The Journal of Illiberalism Studies

The Journal of Illiberalism Studies (JIS) is a biannual journal published by the Illiberalism Studies Program at The George Washington University.

JIS aims to provide an intellectual space for critical analyses of the concept of illiberalism and its derivates. The objective in setting up this new journal is to fill a gap in current academic debates regarding the treatment of the still understudied concept of illiberalism and make a contribution to its relevance for political philosophy, political science, sociology, media studies, IR, and cultural anthropology. For a definition of illiberalism, see here.

JIS is double-blinded peer-reviewed and available in Open Access. Each article is published individually as soon as it is accepted under a Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY 4.0). This means that all content is freely available without charge to readers. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author. This is in accordance with the BOAI definition of open access.

JIS publishes research articles, book reviews and discussions, and symposiums. For shorter pieces, blogs, op-eds in need of a quick turnout, please contact us at illibstudies@gwu.edu for our online publications.

JIS is committed to equity. We encourage authors to be sensitive to their own epistemic practices, including as reflected in their citations’ gender balance and representation of scholarship by authors from the country or countries under study.

Submission guidelines

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See our latest call for papers

Current and Previous Issues

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Spring 2023

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Spring 2023

Book Review: Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism

The Comparative Economics of Neo-Illiberalism

The Spanish and French Far Rights in Their Quest for a New Traditionalist Order

Patriarch Kirill’s Praetorian Guard: Sorok Sorokov as Radical Outreach for “Holy Tradition”

Nae Ionescu’s 1938 Legionary Phenomenon: A “Missing Link” between Evola and Dugin

The Phantasmatic Dimension of Culture Wars: The Case of Social Conservatism

Fall 2022

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Fall 2022

Liberal Democracy in a Less-than-Liberal Context? The Case of Contemporary Greece

Economic Nationalism Goes Global: Illiberal Governments Instrumentalizing Globalization in Eastern Europe

Regimes of Cheating and the (A)morality of Illiberalism

Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation: The Critique of Liberalism and the Emergence of Illiberalism

Illiberal Liberalism: A Genealogy

Eric Zemmour, The New Face of the French Far Right: Media-Sponsored, Neoliberal, and Reactionary

Spring 2022

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Spring 2022

State Ideology, Science, and Pseudoscience in Russia

The Birth of an Illiberal Informational Autocracy in Europe: A Case Study on Hungary

The Transnational Networks of the European Radical Populist Right and the Beacon of Hungarian Illiberal Democracy

Georgia’s Illiberal Forces

Guillaume Faye (1949-2019): At the Forefront of a New Theory of White Nationalism

Exploring the Topography of the Authoritarian: Populism, Illiberalism, and Authoritarianism

Fall 2021

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Fall 2021

Owning and Disowning the Female Body

Forging the Body of the New Ukrainian Nation

Documents Accuse

White Rex, White Nationalism, and Combat Sport

Political Conversion to Islam Among the European Right

Summer 2021

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Summer 2021

India’s Third Gender

Political Street Stickers

Visual Biopolitics

The New French Knight

The Italian Great Convergence

Elites and Institutions in the Russian Thermidor: Regime Instrumentalism, Entrepreneurial Signaling, and Inherent Illiberalism

Chief Editor:

Marlene Laruelle, The George Washington University, USA

Assistant Editors:

Ellen Powell and John Chrobak, The George Washington University, USA

Editorial Board

Columbia University, USA

Alexander Cooley

Alexander Cooley is the Claire Tow Professor of Political Science at Barnard College and Director of Columbia University's Harriman Institute (2015-present).

Professor Cooley’s research examines how external actors—including emerging powers, international organizations, multinational companies, NGOs, and Western enablers of grand corruption—have influenced the development, governance and sovereignty of the former Soviet states, with a focus on Central Asia and the Caucasus. Cooley is the author and/or editor of seven academic books including, Dictators without Borders: Power and Money in Central Asia (Yale University Press 2017), co-authored with John Heathershaw, and most recently, Exit from Hegemony: the Unravelling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020), co-authored with Daniel Nexon.

In addition to his academic research, Professor Cooley serves on several international advisory boards engaged with the region and has testified for the United States Congress and Helsinki Commission. Cooley's opinion pieces have appeared in New York Times, Foreign Policy and Foreign Affairs and his research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Open Society Foundations, Carnegie Corporation, and the German Marshall Fund of the United States, among others. Cooley earned both his MA and Ph.D. from Columbia University.

Tartu University, Estonia

Andrey Makarychev

Andrey Makarychev is Professor of Regional Political Studies at Johan Skytte Institute of Political Science, University of Tartu.

Andrey Makarychev is Professor of Regional Political Studies at Johan Skytte Institute of Political Science, University of Tartu. He is also a Guest Professor at Center for Global Politics, Free University in Berlin and Senior Associate with CIDOB think tank in Barcelona. His previous institutional affiliations included George Mason University (US), Center for Security Studies and Conflict Research (ETH Zurich), and Danish Institute of International Studies. Andrey Makarychev teaches courses on “Globalization“, “Political Systems in post-Soviet Eurasia“, “EU-Russia Relations“, “Regionalism and Integration in the post-Soviet Area“, “Visual Politics“. In recent years he co-authored (all with Alexandra Yatsyk) three monographs – “Celebrating Borderlands in a Wider Europe: Nations and Identities in Ukraine, Georgia and Estonia” (Nomos, 2016), “Lotman’s Cultural Semiotics and the Political” (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), and “Critical Biopolitics of the Post-Soviet: from Populations to Nations” (Lexington Books, 2020). He co-edited a number of academic volumes – “Mega Events in post-Soviet Eurasia: Shifting Borderlands of Inclusion and Exclusion” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), “Vocabularies of International Relations after the Crisis in Ukraine (Routledge, 2017); “Borders in the Baltic Sea Region: Suturing the Ruptures” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).

