Category Archives: democratic reform overseas

an international discussion of polarization

Last October, THE CIVICS Innovation Hub and the European School of Politics convened an international group in Istanbul for a conversation about “trust and polarisation.” Kameliya Tomova has written a nice summary. I’ll paste the portion that mentions me below and recommend the rest as well. (Note that I was talking here about the world, not necessarily or specifically about US politics.)

Peter Levine, political theorist and civic scholar, cautioned against treating all forms of division as equivalent. “Is the problem that two sides are too far apart,” he asked, “or that one side is organised around hate and the other around love and dignity?” The answer to that question, he suggested, has profound consequences for whether and how we even attempt dialogue. Levine argued that not all polarisation reflects symmetrical extremes — sometimes one side advances exclusion while the other defends basic rights. In such cases, the work of bridging may look very different, or may not be appropriate at all.

Building on this concern, human rights and peace activist Harsh Mander warned that insisting on symmetry between “sides” can normalise authoritarian or dehumanising positions. Drawing on his experience in India, he asked: “If I say Muslims deserve to live with dignity, and that’s seen as an ‘extreme’ view, then what is the centre? Mild dehumanisation?” The language of depolarisation and how broadly it’s currently being used, he argued, risks collapsing injustice into mere disagreement if moral asymmetries are not explicitly acknowledged.

Others spoke of perception gaps — the distance between what we think others believe and what they actually do. When people have limited direct contact and rely instead on distorted signals from online spaces, they tend to assume others hold more extreme and internally consistent positions than is often the case. Peter Levine noted that quantitative research frequently reinforces this assumption by treating political identities as coherent blocks — for example, presuming that someone who holds a conservative position on one issue will do so across others. In practice, he argued, people’s views are far more fragmented and situational. These misperceptions reduce willingness to cooperate, until direct interaction or clearer information disrupts the assumed coherence of the “other side”.

notes from the West Bank

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I spent the Thanksgiving break in the West Bank (via Israel). I visited two Palestinian universities, Bethlehem and An-Najah. I presented at both institutions and met students, faculty, administrators, and alumni, hoping to create or strengthen relationships and perhaps contribute just a bit to Palestinian higher education. Collaborative relationships with outside colleagues represent “social capital” that can benefit an institution, and that’s what I wanted to offer.

In all, I met more than 100 Palestinians as well as two Israelis whom I admire. Thanks to kind and well-informed hosts in the West Bank, I also had the chance to observe significant aspects of the current situation there. My visit was brief; my observations are superficial. Nevertheless, my packed three and a half days in the West Bank left vivid memories that will take me a long time to process.

For instance, I recall the contrast between two scenes.

In the Balata refugee camp—a zone of intensely concentrated poverty—I watch children literally playing with fire in the darkness, carrying burning garbage to make a pretend lethal trap for Israeli soldiers who frequently raid the camp later at night. Many of the walls are plastered with the photographs and names of armed young men (five to ten years older than the kids on the street) who have been killed.

On the other hand, in a classroom at An-Najah, I meet with about 65 earnest and impressive students of disciplines from computer science and medicine to English literature who aspire to study abroad. For two hours (until a driver arrives to take me to Tel Aviv), they ask me questions about admissions, financial aid, different kinds of degrees, and how to prepare to be competitive.

I also vividly recall walking around the partly excavated archaeological site of Sebastia, formerly a palace and city where many Christians and Muslims believe that John the Baptist is buried. You step on scattered tesserae as you explore the hill, set in a classic West Bank landscape of olive orchards, scattered Palestinian villages and visible Israeli settlements, and military installations on the mountaintops.

Finally, I hear a sophisticated and nuanced conversation about strategies for improving gender equity in Palestine, addressing the importance of women leaders in civil society and government, the pros and cons of treating feminism as a distinct agenda, the relevance and limitation of legal rights, and—as one woman said—the pattern that men start wars and women pay the steepest price of war. I sense that this is a debate among colleagues who already know and respect one another’s views but who cannot quite agree—which is just how things should be in a university.

