From South Africa and Brazil to the United States and beyond, authoritarian forces are challenging democratic norms and meeting resistance from domestic and transnational actors.

The Transnational Law Institute (TLI, 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), have joint efforts to launch the Consortium on Global Resistance to Authoritarian Diffusion (GRAD Consortium) project, which will study authoritarian developments in selected countries and explore domestic and international resistance to them. We will look into autocratisation processes in Brazil, China, Hungary, India, Israel, Russia, South Africa and the United States.

The projects’ main questions are:

• What are the primary forms of autocratisation taking place today?
• What are the economic, social and political drivers of autocratisation?
• How are autocratic norms and practices diffused around the world?
• What forms of resistance have emerged within autocratising countries?
• What role have the legal system and lawyers played in the resistance to autocratisation?
• What are the sources of transnational resistance to autocratisation, how are they linked to domestic groups, and how effective have they been?

The GRAD Consortium has been launched in November 2022, with an event at The Dickson Poon School of Law featuring all partners in the consortium and guest international experts. The next event of GRAD will take place at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in September 2023 (the abstracts of some of the papers can be assessed here).