IERES/UVA

Maria Snegovaya

Maria Snegovaya (Ph.D., Columbia University) is an IERES Visiting Scholar at George Washington University, a PPE postdoctoral scholar at Virginia Tech and a Fellow at Center for European Policy Analysis. She is a comparative politics, international relations, and statistical methods specialist. Her research interests include party politics, political behavior, political economy and political sociology. The key focus of her research is democratic backsliding in Eastern Europe, as well as Russia’s domestic and foreign policy. Her research results and analysis have appeared in policy and peer-reviewed journals, including Journal of Democracy, Democratization, Post-Soviet Affairs and the Washington Post‘s political science blog the Monkey Cage. Her research has been referenced in publications such as the New York Times, Bloomberg, the Economist, and Foreign Policy.

CERI, France

Christophe Jaffrelot

Christophe Jaffrelot works at the Centre for Studies in International Relations (CERI)-Sciences Po and served as its Director from 2000 to 2008.

Christophe Jaffrelot works at the Centre for Studies in International Relations (CERI)-Sciences Po and served as its Director from 2000 to 2008. He is currently a senior research fellow at CNRS and a professor at Sciences Po. He is also a visiting professor at the India Institute, King’s College London, and has taught at Columbia University, Yale University, Johns Hopkins University, the Université de Montréal, and as a Global Scholar at Princeton University. Since 2008, he has been a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His last book, co-authored with Pratinav Anil, is India’s First Disctatorship. The Emergency, 1975-77, London, Hurst, 2020 and his forthcoming book is Modi’s India. Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy, Princeton University Press, 2021.

Loughborough University, United Kingdom

Sabina Mihelj

Sabina Mihelj is Professor of Media and Cultural Analysis in the School of Social Sciences, Loughborough University.

Sabina Mihelj is Professor of Media and Cultural Analysis in the School of Social Sciences, Loughborough University. Sabina’s research focuses on the comparative study of media cultures across both traditional and new media, with a focus on nationalism, identity, memory, and Eastern and Central Europe. She has written extensively on the relationship between mass communication and cultural identity, on comparative media research, and on the role of media and popular culture in the Cold War.

Her latest book is entitled From Media Systems to Media Cultures: Understanding Socialist Television (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Sabina’s research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, the British Academy, the Leverhulme Trust, the Norwegian Research Council, and the Ministry of Science and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia. She is a member of the Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College, and sits on the editorial boards of several international media and cultural analysis journals. Over her time at Loughborough, Sabina served as Programme Director for both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in communication and media studies. She currently acts as School lead for Loughborough’s REF2021 submission to the D34 panel, and leads the Media, Memory and History strand of the Centre for Research in Communication and Culture.

Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria, and Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria

Ivan Krastev

Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies and permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna.

Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies and permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, IWM Vienna. He is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Board of Trustees of The International Crisis Group and member of the Board of Directors of GLOBSEC. He was a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times (2015-2021). Ivan Krastev is the author of "Is it Tomorrow, Yet? How the Pandemic Changes Europe" (Allen Lane, 2020); The Light that Failed: A Reckoning (Allen Lane, 2019), co-authored with Stephen Holmes - won the 30th Annual Lionel Gelber Prize; “After Europe” (UPenn Press, 2017); “Democracy Disrupted. The Global Politics on Protest” (UPenn Press, 2014) and “In Mistrust We Trust: Can Democracy Survive When We Don't Trust Our Leaders?” (TED Books, 2013). Ivan Krastev is the winner of the Jean Améry Prize for European Essay Writing 2020.

University of Helsinki, Finland

Takis Pappas

Takis S. Pappas (PhD, Yale) is a docent, visiting professor, and researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Takis S. Pappas (PhD, Yale) is a docent, visiting professor, and researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. Formerly a professor of comparative politics at the University of Macedonia, Thessaloniki, Greece, he has also held teaching and research appointments at the universities of Strasbourg, Oslo, Freiburg, Luxembourg, Central European University, European University Institute, Yale, and Princeton. Besides dozens of articles in top academic journals, he has authored Making Party Democracy in Greece (Macmillan 1999), The Charismatic Party: PASOK, Papandreou, Power (2009, in Greek), Populism and Crisis Politics in Greece (Palgrave 2014), On the Tightrope: National Crises and Brinkmanship in Greece from Trikoupis to Tsipras (2017, in Greek), Populism and Liberal Democracy: A Comparative and Theoretical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2019), and co-edited European Populism in the Shadow of the Great Recession (ECPR Press, 2015). He is a regular columnist in major Greek newspaper Kathimerini, has produced a TED-Ed video on populism, and maintains the blog http://www.pappaspopulism.com. His new and forthcoming work is about the future of liberal democracy, particularly in Europe.

Free University, Berlin, Germany

Mihai Varga

Mihai Varga is a senior research fellow in sociology at the Eastern Europe Institute, Freie Universität Berlin.

Mihai Varga is a senior research fellow in sociology at the Eastern Europe Institute, Freie Universität Berlin. He was a Max Weber Fellow in 2011-2012 and holds a PhD from the University of Amsterdam (2011). His research focuses on market reforms and their political-economic consequences. He has published on World Bank-inspired reforms, trade unions responses to worker protests and austerity, and on the rise of right-wing forces preceding or following the financial crisis of 2007–8.