Editorial | Dynamics of inequalities, political shifts and democracies and the restlessness of our times

When we started at CEIS20 reflecting on the new strategic project and identifying the global challenges that would structure thematic lines of research, although the threats to democracy were already more than evident, having become increasingly acute since the Great Recession of 2008, we were far from imagining that the current situation, combining a multiplicity of factors, would surprise us and make interdisciplinary research in thematic line Dynamics of inequalities, political shifts and democracies absolutely urgent. In a more emotional than rational tone, and succumbing to the inseparability of the scientist and the citizen, we would dispense with these added reasons for legitimising the line.

Some see the current situation as the most dangerous moment since the end of the Second World War. In addition to a continuous trajectory of rapid and abrupt growth of parties of the (renewed) extreme right in Europe and other countries, a geopolitical strategy is giving shape to an articulated international agenda to dismantle liberal democracy, which is infecting even the parties of the system, such as the Republicans in the USA. Donald Trump's return to the US presidency, with the successive making and executing of unilateral decisions, defying and violating constitutional norms in a way that hasn't happened since 1865, according to the Harvard Law Review, appears to threaten democracy in the country and in the world.

The political weakening of the constitution as a system of checks and balances on presidential power, in the case of a power in the international system like the USA, opens the way to a historic fracture in international alignments with the liberal order since the Second World War, or even the First. Europe, despite its ability to move towards the ‘myth’ of supranationality, is still faced with the same historical dilemmas of internal and external incapacity. And while here we are confronted with the reality of the weakening of democracy, fellow citizens in other parts of the world aspire to be blessed with it for the first time.

Although the distressing current situation does not exhaust the scientific potential of thematic line Dynamics of inequalities, political shifts and democracies, it is prodigal in challenging the CEIS20 scientific community with a series of issues that need to be investigated: It confronts us with anachronistic and diachronic perspectives on the construction and fall of democracies; with the material and immaterial legacies of authoritarianisms; with theoretical revisits on nationalism; with (cor)relations between economic inequalities and electoral preferences, between political regimes and socio-economic development, between human mobility, (re)territorialisation and political ethno-territoriality; or with the problematisation of the effectiveness of public policies in the face of problems with a global dimension.

To these concerns and problematising derivations of the ‘dynamics of inequalities, political changes and democracies’, others can be added, with the integration of all the scientific and epistemological sensitivities of CEIS20, through the promotion of reflection, dialogue and collaborative research, aimed at producing integrated knowledge that materialises the line in a deep understanding of the socio-economic and political complexity of societies. ‘Our world, we insist, is new; its risks and opportunities are unprecedented.’ (Judt, 2008). If CEIS20 has given up the chronological exclusivism of its name, this is just as important as not ignoring chronology. ‘The 20th century has barely left us and already its disagreements and its dogmas, its ideals and its fears, are slipping into the obscurity of spurious memory.’ (Judt, 2008).