After the Arab Spring, Tunisia emerged as the one success story to transition to democracy, winning a Nobel Peace Prize in 2015 for its focus on inclusion and power-sharing. How, then, did its democracy collapse in 2021?

Drawing on unique interviews with senior Tunisian officials, alongside three nationally representative surveys of the population, The Rise and Fall of Tunisian Democracy points to an overemphasis on compromise, consensus, and power-sharing. Although power-sharing institutions can be useful at the start of a transition, the book finds that extending them beyond that point can lead democracy to unravel by frustrating voters and spurring the rise of populists and extremists. The book takes an in-depth look at Tunisia's transition and then explores how far the theory travels through a quantitative analysis of all democratic transitions between 1942–2020. Overall, the book reveals the dark side of power-sharing, broadening our understanding of the causes of populism, polarization, and democratic breakdown.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Sharan Grewal (PhD, Princeton 2018) is an Associate Professor of Government at American University and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. His research examines revolutions and democratic transitions, particularly in the Arab world. His first book, Soldiers of Democracy? Military Legacies and the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2023), explores why militaries support or thwart democratic transitions. It received APSA’s Best Book in MENA Politics Award and the Robert Jervis Best International Security Book Award. His second book, The Rise and Fall of Tunisian Democracy: Populism, Polarization, and the Perils of Power-Sharing, is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press in October 2026. His work has also been published in the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and British Journal of Political Science, among other journals. His research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Defense Security Cooperation University.

Join the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law for a conversation with Maria Kuznetsova and Dan Storyev, Russian journalists in exile and co-authors of How to Survive Authoritarianism: A Russian's Phrasebook for Everyday Life in America (Liveright, 2026). The book argues that Americans confronting a rising tide of authoritarianism don't need to invent a vocabulary for it: Russians already built one over generations of contending with illiberal rule. Kuznetsova and Storyev compile roughly 100 Russian words and phrases, from "power vertical," used to describe hypercentralized governance, to "mnogohodovochka," a term that mocks misguided state initiatives, tracing how this vernacular of double-speak helped ordinary citizens "make sense of how illiberalism takes shape." The discussion will bring that framework to the American context, examining the mechanics of authoritarian consolidation and the strategies available for resisting it, and drawing comparisons between the Russian experience and current U.S. politics. Satre Family Senior Fellow & Mosbacher Director Kathryn Stoner will be moderating the discussion.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Maria Kuznetsova is a human rights expert from Russia who tackles political prosecution and anti-war repressions. She has expertise in developing international advocacy campaigns and engaging in strategic communication with journalists and public figures on human rights issues, especially in the context of Russian war against Ukraine. Kuznetsova received a master of public policy from Harvard Kennedy School and is based in San Francisco.

Dan Storyev grew up between Russia and the US. An Oxford graduate, he has been working as a journalist and researcher for years, specialising on writing about the former Soviet space for English-language outlets. His writing appeared in the Financial Times, New York Times and Foreign Policy amongst others. Dan covers human rights and conflicts and has reported from hotspots all over the world, including Ukraine and Myanmar. Dan writes the English newsletter at OVD-Info, a leading Russian human rights watchdog, which Dan also represented at conferences, radio, TV and more. Dan had worked as a lecturer and tutor for a decade — his diverse experience includes guest lectures at Oxford, Ghent and KCL.

Why do individuals differ so persistently in their willingness to take economic risks? This paper investigates whether religiosity, particularly the intensity of religious belief, and helps explain this variation. The research considers two competing theoretical predictions: religious teachings discourage immoral and unlawful behavior, while the religious coping literature suggests that belief in a benevolent God reduces background anxiety and effectively provides psychological insurance. Using Danish administrative data covering the full population over three decades, together with a novel naming-based measure of individual religiosity, the paper finds that more religious individuals are significantly more likely to be self-employed and to hold a larger share of their assets in stocks. These effects are economically meaningful, corresponding to roughly a quarter of the wealth effect on economic risk-taking. The findings also remain significant when comparing individuals within sibling groups, which absorbs family-level confounders. The research further finds that these same individuals are less likely to be charged with a criminal offence. This pattern of opposite effects across different types of risk is consistent with the idea that religiosity reduces perceived background risk through a psychological insurance channel, while simultaneously increasing the perceived cost of behaviours condemned by religious teachings. Overall, the paper suggests that religiosity helps explain a portion of the large and persistent individual differences in risk-taking behavior.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Jeanet Sinding Bentzen is a Professor of Economics at the University of Copenhagen, where she also leads the department's PhD program. She is a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and the Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy (CAGE), Associate Editor at The Economic Journal, and Executive Director of the Association for the Study of Religion, Economics, and Culture (ASREC).

Her research lies in the economics of religion field. Using natural experiments and large-scale data, she studies why religiosity differs across the globe and how it shapes societies. Her work shows that crises such as earthquakes and the COVID-19 pandemic raise religiosity, that the divide between devout and secular people is the widest cultural gap on Earth, and that religiosity affects science, democracy, productivity, and conservative attitudes. She has published in The Economic Journal, the American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, the Journal of Development Economics, and Nature Communications, and her findings have been covered by The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and Freakonomics Radio.

Citizenship is conventionally understood as a source of rights and protection. It is also a source of dependency: states retain distinctive authority over passports, legal identities, civil status, and mobility that citizens need even when they live abroad. Under authoritarianism, these dependencies become instruments of political control. The study introduces extraterritorial authoritarian citizenship, a continuing relationship in which emigrants depend on origin-state institutions whose provision of nominally universal rights is politically conditional. It generates latent leverage: the capacity to impose costs without exercising it against anyone in particular. Emigrants may curb dissent even when never targeted, and transnational repression activates leverage already at work. Using a four-wave panel survey of 4,000+ Russian emigrants in over 100 countries and 500+ interviews, the authors show that what emigrants fear is the open-ended legal and administrative reach of the origin state rather than targeted violence, that this fear suppresses contentious activism specifically, and that only the protection of another state reduces it. (In collaboration with Emil Kamalov and Karolina Nugumanova).

