Transnational History Education and Backsliding Democracy

This introduction contains three parts. In the first, I give an impression of history education historiography since the “transnational turn,” an approach in humanities scholarship that turned away from the nation-state as the foremost analytical category to instead study the interconnections across and beyond national borders. The second part addresses research into democratic backsliding, a recent approach in political science that has quickly gained widespread popularity in and outside academia, particularly in Anglo-Saxon countries. While critical of some of the ideological formations of the democratic backsliding paradigm, I locate censorship of history education within challenges to democracy as the political background to this volume. The third and final part introduces the seventeen contributions.