Prof. Albena Azmanova: Victimhood Olympics - Precarity Capitalism and the Competition for Patronage as Drivers of the Autocratic Turn in Liberal Democracies

We are very pleased to be hosting Prof. Albena Azmanova in our contribution to the regular seminar series of the School of Sociology and Social Policy.

Prof. Azmanova will be speaking to our Zygmunt Bauman centenary programme theme, 'Theorising the First Quarter Century of the New Millenium', and Dr Austin Harrington will be acting as discussant.

There is today a tangible and growing public appetite for autocracy within Western liberal democracies. Azmanova's talk asks what forms of justice are now mobilising the mutation of imperfect democracies into autocracies. The focus is on the social mechanism through which emancipatory struggles against structural inequalities have been subverted into strategies of oppression, evident in the conflicts surrounding EDI policies in the U.S. and Europe - the clash between, on one side, a left‑leaning ‘cancel culture’ defending vulnerable groups and, on the other, a militant Right opposing affirmative action in the name of non‑discrimination.

Azmanova will argue that self‑described ‘progressive forces’ have become ensnared in the ‘emancipation paradox’, a situation in which victims turn against other victims while structural causes remain unaddressed. She will trace this paradox to features of contemporary ‘precarity capitalism’, which generates both competition for victimhood as social capital and political patronage as a tool of population control. These antagonisms are products of specific historical conditions that emancipatory politics must seek to undo.

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Albena Azmanova is a professor of political science at City St George’s University of London with specialisation in critical social theory and political economy. Her research and teaching interests include, among other things, democratic theory, political epistemology, and critiques of contemporary capitalism. Her most recent research on the political economy and social psychology of the rise of populism in current-day democracies has received numerous awards. Professor Azmanova is a member of the expert group to the Independent Commission for Sustainable Equality of the European Parliament and Honorary Fellow of the Institute for Global Sustainable Development, University of Warwick. As a Senior Fellow at Open Society University Network’s Economic Democracy Initiative, led by Bard College, she is curating, with Pavlina Tcherneva, the symposium “Post-Neoliberalism: Pathways for Transformative Economics and Politics”. Professor Azmanova is founder and editor-in-chief (with James Chamberlain) of Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis and co-director of the Radical Critical Theory Circle. She also serves on the European Civic Academy’s Task Force to the European Civic Forum, among other advisory positions in international political institutions.