Museums after progress

Museums after progressEach year the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) Research Project led by the University of Gothenburg issues a report summarizing the status of democratic processes and politics around the world.The 2024 report makes for a sobering read.While there are roughly the same number of democracies in the world as autocracies (91 and 88 respectively), many more people now live in countries governed by autocratic regimes -71% of the global population in 2023, or 5.7 billion people.42 countries meanwhile are classed as "autocratizing," a label that indicates the weakening or wholesale suspension of often hard-won democratic values and standards.Troublingly, many of the countries currently undergoing processes of autocratization are economic and military regional and global powers (V-Dem, 2024, p. 10).While a simple binary of democratic/autocratic cannot do justice to the complex social, historical and economic factors underlying this geopolitical trend, the scale and pervasiveness of the shift towards authoritarianism -and the dangers that accompany it -cannot be ignored.As a recent article on the rise of "illiberal democracies" puts it, "the 21st century is a quarter complete.So it's the right moment to consider this century as one during which so much of what we assumed was given, solid and established by the end of the 20th century has cracked and crumbled" (Vaidhyanathan, 2025).Examples of this crumbling are numerous and extend beyond liberal democratic norms and principles.The Uppsala Conflict Data Program -another dispassionate Scandinavian chronicle of global affairs -identified 2022 and 2023 as the most conflictual years in the world since the end of the Cold War (Poast, 2023).In January 2025, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved the so-called "Doomsday Clock" to 89 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to catastrophe, citing climate change, biological threats, an increased risk of nuclear conflict, and the emergence of AI as ominous signals of the world's "existential predicament" (Mecklin, 2025).Scholars and policymakers in varied fields have begun to characterize this situation as a "polycrisis," wherein multiple crises reinforce one another to push already volatile global relations into harmful disequilibrium (Lawrence et al., 2024).Perhaps unsurprisingly given these intersecting forces, uncertainty about the present and future has risen dramatically in recent years; a 2022 special report by the United Nations Development Programme found that more than 6 in 7 people worldwide felt insecure, with even those benefiting from historically high levels of good health, wealth and education reporting greater anxiety than ten years previously (UNDP, 2022).The feedback loop between insecurity, uncertainty and the rise of autocratic regimes would require something much more than a short editorial to explore fully, but history tells us that experiences of polarization, hopelessness and enormous material gaps in wealth and privilege can lead to social and political upheaval, opening the door to emancipation or -converselynew forms of oppression and despotism.In her recent book Autocracy Inc., Anne Applebaum clarifies the stakes of such uncertainty, arguing that today's authoritarian leaders are adept at seeding and amplifying legitimate feelings of cynicism and futility to undercut ideas of transparency, accountability, justice and democracy wherever they are found (2024, pp.12-13).In stark contrast to authoritarian regimes of the past, which did typically promise a brighter future (at least for some), contemporary autocracies have largely retreated from progress as