The Illiberalism Studies Program (ILLSP) studies the different faces of liberal and illiberal politics and thought in today’s world, accounting for the diversity of their cultural context, their intellectual genealogy, the sociology of their popular support, and their implications for the global order. By bridging the gap between academic expertise and broader audiences, and by addressing key societal issues, ILLSP aims to excel in a form of public scholarship that can benefit the public.
About Us
ILLSP is structured around three complementary hubs—Washington, Paris, and Rome. Each are anchored in distinct but interconnected research priorities. Building on its foundational approach that treats illiberalism as a global, context-dependent ideological universe shaped by political, economic, and cultural contestations, the three branches develop specialized research agendas that speak to one another across geographic and disciplinary boundaries. Together, these hubs reflect the program’s core insight that illiberalism is not a monolithic ideology but a flexible, meaning-making framework that adapts to local contexts while participating in a shared global conversation.
Core team
Marlene Laruelle is Research Professor of International Affairs and Political Science and Director of the Illiberalism Studies Program at the George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. Laruelle works on the rise of populist and illiberal movements in post-Soviet Eurasia, Europe and the US. She is the former Director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES) and of the Central Asia Program (CAP).
John Chrobák is a Research Supervisor for the Illiberalism Studies Program. He has an MA in International Affairs from GW’s Elliott School of International Affairs with a specialization in U.S. Foreign Policy and Eurasian Politics. His work has focused particularly on regional politics and security in Eurasia as well as transnational connections among illiberal movements. He has previously worked at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA) and at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab (DFRLab). He holds a B.A. in Political Science and Philosophy from McGill University.
Aaron Irion is an Institute Associate at the Illiberalism Studies Program. His work focuses on the crisis of liberalism, treating it as a catalyst for new political imaginaries. He is keenly interested in post-liberalism and the relative absence of the left in our present conjuncture. His work, therefore, also focuses on a critical engagement with (and reevaluation of) certain tendencies that emerged on the left in the second half of the twentieth century. His work takes Marxism, post-Marxism, post-structuralism, and political economy seriously and as starting points.
Washington D.C.
The Washington branch, hosted at the George Washington University, focuses on American politics and culture as well as on economic and environmental transformations, paying particular attention to the interplay between market liberalism, identity politics, and democratic legitimacy. It studies the American right as a producer of meaning, from postliberal and nationalist thought to media ecosystems, popular culture, religion, masculinism, conspiracy narratives, and anti-globalism. Alongside this focus, the hub analyzes economic, technological, and environmental transformations, paying particular attention to how market liberalism, corporate power, climate crises, digital governance, and social dislocation reshape democratic legitimacy and citizens’ expectations of the state. By situating the United States as both a laboratory and an exporter of illiberal repertoires, the Washington hub explores how these domestic struggles resonate internationally and contribute to the broader redefinition of liberalism and its challengers.
Members
Joseph Cerrone is a Postdoctoral Associate at IERES in the Illiberalism Studies Program. He holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in political science from George Washington University, as well as a B.A. in international relations and Spanish from Saint Joseph’s University. His research investigates how emotionally-resonant political discourse shapes public opinion about immigration, with a specific focus on the far right in Italy and Spain. He also studies how far-right parties and leaders across Europe use discourse to construct shared identities among their followers. His research is methodologically eclectic, employing quantitative text analysis of social media data, survey experiments, and qualitative case studies.
For a list of publications, see: https://jcerrone.com/publications/.
Laura K. Field is a writer in Washington, DC. She works on the Frontiers of American Reaction series at the Illiberalism Studies Program. She studied political theory and public law at the University of Texas at Austin, has held faculty positions at Rhodes College, Georgetown University, and American University, and today is a Scholar in Residence at American University and Senior Fellow at the Niskanen Center. Laura has a longstanding interest in political culture and how thinking (and writing, and rhetoric) shapes our lives, which pairs well with current questions about the crisis of liberalism and rising authoritarianism around the world. She has worked extensively on the right-wing (“New Right”) intellectuals who rose to prominence under the Trump administration. Her book Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right is forthcoming from Princeton University Press in November 2025.
Beni Kovacs is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Illiberalism Studies Program. His research explores the radical right in Hungary and the United States - where they come from, intellectually, and how they envision domestic and international politics. He holds a PhD in Political Science from Queen Mary University of London.
