Ivan Krastev

Fellowship

Mercator Fellowship Program

Granting institution

Period of the Fellowship

April 2019 - December 2019

Project title

The Future of Democracy

Project description

During his Mercator Fellowship, Ivan Krastev will explore how migration and demographic changes transform Western democracies. Western public imagination is captured by the arrival of migrants: those who have arrived and those who may yet arrive. At the same time, Western societies are ageing and their share of the global population is declining. What is the intense sensitivity to such demographic changes doing to Western democracies? How might present majorities react to the prospect of being outnumbered and outvoted? Such questions are at the heart of Krastev’s fellowship.

Short biography

Ivan Krastev is the chairman of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia and permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna. He is a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the Board of Trustees of The International Crisis Group and is a contributing opinion writer for the New York Times. Ivan was appointed as the Henry A. Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the John W. Kluge Center, Library of Congress (2018-2019). His latest books in English are “After Europe” (UPenn Press, May 2017) and “Democracy Disrupted. The Global Politics on Protest” (UPenn Press, May 2014). He is a co-author with Stephen Holmes of a forthcoming book “The Light that Failed” (with Penguin, autumn 2019) on perils of the politics of imitation.