ABOUT
The group was founded in 2022, in the run-up to that year’s general elections, to strengthen the academic response to attacks on Brazilian democracy and its electoral system.
At the time, international assessments recorded a marked erosion of Brazil’s democratic standing: the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project had reclassified the country from a liberal to an electoral democracy and placed it among the ten countries that had moved furthest toward autocratization over the preceding decade, and human rights organizations had warned of threats to public safety, to political opponents, and to the press.
The group’s premise is that Brazilian democracy needs the support of the national and international academic community to map attacks on it, to defend democratic institutions, and to improve democratic processes. It seeks to strengthen conversations surrounding the Brazilian case and its implications at the national and international levels.