Victoria Tin-bor Hui, Associate Professor of Political Science, University of Notre Dame

Teaching this series has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my academic career. Over time, the classroom has evolved from a site of instruction into a civic space where democracy is practiced through encounter, dialogue, and responsibility.

The initiative began in Fall 2025 as an upper-level Political Science Writing Seminar, Democracy Defenders in Exile, emphasizing intensive analytical writing, newsroom-style interviewing, and sustained revision. Students produced long-form stories, analytical reflections, and policy-oriented writing grounded in direct engagement with democracy defenders. In Spring 2026, the initiative expanded into the College Seminar Global Struggles for Democracy, broadening participation across the College of Arts and Letters and placing greater emphasis on oral engagement, public-facing Q&A sessions, action statements, and democratic civic learning across disciplines. While the formats differ, both versions of the course share a common goal: helping students move from passive observation toward disciplined democratic reasoning, public responsibility, and engagement with difficult political realities.

This pedagogical evolution has also shaped my broader thinking about democratic education. In my recent Journal of Democracy essay, "Defending Democracy Must Begin in the Classroom," I argue that democracy depends not only on democratic values but also on democratic capabilities cultivated through reconstructive learning and sustained practice. This website documents one effort to cultivate those capabilities through direct engagement with democracy defenders and sustained public responsibility. (Read the essay.)

The defining feature of the series is that students—not the professor—lead live Q&A interviews with frontline democracy defenders. Trained to conduct newsroom-style interviews, students must represent speakers' experiences with accuracy, attentiveness, and care. When defenders join in person, this responsibility becomes tangible: students are no longer discussing repression in the abstract, but engaging directly with those who have lived it. The result is a heightened sense of accountability that deepens both intellectual rigor and moral seriousness.

The courses are structured to cultivate reconstructive learning —the ability to construct, defend, and revise arguments under real-world constraints—and autocracy literacy, the capacity to diagnose how authoritarian regimes operate, suppress coordination, adapt to opposition, and reshape civic life. Students learn to move from theory to practice: to define goals, diagnose political systems, derive strategy from structural conditions, and respond to counterarguments in real time. Through repeated cycles of preparation, oral defense, revision, and public engagement, students discover that democratic thinking requires disciplined attention, willingness to revise assumptions, accountability to evidence, context, and lived experience, and the productive struggle through which understanding becomes their own.

Over time, I have seen students shift from distant observers of global repression to active learners who ask what role they themselves might play in defending democracy. They learn not only critical thinking, but also how to ask difficult questions, speak publicly with confidence, revise positions, and write with moral clarity. Equally important, these encounters are reciprocal. Many democracy defenders describe the exchanges as energizing, affirming that academic dialogue can also sustain those working under conditions of risk, uncertainty, and exile.

To extend the impact beyond the classroom, this website archives student reflections, stories, interviews, policy memos, and speaker conversations generated through different versions of the initiative. In this way, the conversations initiated here continue to travel—reinforcing the idea that education, when practiced as reconstructive learning, sustained engagement, and public responsibility, can contribute to the defense of democracy.

The “Democracy Defenders in Exile” series is supported by the University of Notre Dame’s Democracy Catalyst Grant; the Keough School of Global Affairs; the Kellogg Institute for International Studies; the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies; the Law School’s Lindsay and Matt Moroun Religious Liberty Clinic (Fall 2025); and the College of Arts and Letters’ Teaching Beyond the Classroom mid-size grant, the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, and the O’Brien Notre Dame International Security Center (Spring 2026).

A multi-year grant from the Kellogg Institute for International Studies will support the continuation and expansion of the series from Fall 2026 through Spring 2029.