Chantal de Jonge Oudraat is the John O. Rankin Professor of Practice of International Affairs and Program Director of the Masters of Arts in International Affairs at the GW Elliott School of International Affairs. She is also a Global Fellow at the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Wilson Center. She served as President and CEO of Women in International Security (WIIS) from January 2013 to July 2021 and is a member of its Board of Directors. She has held senior positions at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) North America; the US Institute of Peace (USIP); the Center for Transatlantic Relations at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University; the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; and the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR) in Geneva. She was also for many years an adjunct associate professor at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University.
de Jonge Oudraat has published extensively on international security, gender, and WPS issues. Her latest publications include: an edited volume with Michael E. Brown The Gender and Security Agenda: Strategies for the 21st Century (Routledge, 2020); and a co-authored book with Michael E. Brown, Men, Masculinities and Security (forthcoming 2025).
Steven Livingston is a Resident Senior Fellow at the Illiberalism Studies Program. He is also the Founding Director of the Institute for Data, Democracy, and Politics (IDDP) and Professor of Media and Public Affairs. He also hold an appointment in the Elliott School of International Affairs. In 2019, he led GW’s successful bid for a $5 million grant to found IDDP. In 2021, Livingston is a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Helsinki in Finland where he holds a new special award of the Finish Fulbright Foundation called Seeking Solutions for Global Challenges. Over his 30-year career at GW, Livingston has served as the director of the Political Communication Program when it was a degree-granting entity within SMPA (1996 – 2002, 2004 – 2006). In 2004, he served as director of the School of Media and Public Affairs, a position held until August 2006. He also founded the Public Diplomacy Institute (PDI) at GW in 2000 and served as the chairman of the Board of Directors until 2008. PDI is now the Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communication.
Erik Piccoli is a Research Assistant for the Illiberalism Studies Program. His work mainly focuses on illiberal social networks, political discourse, and the transnational far-right. Erik has previously worked for the Italian Institute for International Political Studies. He graduated from Louisiana State University with a BA in Journalism and is pursuing a Master’s Degree in European & Eurasian Studies at the Elliott School.
Timothy Shenk is a historian of the modern United States with a particular interest in political and intellectual history. His latest book, Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics, will be published by Columbia Global Reports this fall. The book uses the history of a long-running battle inside the Democratic consultant class to explore the remaking of leftwing electoral coalitions around the world over the last fifty years. His previous book, Realigners: Partisan Hacks, Political Visionaries, and the Struggle to Rule American Democracy, chronicled the making and breaking of the country’s dominant political majorities from the founding to the present; published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, it was named one of the best political books of 2022 by the Wall Street Journal. He is currently working on an intellectual biography of the American economy, which is under contract with Princeton University Press.
de Jonge Oudraat has published extensively on international security, gender, and WPS issues. Her latest publications include: an edited volume with Michael E. Brown The Gender and Security Agenda: Strategies for the 21st Century (Routledge, 2020); and a co-authored book with Michael E. Brown, Men, Masculinities and Security (forthcoming 2025).
de Jonge Oudraat has published extensively on international security, gender, and WPS issues. Her latest publications include: an edited volume with Michael E. Brown The Gender and Security Agenda: Strategies for the 21st Century (Routledge, 2020); and a co-authored book with Michael E. Brown, Men, Masculinities and Security (forthcoming 2025).
Jacob Ware is a research fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), where he studies domestic and international terrorism and counterterrorism. Together with Bruce Hoffman, he is the author of God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America, published in 2024 by Columbia University Press. He was previously a research associate for counterterrorism at CFR.
Julian G. Waller (Ph.D, George Washington University) is a Professorial Lecturer in Political Science at George Washington University, a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies, and an Associate Research Analyst in the Russia Studies Program at the Center for Naval Analyses. His research focuses on political institutions in authoritarian regimes, non-democratic regimes in historical perspective, post-Soviet politics, and illiberal politics in Western democracies. His work has been published in Problems of Post-Communism, American Affairs, the Journal of Illiberalism Studies, Social Media + Society, and the International Journal of Constitutional Law, among others.
