Authoritarian Legality Before Autocratic Legalism

Anthony Pereira revisits Latin America’s dictatorships to explain how law became a tool of political repression—and what those experiences reveal about the present.

Episode Number 4

Today, Fabio talks to Anthony Pereira, a political scientist who teaches at the King’s College, in London. Pereira is the author of Political (In)justice, a book on how Latin American dictatorships used the law to repress political dissidents, which he then labeled authoritarian legality.

Fabio and Pereira discuss how these lessons from the past could be used in efforts to understand present-day autocratic legalism and what Brazilianists got wrong about Brazil.

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