Albena Azmanova: The Politics of Precarity and Patterns of Autocracy in Europe

Abstract: Two dynamics have been making their imprint on the political landscape of Europe over the past decade: the rise of economic inequality and the rise of far-right parties. Are the two phenomena related? And why isn’t the rage of impoverished workers fueling support for the left? Professor Azmanova will trace policy developments through which these processes have taken place, in order to disclose the political and economic logic behind the spread of autocratic rule in Europe.

Albena Azmanova is Professor of Political and Social Science at the University of Kent, Senior Fellow at OSUN Economic Democracy Initiative, Bard College, member of the Independent Commission for Sustainble Equality to the European Parliament, and Honorary Fellow at the Institute for Global Sustainable Development, University of Warwick.

Her research focuses on political and social transformations, with analyses of social justice and political judgment, democratic transition and consolidation, critiques of capitalism, social protest, and electoral mobilisation. In her last book, Capitalism on Edge. How Fighting Precarity Can Achieve Radical Change Without Crisis or Utopia (Columbia University Press, 2020) she identifies ubiquitous insecurity as politically generated social harm, traces its political consequences and charts an anti-precarity policy agenda. The book has received numerous awards, among which is the Michael Harrington Award, with which the American Political Science Association “recognizes an outstanding book that demonstrates how scholarship can be used in the struggle for a better world”, as well as the International Studies Association best book prize for International Political Economy.

Professor Azmanova has held academic positions at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna; The Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne; the University of California Berkeley; Harvard University; Sciences Po. Paris; and the New School for Social Research, New York.

She has worked as a policy advisor for a number of international organisations, most recently, for the European Trade Union Confederation, The European Civic Forum, and the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs.

Professor Azmanova is co-founder and co-Editor in Chief of Emancipations: a Journal of Critical Social Analysis, member of the editorial boards of the journals Review of Evolutionary Political Economy, Philosophy and Social Criticism, and  member of the International Advisory Board of the “Alternatives to Capitalism in the 21st Century” series of Bristol University Press.