Trump, Modi, Erdogan

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I am flying back to the USA after a meeting in Istanbul with activists and NGO leaders from six or more countries. (By the way, I don’t think that all of them could have met in the USA because of our government’s visa policies and treatment of visitors.)

One of the many benefits of the meeting was to challenge a framework that I have been using which treats leaders like Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan as examples of the same phenomenon. These men are both similar and different, and it’s important to keep the differences in mind.

All three (it seems to me) are national narcissists, meaning that they believe their own country is the best yet disrespected (Cislak & Cichocka 2023). All espouse a form of populism: the idea that they enjoy the united support of the true nation, whereas opponents and critics are enemies of the people. All identify a favored ethnic and/or religious majority as the authentic country and its rightful rulers.

All favor aggressive state economic interventions while favoring allied businesses and industries (and making money from these alliances). All prefer splashy infrastructure projects to providing consistently decent public services. To be generous, we could say that they each “see like a state” (Scott 1998). And they all use a similar toolkit. They don’t cancel elections or openly suspend (most) constitutional rights but rather prosecute opponents and use economic pressure against the producers of speech: publishers and universities (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018).

As for the differences:

Modi represents a century-old effort to establish Hindu supremacy in India. Islamophobia is central to this project (Bhatia 2024). It already inspires regular violence, and it has the potential to spark vast destruction. Modi’s party and government are disciplined. Their agenda is not only social control or personal profit but also redefining a nation in a way that would exclude 200 million of its citizens.

Erdogan, I think, began by opening Turkish politics and civil society to groups and perspectives that deserved representation, including but not limited to observant Muslims. He made appropriate reforms. He is the kind of leader who should have retired a decade ago, in which case he could now travel the international circuit as an elder statesman with some genuine contributions to his name. Alas, he crossed many bright lines by jailing opponents and crushing opposition, perhaps in part because he sincerely believes that he is indispensable. But his managerial record is now quite poor.

Trump represents political views that he did not invent. He espouses familiar forms of xenophobia, chauvinism, and aggrieved nationalism. But I interpret Trump as more transactional than his counterparts in Turkey and India. For many voters, he offers a deal: better economic outcomes in return for legal impunity, the ability to settle scores, praise and monuments, and lots of sheer cash.

Since Trump’s relationships are always self-interested, they are also relatively fragile. I think an economic downturn would break his implicit contract with voters, lowering his approval by 10 points, and that would make him an increasingly problematic ally for Republican politicians. I can see him being discarded (not necessarily impeached, but rendered a lame duck) in a way that I cannot quite see for the regimes represented by Modi or Erdogan.

Sources: Cislak, A., & Cichocka, A. (2023). National narcissism in politics and public understanding of science. Nature Reviews Psychology, 2(12), 740-750; James C . Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (Yale, 1998) Stevnb Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (Crown 2018), and Rahul Bhatia,, The New India (Abacus, 2025)

teaching Civic Studies in Kyiv

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This reflection is originally published on From Many, We the Charles F. Kettering Foundation blog series that highlights the insights of thought leaders dedicated to the idea of inclusive democracy.

I went to Kyiv, Ukraine, June 2–7, 2025, to offer a short course on Civic Studies at the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE).

I wanted to do something useful in Ukraine. Ukrainians earned their democracy by accomplishing massive nonviolent popular revolutions in 2004–2005 and 2013–2014. Their republic stands as a rebuke to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has tried to destroy it for more than a decade. In addition to wanting to express solidarity, I also wanted to learn from them and to understand more about civil society in the context of war.

On the Ground in Kyiv

As I traveled toward Kyiv, the tempo of the conflict was increasing. First, the Russians intensified strikes on civilian targets. Then Ukrainian special forces achieved a remarkable attack on Russian strategic bombers, which form part of the Russian nuclear triad. President Putin swore to retaliate—a threat that President Trump repeated without any criticism. Some retaliation then unfolded while I was in Kyiv, although Putin may still be looking for ways to do far worse. The Thursday of my visit was the second-most intense night of strikes on Ukrainian civilians in the war to that date.

