Courtesy of Nina Johnson
Lewis & Clark’s 64th International Affairs Symposium, held April 6-8, centered on the theme of rising authoritarianism, titled: “Crumbling Pillars: The Age of Authoritarianism.” With global freedom declining in 54 countries over the last year, per Freedom House, the symposium pushed students to confront not just the cause of democratic backsliding, but how to respond.
Unlike previous years, the symposium expanded beyond the traditional lectures and debates, incorporating activism, personal storytelling and community engagement to explore authoritarianism from multiple angles.
The Mossy Log attended several of the events put on during the week.
Write for Rights — April 6
The symposium started with a Write for Rights letter writing campaign held in Watzek Library that encouraged students to advocate on issues ranging from local policy to international human rights. Inspired by Amnesty International’s annual campaign, the event was designed to make political engagement accessible.
Gwen Daoust ’26, a member of the symposium’s steering committee, gave insight into the planning process. The event was partially inspired by Daoust’s summer experience working in immigration support services.
“Over the summer, I worked for an immigration support office, and once over the summer we had a bunch of letters sent to us. The people I worked with appreciated it a lot, and I feel like it promotes a lot of motivation,” she said.
At each event, including Write for Rights, was a faux United Nations passport customized by the symposium. The passport itself was a part of a raffle with three prizes. Upon opening it, the raffle’s rules were outlined on the lefthand side — when visiting any IA symposium event (or its two stations in JR Howard and Watzek), you could collect a new stamp, which counted as one raffle entry each.
Keynote Address by Richard Wolff — April 6
The symposium’s keynote address “Scapegoats & Sellouts: Narratives of Capitalist Deception” featured Richard Wolff, a professor emeritus of economics at University of Massachusetts Amherst, who argued that modern capitalism itself fosters authoritarian structures, particularly in the workplace.
Wolff was described in 2012 by the New York Times as “America’s most prominent Marxist economist.”
Wolff’s theory argues for a transition away from the current hierarchical — and, crucially, “authoritarian” — model of corporate enterprise in our economy. In this system, corporate decisions are made by an elite board of directors, and a CEO is granted near-total control over workers’ fate. He instead promotes a more “democratic” model of worker-owned cooperatives, where the workers of a company also function as its board of directors.
“As you cross the threshold into your workplace, something magical happens,” Wolff said. “Any democratic control you have over the people dictating what you do has been magically erased.”
Drawing on the popular narrative of modern democratic regimes as being from ancient Greek heritage, Wolff pointed out that ancient Athenian society was not the “great model of democracy” wherein all participated equally, but built off the backs of an enslaved class.
“Ancient Athens … was better understood as a model of the tense contradiction, the tense coexistence of some democracy for some people and authoritarianism for a lot of other people — the majority,” he said.
He then connected this unresolved tension between the slave class and the citizen class in Athens to our modern struggle against authoritarianism.
Wolff made the case that we have unnecessarily separated our democracy between our residential and work communities. While we have democracy over our residential community, Wolff argued, being able to elect our representatives in government based on our address, we have no control over the workplace community where we spend a significant portion of our time.
Wolff then transitioned into his interpretation of a key aspect of Marx’s theory of historical materialism. According to Marx, history is driven by conflicts between opposing economic classes, resulting in a new economic regime. As Wolff argues, in the case of Athens, the main class conflict was between master and slave.
Wolff used Marx’s concept of the stages of historical development — with states developing from slave societies, to feudalism, to capitalism after class conflicts led to economic regime change — to illustrate how worker’s cooperatives were the next stage in an inevitable historical line.
“We’ve had lots of systems, capitalism is only the most recent. Every system of which the human race has any record was born, evolved and died. You live in capitalism, which has been born… It has evolved over time, you’ve probably noticed that. And you know what the next stage is? Death. It’s not a question of whether, it’s only a question of when,” Wolff said.
Wolff portrayed the American and French revolutions as the death of feudalism and the birth of capitalism — the rule by the “bourgeoisie,” the urban employers with no noble title, who gained their wealth from the profits of private enterprise rather than through ruling over an estate of serfs. Wolff emphasized the key contradiction of these revolutions.
Wolff then asserted that workplace democracy in the form of worker’s cooperatives was the next stage of economic and historical development — one of existential importance.
“If you want to end the power, the threat, the danger of authoritarianism … then you need to recognize that the most important institution that now protects, advances and reproduces authoritarianism every day is the capitalist enterprise,” he said.
Wolff then highlighted the recent election of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist, as proof that people in the modern day desire an alternative to capitalism.
He concluded that students should not feel discouraged, encouraging them to work to resolve the tension between authoritarianism and democracy.
“(I hope) that your efforts, your brains, your muscle, your time, your energy will go in the direction of the democratic alternative and not stop at your workplace, as if there were an invisible fence that prevented you from demanding at your job the freedoms, the opportunities that you have everywhere else,” Wolff said.
Storytelling Event with The Immigrant Story — April 7
Hosted in Agnes Flanagan Chapel, the symposium’s Storytelling Event was co-hosted by The Immigrant Story, a nonprofit organization which aims to build empathy by sharing the stories of immigrants and refugees. The event spotlighted the personal narratives of four members from the Portland community, who shared prepared remarks.
