New Books in European Politics

This is a special episode that we recorded a week after elections in both Brazil and Serbia saw the defeat of authoritarian forces. In this preview episode of the RESISTANCE research project, host Licia Cianetti is joined by Brazilian and Serbian colleagues Déborah Monte and Aleksrandra Krstić to talk about what happened in their respective countries and what made anti-authoritarian mobilisation successful against the odds. They talk about how, in both countries, online and offline mobilisation were combined to overcome skewed communication systems, the civic infrastructure that was needed to make that mobilisation possible, and their fears and hopes for the future.
RESISTANCE – Resisting Inter-Scalar Authoritarian Networks and Coalitions is a research project that aims to uncover how authoritarian ideas, practices, technologies, and policies are produced and spread in a thickly interconnected world, how they create local authoritarian ecosystems, and how they can be resisted. It is funded by European Union’s Horizon-Europe grant no. 101286676 for the years 2026-2029. To know more and sign up to the project newsletter visit here
Guests:
Aleksrandra Krstić is Professor at the Department of Journalism and Communication, in the Faculty of Political Sciences, at the University of Belgrade, Serbia. She is an expert in media and journalism studies, including on the role of local media in Serbian democracy. She co-leads the RESISTANCE project’s work stream on digital authoritarianism and surveillance technologies.
Déborah Monte is International Relations Professor at the Federal University da Grande Dourados, Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. She was Visiting Fellow at CEDAR/University of Birmingham in 2024-25 and co-hosted the People Power Politics Podcast episode on Militarization and Democracy in Contemporary Brazil. She recently started a new research project on “Autocratisation and democratic resilience: Brazil in global perspective” as the recipient of a CNPq/Fundect Research Productivity Fellow grant.
Presenter:
Licia Cianetti is Associate Professor at the University of Birmingham and Founding Deputy Director of CEDAR. She is the Principal Investigator of the research project “Resisting Inter-Scalar Authoritarian Networks and Coalitions” (2026-2029, funded by the European Commission under Horizon Europe grant no. 101286676).
The People, Power, Politics podcast brings you the latest insights into the factors that are shaping and re-shaping our political world. It is brought to you by the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR) based at the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. Transcript for this episode here.

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What are Taiwan’s ties with the Baltic States? This episode puts Estonia in the spotlight and familiarizes listeners with key developments in Estonia-Taiwan relations against the backdrop of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Lithuania’s decision to open a Taiwanese Representative Office in Vilnius, and growing tensions between the EU and China. The guest - Mart Tšernjuk from the University of Tartu - has been working on this topic for a number of years and published both in Estonian and English. One of his most recent publications is a chapter in an open-source book Partners in Need, Partners Indeed? Tracking Europe-Taiwan Relations Amidst Global Disruption (Central European Institute of Asian Studies, 2025).
Mart Tšernjuk works at the University of Tartu as a lecturer in Chinese language and culture and as the Coordinator of Taiwanese Affairs at the Asia Centre. He is also President of the Estonian Oriental Society.
The episode is hosted by Linas Didvalis, an Associate Professor at Centre for Asian Studies at Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania.
The Nordic Asia Podcast is a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region, brought to you by the following academic partners: Asia Centre, University of Tartu (Estonia), Asian studies, University of Helsinki (Finland), Centre for Asian Studies, Vytautas Magnus University (Lithuania), Centre for East Asian Studies, University of Turku (Finland), Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University (Sweden) and Centre for South Asian Democracy, University of Oslo (Norway).
We aim to produce timely, topical and well-edited discussions of new research and developments about Asia.

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Fascists of the World, Unite?: A History of Fascist Internationalism in the 1930s (de Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2025) analyzes the ideas and forms of international cooperation between Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and fascist movements from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland, and Britain. The study examines how fascists attempted to unite across borders by forming international organizations and networks, hosting conferences and exhibitions, disseminating multilingual publications, and exchanging propaganda. Their transnational cooperation was fuelled by shared ideas of ultranationalism, anti-liberalism, anti-communism, antisemitism, racism, white supremacism, and Europeanism. The book argues that fascist internationalism, marked by contradictions, limitations, and an Italo-German rivalry, emerged in the 1930s as a counter-reaction to liberal and communist internationalism. The epilogue discusses reverberations in the Second World War and the postwar period and outlines the relevance of this history for understanding contemporary forms of far-right internationalism.

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Romania, the Little Entente and the Struggle for Europe (Bloomsbury, 2026) is the first in-depth, English-language study of Romania's role in the Little Entente-an alliance formed with Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia to defend the territorial status quo in Central and Eastern Europe after the First World War. While this alliance has often been dismissed in international historiography as peripheral, this book argues that the Little Entente was a critical, albeit fragile, experiment in regional security and interwar diplomacy. Anchored in Romania's foreign policy, it reinterprets the alliance as a revealing case study in small-state agency, collective security, and the entropic pressures of the post-war order. Whilst drawing on a wide range of Romanian diplomatic archives, press materials, and memoirs, many of which remain underutilized in anglophone scholarship, Grey also situates Romania's actions within the larger European context, assessing how regional alliances engaged with the League of Nations and evolving relationships with France, Germany, Italy, and Soviet Russia. Romania, the Little Entente and the Struggle for Europe moves beyond simplistic narratives of failure and instead presents a nuanced portrait of the Little Entente as a fragile, flawed, but earnest effort to secure peace in a precarious international order-one whose lessons resonate powerfully today.

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In this episode, hosts Claudia Radiven and Amina Easat-Daas were joined by Farid Hafez to discuss his most recently published book Governing Islam in Austria and Germany: From Colonial Times to the Present (Oxford UP, 2026). Hafez’s recent work centres on the comparative analysis of the Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia-Herzegovina and the German rule in Tanzania, Togo and Cameroon, and in particular their respective treatment of Muslims in each case to then in turn shed light on the current governing of Muslimness in both. Farid Hafez is an assistant professor in International Relations at William and Mary, and also a senior researcher at Georgetown University.

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