Safeguarding Scholarship in Emerging Autocracies: Preview of an APS Convention Workshop

We are at an inflection point. The world is now nearly evenly divided between democracies and autocracies, and the share of the global population living under autocratic regimes has surged from 50% to 72% in just two decades.

Even long-established democracies—the United States chief among them—are showing the hallmarks of democratic backsliding that scholars of authoritarianism have documented across Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela, and beyond.

Science and scholarship are among the first targets of autocrats when they seek to dismantle democracy. The core missions of universities—research, critical inquiry, expertise, and the transmission of complex knowledge—are anathema to autocrats.

In its first 15 months, the Trump administration has taken more than 300 documented actions against science:

• the National Institutes of Health terminated nearly 800 research projects, including almost half of all projects addressing vaccine hesitancy
• federal scientists were barred from contributing to international climate reports
• the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention instructed researchers to withdraw already accepted papers that did not conform to the administration’s political diktats
• all authors of the next National Climate Assessment were dismissed
• more than 6,000 international student visas were revoked, many targeting students for nothing more than political speech or activism

As one Hungarian scholar observed, the Trump administration may have done more damage to science in six weeks than Viktor Orbán managed in 15 years of sustained effort. The V-Dem Institute and the Financial Times have recently published quantitative data suggesting that democratic backsliding in the United States is far more rapid than it was in other autocratizing countries, including Russia.

On Thursday, May 28, as part of the APS Annual Convention in Barcelona, my colleagues, Vera Kempe (Abertay University) and Christina Pagel (University College London), and I will host a four-hour interactive workshop for scholars who want to understand what is happening, assess their own situation, and figure out how they can respond to autocratization.

The workshop builds on a series of online events we have been running since late 2025 and draws directly from our freely available Anti-Autocracy Handbook. To help us tailor the content to participants’ needs, we will be sending out a short pre-workshop questionnaire to registered attendees—so expect to hear from us before the day.

Related: New Anti-Autocracy Handbook Aims to Give Power Back to Scholars

The “3 Ps” of autocracy

Wherever we look—from Budapest to Brasília to Washington—autocrats follow the same playbook, and recognising it is the first step to resisting it. The three moves are so consistent across time and geography that they have come to define what democratic backsliding looks like in practice.

Populism frames the ruler as the sole authentic voice of “the people” against a corrupt, self-serving elite. It is a rhetorical move as old as demagoguery itself, but in its modern form it serves a specific function: to delegitimize opposition. If the leader is the people, then critics are by definition enemies of the people—and treating them as such becomes not just permissible but righteous. Universities, independent scientists, and critical media are particularly easy targets in this frame, cast as out-of-touch elites who look down on ordinary citizens and pursue their own agenda at the public’s expense. As recent scholarship confirms, populist leaders target academia precisely because universities embody the kind of evidence-based, pluralist reasoning that challenges their simplified, binary worldview.

Polarization deepens and weaponizes social divisions, sorting society into friends and enemies, us and them. Autocrats do not merely benefit from a divided society—they actively cultivate division because polarization makes collective resistance harder to organize and sustain. It also creates a permission structure: Once the other side has been sufficiently dehumanized, measures that would previously have been unthinkable become acceptable to a large enough portion of the population. The targeting of minority groups—LGBTQ+ communities, ethnic minorities, immigrants—is not incidental to autocratization; it is a core mechanism by which the process advances and tests its limits.

Post-truth completes the triad. By flooding the public sphere with disinformation, sowing confusion about basic facts, and attacking the institutions—journalism, academia, the judiciary—that exist to establish shared reality, autocrats undermine the very possibility of democratic accountability. As philosopher Hannah Arendt observed, the aim of totalitarian lying is not to make people believe the lie, but to ensure that nobody believes anything at all—and a people deprived of the capacity to distinguish truth from falsehood can be led anywhere. This is why science and scholarship are always early targets: not merely because scholars, including scientists, say inconvenient things, but because the entire enterprise of evidence-based inquiry represents a standing challenge to the authority of the strongman.

How the workshop is structured

The session will move between input and dialogue rather than delivering a one-way lecture. There will be three short presentations, each succeeded by structured discussion, before a collective brainstorming and summary session closes the afternoon.

I will set out the landscape of democratic backsliding, the 3 Ps, and the practical and psychological obstacles that scholars face—drawing on the Anti-Autocracy Handbook and on a risk-assessment framework that helps participants identify which actions are open to them.

Christina will ground the workshop in concrete, current evidence of what has happened already, what is coming, and how to track it. Her section will document what the Reform Party is likely to do to science and higher education in the United Kingdom, examine how the United States is actively working to undermine European democratic systems, and present evidence on the Alternative for Germany party’s assault on academic and civic norms in Germany (being compiled specifically for this workshop by colleagues Christoph Abels and Ulrike Hahn). A centerpiece will be the Trump Action Tracker—not just as a record of what has happened, but as a methodology: a model that participants can apply in their own national contexts to identify vulnerable institutions, raise the alarm early, and build the evidence base that effective collective action requires.

Vera will address the question that haunts us all but rarely gets asked directly: What if we don’t fully succeed? Drawing on thought from anthropology, psychology, and political science as well as the lived experience of those who grew up behind the Iron Curtain—a generation with no first-hand knowledge of democracy—she will argue that even where backsliding cannot be stopped in the short term, the cultural transmission of democratic knowledge and behavior across generations remains both possible and critical.

This raises urgent practical questions that the workshop will explore together: How do we identify and protect the civic structures—university senates, professional associations, learned societies—that transmit democratic behavior? How do we distinguish genuine civic institutions from those that have already been captured or weaponized? And how do we engage with professional organizations in ways that exercise, rather than quietly surrender, our democratic rights?

Know your risk

One of the most practically useful things we offer is a structured approach to personal risk assessment. Not everyone is equally exposed: A senior tenured professor who is a citizen faces a very different landscape from an early career researcher on a temporary visa, a person of color, or a member of the LGBTQ+ community. The workshop uses a risk-scoring framework developed by Christina to help participants honestly evaluate their own position—and to choose their response accordingly.

The psychological obstacles are real and deserve frank discussion. Anticipatory obedience—preemptively complying with what the regime might want before it even asks—is one of the most corrosive forces at work, as powerful institutions silence themselves in the hope of being spared. Self-censorship spreads through social networks like a contagion. And the familiar comfort of strategic silence—the idea that not responding to an attack is the safest course—is all too often exactly wrong.

Digital autonomy: A new frontier

A thread running through our planning has been the question of digital independence—not wholesale withdrawal from mainstream platforms, which could cut scholars off from the communities they need to reach, but building genuine autonomy: having options, knowing the trade-offs, and ensuring that a whimsical decision by a U.S. tech company cannot simply switch off our ability to communicate and collaborate. This sits alongside the more familiar digital safety agenda of protecting against doxxing, harassment, and surveillance—threats that fall disproportionately on women and those with intersectional identities.

Come ready to participate

This workshop is designed as a community-building event as much as an information session. We want to hear from participants as much as talk at them—what is working, what is not, and where the gaps in the resistance are. Research on nonviolent movements shows that when just 3.5% of a population actively participates in resistance, success becomes near-universal. Academia is a long way from that number. This workshop is one small step toward changing that.

If you are attending the 2026 APS Annual Convention in Barcelona and work in research or higher education, please join us and watch out for our pre-workshop questionnaire once you have registered.

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