The first story was from Sonia Priscila Ticas. Born in El Divisadero, El Salvador, she immigrated to Los Angeles at age 11, fleeing a civil war. Ticas fled with her siblings through a hole in the barbed wire fence at the border between Mexico and California. They were met by a man who told them to follow him. They complied, and after hours of separation met with their grandmother who resided in Los Angeles.
“Suddenly, I was eligible for amnesty. That irony wasn’t lost in me. We were being pardoned for fleeing a war the United States helped keep alive,” she said.
The next story was told by Rama Youssef, who fled the Syrian Civil War at the age of 12 after her mother brought her to stay with a married sister in the U.S. Youssef’s narrative has been previously featured in the Oregonian.
“One morning, I remembered that my mom shook me awake asking me, ‘Did you just hear this?’ She had just heard an explosion… we rented a car to drive away from the danger. But all the roads were blocked off, and the only way to escape was to drive by where the explosion had happened … I remember seeing pools of blood, body parts, even a whole hand lying on the pavement,” she recalled.
For Youssef, her arrival in the U.S. offered a long-awaited reprieve from the conflict.
“When my mom and I came to the USA, we landed in California in 2012. It was such a relief to be away from the war, from the fear, from never knowing what would happen next.”
However, her mom had to leave her behind in the U.S., leaving Youssef couch surfing. By 2016 she had found herself in Portland with everything she owned. Youssef was proactive though, never waiting for a miracle. She went to a local sandwich shop and got her first job; she begged for a spot at a local Catholic school even after being told it was too late. She later got her first internship at a newspaper, and she says that is where she created a community. Yousef goes to UCLA and is studying legal career injustice.
Next, organizers introduced Saron Khut, a survivor of the Cambodian Killing Fields genocide. After his father was killed by the Khmer Rouge when he was five years old, Khut’s family moved across towns for five more years, eventually fleeing his native Cambodia and becoming refugees in Thailand. In 1981, his family moved to Portland, Oregon.
“They tied him up, dragged him out and beat him to death,” Khut recalled of his father’s death.
During his escape from Cambodia, Khut endured an arduous journey through landmines, booby traps and patrol cars. His journey included a pivotal moment when a baby in their travel group started to cry, potentially revealing their location. This left his group a difficult decision — whether to kill the baby, leave the whole family behind, or wait for the baby to stop crying. They were planning to leave the family behind, but right at that moment he stopped crying.
Khut’s family then made it to a refugee camp in Thailand, which he called “heaven.” Khut has since worked to build up the community that sustained him, establishing the Cambodian restaurant Mekong Bistro in 2012.
The final speaker was Samir Mustafic, who lived through the war between Bosnia and Serbia. Born in 1972, Mustafic was only 21 when his mother and sister were killed in a 1993 bombing. Mustafic, who is from a small town, is a combat veteran from the war. After becoming injured during the war, he was sent to the U.S. for treatment, leading to his eventual permanent immigration.
“Some time later, my best friend found me. He bandaged my arm and did his best to treat my other injuries. And now I know he actually saved my life. … My injuries were so severe that in order for me to get the care that I needed, I would have to leave Bosnia. In war, everything can become a part of an exchange,” he said.
Mustafic came to the United States for rehabilitation where he met his wife and had children, one of whom is current LC student Ajsa Mustafic ’28. Mustafic later returned to his village, reconnecting with family and friends. He now works for the state of Oregon as a software architect.
Debate with Oren Samet and Susan Strokes on The Authoritarian Threat: Imported or Homegrown? — April 7
The symposium’s signature debate, moderated by Leah Gilbert, associate professor of political science, examined whether authoritarianism is primarily driven by domestic or international forces.
The debate featured Susan Strokes — the Tiffany and Margaret Blake distinguished service professor of political science at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Center on Democracy — who argued that authoritarian regimes primarily spread from domestic wealth inequality.
“The United States is a highly unusual advanced democracy. We’re much more unequal than many other advanced democracies around the globe,” Stokes said.
Her counterpart, Oren Samet, is the Einstein-Moos postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and made the case for the model of authoritarian diffusion, which suggests that non-democratic institutions and cultural norms spread between countries, influencing those countries’ political systems.
“Since we’re seeing this global phenomenon, that should maybe lead us to think about global explanations, international explanations,” Samet said.
Samet argued that leaders often adopt strategies from one another, creating a “demonstration effect” that accelerates democratic erosion worldwide.
While the event was framed as a debate, Samet and Strokes overwhelmingly found agreement in their arguments, with Strokes even referring to the two as “friends.”
After an exchange of their central arguments, Samet and Strokes took questions from the audience.
Live Podcast Recording — April 8
The symposium also featured a live podcast recording with international affairs journalist Mark Leon Goldberg, who hosted a conversation with International Affairs Department Chair Kyle Lascurettes on the role of global institutions in addressing democratic backsliding.
Goldberg, known for his “Global Dispatches” podcast and reporting on under-covered international issues, has been recognized for advancing “humanitarian journalism,” which emphasizes both objectivity and the equal value of all lives.
The discussion focused on how organizations like the United Nations respond to rising authoritarianism, as well as the challenges they face in an increasingly fragmented global order.
Like with other events, the podcast discussion opened for a series of student questions.
Across events, the symposium returned to a central tension: whether authoritarianism is driven by systems, leaders or global forces — and what responsibility individuals have in confronting it. By combining activism, debate and personal storytelling, this year’s symposium challenged students not just to analyze democratic decline, but to consider their role in resisting it.
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