 
  • Denis Augustin Samnick (Institute of Development Policy - UAntwerp)
    
    
• 2/Dec  From Global Anticolonial Struggles to Student Encampments Today   
  • Vijay Prashad (Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research)