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Ivetta Sergeeva specializes in comparative social science, focusing on political behavior, civil society, citizenship and migration. In her research, she employs a mixed-methods approach, emphasizing surveys, statistical modeling, experiments, and interviews. Apart from her research skills, she has eight years of experience supervising projects in civil society and human rights organizations within the challenging context of contemporary Russia.

Politicians who openly display anti-democratic traits can attract substantial electoral support, even among voters who value democracy. This paper argues that the very behavior that makes a politician objectionable can also reassure voters that the politician will remain independent of political elites. Voters whose preferred policies lie far from elite interests worry that the candidates they elect will be captured by elites once in office. Because capturing a politician mired in scandal is costly for elites, scandalous behavior can credibly signal that a candidate is beyond elite reach. Where elites are democratically committed, displays of anti-democratic intent become an efficient way to generate such a scandal. Voters may elect these candidates even though they are more likely to manipulate elections once in office, an outcome costly for voters and elites alike. Elites who can perfectly anticipate which politicians will subvert elections have no credible way to communicate this to voters. A reanalysis of existing experimental data is consistent with the model's central prediction. Unlike existing accounts of anti-democratic voting, this theory explains why citizens who value democracy may still elect an anti-democratic candidate, even when a democratically committed candidate offers the same policy platform.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Alain Schläpfer is a social science research scholar at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), and a lecturer in Stanford’s Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy. His research lies at the intersection of political science and economics and focuses on cooperation, political institutions, and intergroup relations. His current work examines how cooperation can be sustained across political and social divisions, why voters support anti-democratic politicians, and how institutions and social norms shape political behavior. His research combines formal theory with experiments and observational data. He holds a PhD in Economics.

Under what conditions do pro-democracy global actors support domestic opposition actors resisting democratic backsliding, and when does such support shape public opinion? This book project develops a theory of international rhetorical pressure that examines both the supply and demand of foreign engagement in backsliding contexts. On the supply side, it argues that international actors' public attention to democratic developments abroad is shaped by both domestic political developments and geopolitical ties. On the demand side, it suggests that foreign statements can shape public opinion toward pro-democracy movements. Drawing on an original dataset of US Secretary of State speeches, survey experiments, and elite interviews, the project shows that geopolitical interests often shape when international actors publicly address democracy abroad, but that when they do, foreign messages can meaningfully shape public opinion. The project highlights the increasingly international nature of backsliding and both the opportunities and challenges international engagement creates for domestic opposition actors.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Benjamin Yoel is the Jan Koum Israel Studies Program Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL). Benjamin studies democratic backsliding, nonviolent resistance, authoritarian politics, and the role of international factors in the context of regime change. He is particularly interested in understanding when and how international actors can help or hurt domestic opposition movements defend democracy. His book project examines the supply and demand-side of international rhetorical pressure in the context of democratic backsliding and opposition to it. Benjamin's other work examines mass public support for democratic backsliding, public willingness to support retaliatory measures by democratic governments against former backsliding leaders, and the broader challenges facing pro-democracy actors in an increasingly illiberal international system. His research has been published in Nature, the International Journal of Public Opinion Research, and American Politics Research. He received his PhD in Political Science from Michigan State University and BA and MA degrees from Reichman University.

What defines Israel Studies as an academic discipline today, and where might the field be heading in view of the profound changes shaping Israel, diaspora Jewry, and Israel's international standing? How has the aftermath of October 7 impacted academic research and university teaching about modern Israel in American academia? Join Amichai Magen and Ori Rabinowitz in conversation with Professor Donna Robinson Divine, former President of the Association for Israel Studies (2017-2019), and Dr. Asaf Romirowsky, executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Donna Robinson Divine is the Morningstar Family Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor of Government, Emerita at Smith College, where she taught a variety of courses on Middle East Politics. Her writing includes Women Living Change:  Cross-Cultural Perspectives; essays from the Smith College Research Project on Women and Social Change; Politics and Society in Ottoman Palestine: The Arab Struggle for Survival and Power; Postcolonial Theory and The Arab-Israeli Conflict; Exiled in the Homeland: Zionism and the Return to Mandate Palestine; Word Crimes: Reclaiming the Language of the Israel-Palestinian Conflict; and October 7: The Wars Over Words and Deeds. Named the Katharine Asher Engel lecturer at Smith College for the 2012-2013 academic year in recognition of her scholarly achievements, she was also designated as Smith's Honored Professor for the excellence of her teaching. She was president of the Association for Israel Studies from 2017-2019, is an affiliate professor at Israel's University of Haifa, and was named to Algemeiner’s 2019 list of the top 100 people “positively influencing Jewish life."

Asaf Romirowsky, PhD, is the Executive Director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME) and the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA). Romirowsky is also a senior nonresident research fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (BESA)  and a Professor [Affiliate] at the University of Haifa. Trained as a Middle East historian, he holds a PhD in Middle East and Mediterranean Studies from King's College London, UK, and has published widely on various aspects of the Arab-Israeli conflict and American foreign policy in the Middle East, as well as on Israeli and Zionist history. Romirowsky is co-author of Religion, Politics, and the Origins of Palestine Refugee Relief and a contributor to The Case Against Academic Boycotts of Israel. His latest book is entitled, October 7: The Wars Over Words and Deeds. Romirowsky’s publicly-engaged scholarship has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, The National Interest, The American Interest, The New Republic, The Times of Israel, Jerusalem Post, Ynet, and Tablet, among other online and print media outlets.

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