The MORDOR project’s ‘Encyclopedia Tyrannica: A Research Guide to Authoritarianism’ (ibidem Verlag, April 2025) seeks to revolutionize education on authoritarian regimes by offering an open-access, comprehensive resource that combines global coverage, non-Western perspectives, and a learner-centered approach. Targeting students, educators, and researchers alike, it provides literature reviews, methodological guidance, and future research avenues. For educators its didactic companion offers lesson plans and user guides to design courses and curricula. This unique resource will foster better course creation, encourage new research on understudied regions and niche topics, and reduce errors in classifications and methodologies for both newcomers and experts in the field. Second, the project aims to influence EU democracy-support policies through its Policy Paper. By integrating insights from area studies and comparative politics, the paper provides innovative recommendations challenging Western-centric frameworks and offering actionable strategies for more effective EU democracy support. The Paper is expected to make a systemic contribution to policy analysis and inform EU policy-making over the next 7-8 years.
The MORDOR project was conceived as an urgent and timely response to the challenges posed by the global decline of democracy, which has been in retreat since 2010. This rollback has brought the share of democracies and their population levels back to those last recorded in 1990. The project aimed to address critical gaps in both education and policy-making related to dictatorship studies and democracy promotion, with a particular focus on comparative authoritarianism and democratization. The primary educational need identified was the lack of accessible, organized, and comprehensive resources for teaching and researching Comparative Authoritarianism and Democratization. The growing abundance of specialized literature on authoritarianism, while encouraging, has made it increasingly difficult for researchers—especially young scholars and graduate students—to navigate the field. Innovations in dictatorship studies are often confined to specific area studies (e.g., Eurasia, Africa, Latin America), which operate in isolation from broader theoretical frameworks. MORDOR also bridges the gap between scholars and policymakers by providing actionable insights for the EU that reflect the complexities of authoritarian contexts.