I was safe, in part because my hotel had a massive, three-story underground garage. From the bottom level, with heavy summertime HVAC running, I couldn’t even hear the strikes on our district, Solom?yan?sky, or the Ukrainian air defenses. I then left Kyiv after the planned five days, which is a blink of an eye compared to the experience of living with this war for three years so far. Most Ukrainians seem resigned to an indefinite future of the same.

Air raid alerts sound several times every day. Mostly, an alert does not result in an actual attack. The Russians send up a MiG (military aircraft) to cause an air alert and disrupt everyone’s day. We are all familiar with disruptions, but it is different to face a hostile state that is trying to maximize inconvenience for years on end. The Russians choose the times and methods of their attacks for that purpose. My class had to relocate to a bomb shelter while we were doing our introductions on the first day and when the participants were offering their final reflections at the very end. Of course, this was a coincidence (Putin did not know or care about my course), but the point is that anything one tries to accomplish is subject to disruption.

Often, the raids are real. The Russians deploy swarms of Iranian shahed drones that buzz around the city, threatening civilian targets. I am told that they sound like Vespa scooters. Most Ukrainians do not have deep basements under their homes—some say they have no shelter at all. So, they listen to the drones’ buzz and the Ukrainian air defenses.

At a certain point, the shaheds crash into apartment buildings, power infrastructure, schools, or any targets that the Russians choose. Meanwhile, MiGs are launching cruise missiles from hundreds of miles away. The popular Telegram channels (with automatic English translation) are used by civilians to report drones or missiles flying overhead. “Chernihiv, heading south!” “The cruise missile is turning west!”

Ukrainian civilians face constant choices: Go to the subway station or wait this one out? Try to move to an apartment on a lower floor? Try to emigrate? And many have relatives on the frontlines.

They report handling stress in various ways. One confident young man told me that he had thought he was fine until his first night on a trip to Poland, when there was a thunderstorm and he found himself trembling and weeping. His guard was finally down. A clinical psychology professor told me that PTSD is a misnomer, because the trauma is not “post.”

I wanted to understand whether such a violent context would require changes in the course material that I usually present.

The Course

With colleagues in the United States and overseas, I have developed a syllabus for an introductory course in Civic Studies and have offered it many times before in several countries. Indeed, I had helped to lead a version in Ukraine in 2015.

I hoped that the course would be useful for Ukrainians who are active in their own civil society—or who want to act—and who struggle with specific challenges, such as the disruptions of war, endemic corruption, and the difficulty of holding robust public debates in full view of a foreign enemy. I was interested in whether Ukrainian civic leaders had changed their thinking since the full-scale invasion of 2022.

Although my course was open to undergraduates, the participants turned out to be professionals who work for Ukrainian nonprofit organizations, plus some entrepreneurs. At least three participants had free time for studying civics because they had recently lost jobs that had been funded by USAID.

In essence, the course addresses three questions that arise for anyone who wants to preserve or improve society.

First are questions of collective action: What kinds of rules and norms help groups to coordinate individuals’ action so that they can accomplish goals together?
Second are questions of dialogue and deliberation: How should people discuss disagreements about values and make wise decisions together?
And third are questions of exclusion. When institutions (or even whole populations) refuse to collaborate or deliberate with us, how can we compel them to engage constructively without using violence? This last topic turns our attention toward nonviolent social movements.

Our curriculum represents a respectful challenge to definitions of “civic education” that emphasize the national government and its constitution. In Civic Studies, we treat any sovereign republic as one venue among many for deliberation and collective action, and we see citizens as people who may choose to belong to many overlapping groups at various scales.

For the most part, my course unfolded as usual. Near the end, at least two participants wanted me to say how different I had found them from the other people I had taught in other countries. My honest answer was that they were not too different. Active participants in civil society everywhere seem to have generally similar concerns and perspectives.

Perhaps this group was a bit less adversarial than the participants in my previous courses. In the last segment, I always give students instructions for organizing an advocacy effort, and I play the “target” of their advocacy. This group asked me to role-play the chair of the board of KSE. They then chose to present me with a rather good idea for a new program. I do not know whether their gentleness toward a hypothetical authority-figure was representative of Ukrainian civil society, but I found it unusual.

In general, my experience in Kyiv reinforced my confidence in the Civic Studies curriculum, but it did challenge me in some valuable ways.

