The New Despotism – webinar recording

Speaker: Professor John Keane, University of Sydney

On 20 August 2020, in our first webinar, Professor John Keane* discussed his recently released book The New Despotism.

A lively conversation about his work began with three panellists, the Chief Investigators for our research project – Associate Professor Adam Czarnota and Professor Martin Krygier, both of the University of New South Wales Faculty of Law, and Professor Wojciech Sadurski of the University of Sydney School of Law. After commentary from the discussants, a variety of questions from the international audience were addressed. The session was recorded and the archive edition is now available for viewing.^

View the session

For those wishing to watch (or re-watch!) particular contributions in this session, they occur at approximately:

• 0 minutes – introduction by Martin Krygier
• 6 minutes – main presentation by John Keane
• 38 minutes – comments from Wojciech Sadurski
• 50 minutes – comments from Adam Czarnota
• 1 hour 3 minutes – comments from Martin Krygier
• 1 hour 15 minutes – response from John Keane
• 1 hour 35 minutes – audience Q&A

Listen to the session

For those with a more limited download speed, an audio-only file is provided below – contributions listed above may begin slightly earlier.

Our project co-hosted this talk with the Network for Interdisciplinary Studies of Law.

^Recording was advised to all participants. Views expressed herein are those of the authors/speakers and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government, the Australian Research Council, or the individual’s parent institution.

*John Keane is Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney, Australia and at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin. His books include The Media and Democracy (1991), which has been translated into more than twenty-five languages; Democracy and Civil Society (1988, 1998); Reflections on Violence (1996); Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions (1998); the prize-winning biography Tom Paine: A Political Life (1995); and Václav Havel: A Political Tragedy in Six Acts (1999). His more recent works include Democracy and Media Decadence (2013) (with Wolfgang Merkel and others), The Future of Representative Democracy (2010), Violence and Democracy (2004) and Global Civil Society? (2003).