Paris
The Paris branch, hosted at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (Inalco), concentrates on the intersections between technology and illiberalism, examining how digital infrastructures, platform governance, artificial intelligence, and information ecosystems are reshaping the production and circulation of illiberal ideas. It also focuses on illiberal trajectories in the Global South where challenges to liberalism are often articulated through postcolonial critiques and visions of alternative modernities. The first axis is supported by the Choose France for Science program, while the second builds on Inalco’s longstanding intellectual excellence in non-Western area studies and is closely articulated with the Decript project, which studies the return of civilizationism to the global stage.
Members
Maxime Audinet is an Assistant Professor of International Relations and International Communication at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO, Paris), where he holds the research chair “Influence and Counter-Influence Strategies.” He is a specialist in Russian foreign policy and holds a PhD in Slavic studies and political science from Paris Nanterre University. He is a full member of INALCO’s Centre de recherche Europes-Eurasie (CREE) and an affiliated researcher at the Geode Center of Paris 8 University.
Dusan Bozalka is a PhD candidate in Information Science at the Centre d’Analyse et de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur l’Étude des Médias (CARISM) at Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas, as well as the Institute of Strategic Research at the École Militaire (IRSEM). His research focuses on the dissemination of strategic conspiracy narratives by QAnon influencers in English, French, German, and Italian digital spaces. Additionally, his work explores how these influencers engage with and amplify Russian disinformation narratives to their audiences. He employs a mixed computational approach, combining strategic communication concepts with sociological analysis of multiplatform social networks.
Raphaël Demias-Morisset (Ph.D, Political science) is a Research Fellow at the University of Bordeaux and a Research Associate at the Illiberalism Studies Program, where he works on the Technology and illiberalism Project. His main fields of research are the history of liberal and conservative ideas, constitutional theory and the study of ideologies, and his research focuses mainly on the conceptualization of illiberalism and its relation with neoliberalism, and illiberal theories. He is currently writing a book on illiberal ideology, which will be published in France in 2025.
Amaury Giraud (Ph. D, Political science) is a former political science assistant professor of the Catholic University of Paris (2021-2022) and of the University of Montpellier (2022-2024) where he gave lectures in history of political ideas, history of sociology, French constitutional law and political literature. He is a graduate from Sorbonne University and Assas University, specialized in political philosophy, and works mainly on anti-modern socialism, left populism, and atypical conservative intellectuals. He also works on international topics regarding issues such as information warfare, interference threats, and extremist ideologies.
Marijana Grbeša Zenzerovic is a professor at the University of Zagreb, Faculty of Political Science where she teaches courses in media, research methods and strategic communication. She is the Vice-Chair of the Committee of Experts on Online Safety and Empowerment of Content Creators and Users (MSI-eSEC) at the Council of Europe.
She has authored over thirty books, chapters and scientific articles on media, political communication, celebrity politics and populism. She is a researcher in the Adria Digital Media Observatory and works as an expert on several media policy projects. She is the editor-in-chief of a distinguished peer-reviewed Media Studies (Medijske studije) journal.
She held the position of Fulbright Visiting Scholar at George Mason University, USA and served as a visiting professor at the Penn State University, USA. Additionally, she held positions as the Head of the School of Journalism and as Vice-Dean for International Relations at the Faculty of Political Science in Zagreb. She also served as a member of the negotiating team for Croatia’s Accession to the EU and represented Croatia in the European Science Foundation.
Marijana has been honored with several academic and professional grants and awards for her contributions to the field.
Reijer Hendrikse is a non-resident fellow at the Illiberalism Studies Program. His research interests are centered on the interfaces between corporations, business services, financial centers, and states, with a focus on finance, lawmaking, technology, and their political anchoring under (neo-)illiberalizing regimes in the US, China and Europe. Amongst others, he is currently investigating the financialization and monopolization of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructures under the aegis of US Big Tech, and how these companies rely on the illiberal antics of the Trump Administration to shield and expand their global dominance.
Arnaud Miranda holds a PhD in political theory and is affiliated with CEVIPOF (Sciences Po's Center for Political Research). He was awarded the Fondation des Treilles' Young Researcher Prize in 2024 for his thesis on the history of political ideas, entitled Les pensées contemporaines de la décadence : un imaginaire antidémocratique (Contemporary Thoughts on Decadence: An Anti-Democratic Imaginary). Since 2019, he has been teaching the history of political ideas and philosophy at Sciences Po, the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin, and the Catholic Institute of Paris.
