Power, Policing, and Politics: The Rise of Authoritarianism in Central America
In-person, Members-only
Tuesday, October 14, 2025| 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM ET
Over the past decade, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras have experienced a resurgence of authoritarian practices. Leaders have expanded executive power, undermined judicial independence, curtailed press freedom, and increased the use of mass incarceration and militarized policing—all under the banner of security and stability. These developments echo past dictatorships but take on new forms in today’s political and technological context, connecting local governance to broader global trends of democratic backsliding. What tactics are modern authoritarian regimes using, and how do they differ from past dictatorships? How can civil society and international actors push back against democratic erosion? What lessons can be learned from countries on a different trajectory, like Guatemala? And what do these trends mean for the future of democracy in the region and globally? Join us on Tuesday, October 14 from 12:00 PM – 1:30 PM for a timely discussion with Noah Bullock, Executive Director of Cristosal, and Marc Edelman, Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center where we will delve into these questions and more.
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SPEAKERS:
Noah Bullock
Noah Bullock has served as Executive Director of Cristosal in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras since 2010. He first came to El Salvador as a Cristosal human rights intern in 2005 after graduating from the University of Montana in Peace and Conflict Studies. In 2007, Noah became the Director of the Community Development Program. Three years later, he became Cristosal’s first Executive Director in El Salvador. Noah studied in 2001 at the International Institute for Conflict Research (INCORE), a joint project of the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, and the United Nations University. He graduated cum laude with a postgraduate certificate in Local Development from the José Simeón Cañas Central American University in 2009.
Marc Edelman
Dr. Marc Edelman is a professor in the Department of Anthropology, teaching courses on Grassroots Movements and Social Change, Anthropology of Food, and Countryside and City. His main areas of interest include social movements, critical agrarian studies, Latin American studies, and historical and political anthropology. He serves as an advisor for the MA Program in Anthropology, has a half-time appointment in the PhD Program at the CUNY Graduate Center, and is affiliated with Hunter College’s Human Rights Program and Public Policy Program, both of which are based at Roosevelt House.
Dr. Edelman has written widely on transnational agrarian social movements. In Central America, he analyzed changing land tenure and land use patterns, production systems, rural class relations and peasant organizations. He has a longstanding concern with understanding changing forms of capitalism and with the politics of controlling markets, whether through welfare states, civil society pressure or global trade rules. Dr. Edelman has been gratified and inspired by the analytical acumen, insight and erudition of the small-scale agriculturalists and other rural people he has met during his fieldwork. He notes that some of the research insights that are most meaningful to him come from them rather than from fellow academics.
Dr. Edelman participated in the process that led to the adoption in 2018 of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas (UNDROP). In the 2000s, he was part of the revival of Critical Agrarian Studies, engaging in numerous international collaborative projects, publishing books and articles on pressing issues in the rural world, and mentoring early career scholars and students at CUNY and from around the world.
Dr. Edelman served as a president of the American Ethnological Society and has participated in various committees and task forces of the American Anthropological Association and the Latin American Studies Association. He has taught or been a visiting researcher at Yale, Fordham, Princeton, Columbia, the Institute for Advanced Study and the universities of Illinois, Tashkent (Uzbekistan) and Costa Rica, as well as the Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales (Ecuador), and for briefer periods, at the Universidad del Cauca, Colombia, and several European universities.
Dr. Edelman writes frequently on politics, human rights and development for non-academic audiences. His research has been published in the Journal of Rural Studies, the Journal of Peasant Studies, Third World Quarterly, and American Anthropologist, among others. He obtained his PhD from Columbia University.
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Image creator: Esteban Benites from Unsplash
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