Power, Policing, and Politics: The Rise of Authoritarianism in Central America
In-person | Virtual
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
Marc Edelman has been on the faculty at Hunter and the CUNY Graduate Center for thirty-one years. He has also taught or been a visiting researcher at the University of Costa Rica, Tashkent State University in Soviet Uzbekistan, the Institute for Advanced Study, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, the Universidad del Cauca in Colombia, and the Instituto de Altos Estudios Nacionales in Ecuador. He was part of the revival of critical agrarian studies in the 2000s and accompanied the process in the United Nations Human Rights Council that led to the 2018 adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and Other People Working in Rural Areas. Edelman’s latest books are Peasant Politics of the Twenty-first Century: Transnational Social Movements and Agrarian Change (Cornell, 2024) and the coedited volume Climate Change and Critical Agrarian Studies (Routledge, 2024).
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