For one thing, the curriculum presumes that the public sphere should be free and vibrant, full of debate about conflicting values. On the surface, Ukraine is not having a very robust, public debate about existential questions, such as whether it would be worth a vast sacrifice to try to regain occupied territories or whether Vladimir Zelensky is the best available leader.

One explanation is that the answers are clear; the government enjoys a broad consensus. Another explanation is that people are voluntarily keeping diverse opinions to themselves because debating and disagreeing feel wrong; it undermines solidarity. Particularly while the government negotiates with a foreign enemy, it may seem wiser to leave such matters to leaders and not to publicly discuss what Ukrainians would be willing to concede. (After all, the Russians could watch the debate.) Finally, to some extent, the Zelensky government may discourage dissent, not through censorship and violence but by dominating the Parliament and media.

I did not press the class to tell me what they thought about the quality of their national debate because the question did not feel sufficiently respectful in the moment. I am still pondering the appropriate role of debate when a nation is under attack.

Another assumption of the Civic Studies curriculum is the value of nonviolent civil resistance, something that Ukrainians experienced in 2004–2005 and 2013–2014. I can testify that it is difficult to talk about nonviolence in wartime. When I emerged from the shelter on Friday morning, I was not exactly in the mood for reconciliation with Russians.

That said, participants seemed open to my point that their relationships to their own fellow citizens and to Ukrainian institutions must almost always be nonviolent, and therefore it is important to learn nonviolent methods for social change.

Finally, I noticed that concepts of patriotism and honor were more prominent in my own mind than usual. Patriotism is often a central value in civic education curricula that are required around the world, including in the US. In contrast, the ideal of patriotism is less prominent in Civic Studies because the nation-state itself is not our focus. In fact, patriotism can rationalize unjust favoritism for people who hold legal citizenship while excluding others.

Nevertheless, I believe that American patriotism was my most basic motivation for going to Ukraine (along with curiosity about what Ukrainians would tell me). I consider our government’s current betrayal of Ukraine to be a stain on our honor. I feel dishonored because I love my country. If I lacked patriotism, then this shame would not attach to me. It was a privilege and a source of satisfaction to be able to tell Ukrainians that many Americans stand by them.

Peter Levine, a Kettering Foundation board member, is the Lincoln Filene Professor of Citizenship and Public Service in Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life and the director of Tufts’ Civic Studies Program. He most recent book is What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life.

from Ukraine (1)

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I am aboard a train from Warsaw to Kyiv, well into Ukrainian territory now. I hope to write something of substance about my week in this country, but my main reflections should wait until I have listened and learned and found the right voice.

I don’t want to pretend to any real knowledge based on a few days in a large country where I cannot even fluently decode the alphabet, let alone study the range of opinion. (I have been here three times before, but always as a brief and superficial observer, which will be the case again this week.)

And I want to find a voice than it not about me, because more than 35 million people live here all the time. Everyone else on this train holds a Ukrainian passport; I saw the whole stack in the arms of the border guard. The people who spend months and years in a war deserve attention, not the guy with the dark-blue passport who can leave when he wants.

I have come in solidarity. That is not a big thing to do; it is a small thing. But it is not nothing, and it seems important right now not to do nothing. Solidarity, plus a desire to learn from activists here, explains my visit.

For the moment, I will just share that a rail journey from Warsaw via Chelm to Kyiv seems haunted. It’s a journey from the site of the Warsaw ghetto, via a town where 60 Jews out of 15,000 survived, to the site of Babi Yar. Our path cuts through the Pale of Settlement, albeit perhaps south of its middle and south of the part of Belarus from which my paternal ancestors escaped in the early 1900s. Trains have rolled back and forth in this region with cargoes of people for mass murder and with soldiers to kill and be killed. (We are currently stopped in Kovel, whose large Jewish community was wiped out, for the most part on the single day of June 28, 1941).

The train that I am riding must have already served the Soviet Union, and the vast majority of the passengers today are women and small children—presumably because most Ukrainian men are not allowed to exit. As we move past farms and through birch-sprinkled woods, the past seems very close.