Autocracy in the World

If 2024 was the year of democracy—a year that saw more people worldwide heading to the polls than ever before—then what is in store for 2025? Early returns are worrisome: political repression continues to throttle civil society movements while global media struggles to keep pace with rampant information manipulation and propaganda. In many places autocratic leaders are tightening their grip on power and democratic backsliding seems to be on the rise globally. Join Perry World House as we welcome Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert on fascism and authoritarian movements, who will talk about our current global political moment in history, how it echoes with authoritarianism of the past, and the critical role media must play in order to keep democracy alive and well.

Ruth Ben-Ghiat is Professor of History and Italian Studies at New York University. She writes about authoritarianism, propaganda, and democracy protection. She is the recipient of Guggenheim and other fellowships and appears frequently on MSNBC She publishes Lucid, a Substack newsletter on threats to democracy in the U.S. and abroad.

Her latest book, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present examines how authoritarian leaders use corruption, violence, propaganda, and machismo to stay in power, and how resistance to them has unfolded over a century. She is also a consultant for television and film productions, including the Academy Award-winning 2022 movie Pinocchio (Guillermo del Toro, 2022), and the Netflix docuseries Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial (Joe Berlinguer, 2024).

She testified to the House Jan. 6 Committee and advises civil society organizations, including churches and multinational corporations, that face autocratic interferences in the US and around the world. As an advisor to Protect Democracy, she was part of a 2019 Amicus Curiae brief in the context of PEN America’s lawsuit against the Trump administration’s attempts to stifle press freedoms. And in January 2024 she co-authored an amicus brief submitted to the Supreme Court on the January 6 insurrection seen through the lens of the history of international anti-democratic violence.

Sarah Banet-Weiser, the Walter H. Annenberg Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, is also its Lauren Berlant Professor of Communication. In addition, she is a research professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and the founding director of the Center for Collaborative Communication at the Annenberg Schools (C3).

Her teaching and research interests include gender in the media, identity, citizenship, and cultural politics, consumer culture and popular media, race and the media, and intersectional feminism. Committed to intellectual and activist conversations that explore how global media politics are exercised, expressed, and perpetuated in different cultural contexts, she has authored or edited eight books, including Believability: Sexual Violence, Media, and the Politics of Doubt (Polity Press, 2023), the award-winning Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (NYU Press, 2012), Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Duke, 2018), and dozens of peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and essays. In 2019-2020, she had a regular column on popular feminism in the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Her research is deeply interdisciplinary, as is her scholarly editorial work. She was formerly the editor of the flagship journal of the American Studies Association, American Quarterly, as well as co-editor of the International Communication Association journal, Communication, Culture, Critique, and was the founding co-editor of the New York University Press book series, Critical Cultural Communication Studies. Banet-Weiser has been the recipient of international fellowships and visiting professorships at, among others, the Fondation Maison des sciences de l'homme in Paris, France; the Gulbenkian Foundation and the University of Portugal in Lisbon, Portugal; Microsoft Research New England (the social media collective); and McGill University in Montreal (Media@McGill Scholar). She is also a Fellow of the International Communication Association.

Banet-Weiser is the recipient of scholarly and mentoring awards, including the Constance Rourke Prize for Best Article in American Quarterly, and the Mellon Graduate Student Mentoring Award. She is a Distinguished Faculty Fellow at the Center for Excellence in Teaching at the University of Southern California. She was formerly a Professor and Head of Department at the London School of Economics after 19 years in the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, where she was Professor, Vice Dean, and the Director of the School of Communication.

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