Alberto Polimeni is a researcher based in London. He is responsible for the Agora series at the Illiberalism Studies Program. He has an MA in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics and a BA in War Studies and Philosophy from King’s College London. His research is interested in how far-right populist parties make strategic political decisions, how they prompt systemic changes in political systems, and their emerging foreign policy ideas.
Périne Schir is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Illiberalism Studies Program and the Transnational History of the Far Right Project. She is a PhD student in political philosophy and an adjunct professor of International Relations at Rouen University. She holds an MA in Sociology and Philosophy from Rouen University. Her PhD research focuses on political movements that position themselves between the right and the far-right, and the ideological current on which they are built.
Joël E. Schnapp is a French historian, holding a PHD in Modern History from the University of Paris-X Nanterre. He is a research associate at University of Grenoble and a specialist of Apocalyptic Traditions in the Renaissance and the Christian Polemics against Islam. He has written several articles about the Turks and Islam in the Renaissance, including his 2017 book called Prophéties de fin du monde et peur des Turcs au XVe siècle: Ottomans, Antichrist, Apocalypse. In 2023, he published an essay called Chroniques de l’Antichrist: Crises et Apocalypses au XXIe siècle, in which he reflects on medieval apocalytic traditions applied to contemporary history. He has also written numerous articles for Le Monde, Le Média, Le Nouvel Observateur, Le Point and Lundi.am.
Gulnaz Sibgatullina (Ph.D., Leiden University) is an Assistant Professor for Illiberal Regimes in the Department of History, European Studies, and Religious Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on Islam in Europe, contemporary Islamic thought, state-church relations, and minority issues in Russia. In addition to these areas of expertise, she also has a keen interest in cultural illiberalism, sociology of religion and religious language, as well as translation studies.
Rome
The Rome branch, hosted at Luiss Guido Carli University, examines how European illiberal currents are reconfiguring debates on sovereignty, identity, integration, and democracy across the continent, with a particular focus on the future of the European Union as both a political project and an embodiment of a normative order under pressure. Anchored in a long-standing engagement with political philosophy, the Rome hub also explores the conceptual history and contemporary mutations of liberalism and its many prefixes—neoliberalism, illiberalism, post-liberalism, and beyond—tracing how these frameworks emerge from within European thought itself and continue to structure competing visions of Europe’s past, present, and future.
Members
S.N. Jaffe is Associate Professor (Research) of the History of Political Thought at LUISS. His PhD is from the University of Toronto, his MSc from the LSE, and his BA from Bowdoin. He has worked on U.S. foreign policy, been a postdoc at the FU Berlin, and is a regular Senior Associate of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. He has research interests in Greek and Roman political philosophy, the history of international political thought, and how classical frameworks can enrich contemporary debates. His first book, Thucydides on the Outbreak of War, was published in 2017 by Oxford UP, and he is working on a book on Polybius. He recently co-edited (with Guillermo Graíño Ferrer) a double special issue of The Review of Politics on populism in the history of political thought.
Christian Joppke is Professor of Sociology in the Political Science Department of LUISS University, Rome. Previous appointments include the University of Southern California, European University Institute, University of British Columbia, International University Bremen, American University of Paris, and the University of Bern, where he held the chair in general sociology from 2010 to 2025. He also held honorary and visiting professorships at Aarhus University, Central European University, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC, Herzliya), and SciencesPo (Paris), as well as research and visiting fellowships at Georgetown University, the Russell Sage Foundation (New York), Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), and the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. He has been a member of the German Expert Council on Integration and Migration (SVR) between 2015 and 2020. Joppke studied at the Free University of Berlin, University of Frankfurt (where he was a doctoral student of Jürgen Habermas), and holds a Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley (1989). Specializing in comparative political sociology, he has written widely and influentially on social movements, immigration, citizenship, multiculturalism, religion, nationalism, and more recently on populism and (neo)liberalism. His last books are Neoliberal Nationalism: Immigration and the Rise of the Populist Right (Cambridge University Press 2021) and Political Neoliberalism: Order and Rupture (Oxford University Press 2025).
Giovanni Orsina is a full professor of Contemporary History at LUISS Guido Carli University in Rome. His main fields of research and teaching are the history of political parties, comparative history of European political systems and the history of journalism.
