Experts from all over the world joined us at the Dickson Poon School of Law to Launch a new project: the Consortium on Global Resistance to Authoritarian Diffusion, or simply GRAD. Co-director of TLI , Prof. Octavio Ferraz: "It was great to welcome at the Transnational Law Institute our friends from the US, Brazil, Hungary, India, South Africa and China to the first event of GRAD. Resistance to autocratisation is not only an important topic but one which lawyers are particularly well placed to study".
The Transnational Law Institute was happy to welcome to King's College London distinguished academics from all over the world on the 10th and 11th of November 2022, in order to launch our newest exciting project - Global Resistance to Authoritarian Diffusion (GRAD).
This project will study authoritarian developments in selected countries and focus on domestic and international resistance to them. In our launch event, we heard presentations on Brazil, China, Hungary, India, South Africa and the United States, as well as topical presentations on sanctions, transnational human rights resistance to authoritarianism and the political economy of autocratisation.
The GRAD Consortium is supported by the initial GRAD Partners: the TLI, based at The Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London; the Fundação Getúlio Vargas Law School in Sao Paulo (FGVLAW-SP), the University of Wisconsin Law School (UW), and the Project on Autocratic Legalism (PAL), an International Research Collaborative (IRC) within the Law and Society Association.
"It was great to welcome at the Transnational Law Institute our friends from the US, Brazil, Hungary, India, South Africa and China to the first event of GRAD. Resistance to autocratisation is not only an important topic but one which lawyers are particularly well placed to study, said Professor Octavio Ferraz, co-director of the TLI.
"There is plenty of writing on autocratisation processes and democratic decline, but not enough on legal resistance to those processes, and that is why this project is unique", explained Fabio de Sa e Silva, Assistant Professor of International Studies & Wick Cary Professor of Brazilian Studies.
Professor Oscar Vilheha Vieira, Professor of Constitutional Law and Dean at FGV São Paulo Law School, agrees: "the growing number of people living in countries going through a process of autocratisation since 2011 is scary. There is no doubt we live in a democratic crisis".
