Erosion and Refiguration: Ethnographic Examinations Along the Democracy–Authoritarianism Matrix

Research Factory B ORDERS IN MOTION Prof Dr Jens Adam Leiter Fachgebiet Kulturmanagement BTU Cottbus How might we ethnographically study the authoritarian transformations that are increasingly visible within formally liberal democracies In many countries we observe governments elected through democratic procedures deploying their electoral legitimacy to hollow out institutions and to reshape democratic principles in authoritarian ways In this lecture I explore how these dynamics might be traced ethnographically and what kinds of analytical vocabulary this requires I approach this question by focusing on the border and on repressive border policies as a key driver of these transformations Poland provides a telling case not least because it offers a longer trajectory for examining the entanglement of border regimes with wider authoritarian shifts On this basis I propose to conceptualize authoritarian transformation as a dynamic interplay of erosion and refiguration that may be studied as