In the contemporary moment, authoritarianism seems to be everywhere. China has risen to become an unabashedly authoritarian power with influence in every corner of the globe. Russia is invading its neighbors and imposing authoritarian political structures on captured territories. Major states in the Middle East like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iran remain authoritarian. The Taliban are back in power in Afghanistan. Self-styled “strongmen” in democracies and semi-democracies like Trump, Erdogan, Orban, Modi, and Nayib Bukele are often dismissive of liberal democratic rights. While there has been vigorous scholarly debate about whether the world is experiencing “democratic backsliding,” what most observers seem to agree on is that at minimum, democracy is no longer advancing. These trends indicate that we would be well served by understanding the drivers, mechanisms, and consequences of authoritarian politics. Two recent books lend valuable perspectives on this authoritarian moment.
Marlies Glasius’ Authoritarian Practices in a Global Age ties together and builds on the author’s long-running and influential research programme on “authoritarian practices.” The central concept is defined as “a pattern of actions, embedded in an organized context, sabotaging accountability to people over whom a configuration of actors exerts a degree of control, or their representatives, by disabling voice and disabling their access to information” (p. 22).
Notably, nowhere in the definition is there a mention of the state or governments. This is intentional. Glasius wants to pull our understanding of authoritarianism away from a reliance on “traditional and top-down understanding of politics” (p. 19), arguing that this is an unsatisfactory way to think about authoritarianism. This is because it tends to define authoritarianism as a residual opposite to democracy, thus obscuring much variation (pp. 13–14), overemphasizes the role of elections in distinguishing between democracy and authoritarianism (pp. 14–15), and too often takes the national government as the sole unit of analysis, which makes it difficult to answer research questions about subnational and transnational processes (pp. 16–18). One could quibble with the characterization of the literature on some of these themes, but the main idea is that a practice is authoritarian if an actor has a degree of control over others and it keeps illegitimate secrets and/or disinforms as this disables access to information, or if it neuters voice by disabling questions and the passing of judgment (p. 22).
Glasius’ approach instead allows the author to expand the empirical lens in novel ways, tying together topics that otherwise would seem unrelated. The empirical chapters take on transnational repression by Turkish and Iranian actors against targets in the Netherlands, “extraordinary rendition” by the US Central Intelligence Agency and its partners during the War on Terror, listing and de-listing procedures of the UN Security Council’s sanctions list, mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and covering up sexual abuse by the Catholic Church. The evidence is qualitative and relies on media reports, parliamentary or government investigations, Wikileaks, and NGO reports, among other sources.
As should be apparent, these examples encompass not just states or state actors, but also international organizations, religious authorities, corporations, and criminal networks. Yes, authoritarian regimes in our traditional understanding exist and are important, but the author argues that a sole focus on them in the study of authoritarianism misses out a range of actors and processes that we should not ignore if we want to understand how authoritarian practices are sustained and perpetuated (p. 189). On a transnational level, Glasius concludes that authoritarian practices are compatible with processes of globalization and to understand them, we must examine “configurations of powerful actors in the transnational interstices between national political systems” (p. 220).
Stephen G. F. Hall’s The Authoritarian International takes up precisely this focus on powerful actors operating between national political systems. This book analyzes “authoritarian learning,” which he defines as “a process in which authoritarian regimes adopt survival strategies based on prior successes and failures of other governments” as well as their own governments (p. 6). Hall’s analysis does retain a link to the state insofar as he is interested in attempts to consolidate authoritarianism in four cases: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and Moldova. However, like Glasius he also works to pull us away from an exclusively state-focused lens by analyzing “authoritarian-minded” elites and the internal and external networks on which they draw. Much of the story becomes about specific individuals meeting specific other individuals or attending certain events rather than general or system-level analysis. The inclusion of Ukraine and Moldova allows for analysis of attempts to forge authoritarian politics that were not always successful whereas the inclusion of Belarus and Russia allows for scrutiny of successful authoritarian consolidation.
A key finding of the book is that “authoritarian learning is less hierarchical than widely considered by the existing literature” (p. 7). Russian elites feature prominently in the analysis, but this is not a book about Russia imposing autocracy on its neighbors (although there is plenty of evidence presented about how Russia manipulates the domestic politics of its neighbors and gains leverage with shady or coercive methods). Rather, it is a book about how elite politicians, bureaucrats, and businesspeople watch what others do, draw conclusions, and act accordingly, sometimes actively meeting and swapping lessons. This means that a successful innovation can travel from less powerful to more powerful states provided it works.
To make his case, Hall uses qualitative evidence, including publicly available media reports, official documents, and interviews with experts and insiders in each of the four cases. Interview access in Belarus, surprisingly enough, seems to have been especially fruitful. For those less familiar with the politics of the region, keeping track of the different names, processes, and institutions as the argument unfolds may require careful attention because the theoretical framework includes at least 11 different actor types and 4 different learning types, some of which overlap conceptually and empirically.
One quotation from an interviewee raised multiple times throughout the book (pp. 9, 12, 17, 201) has it that “90 percent of what we do can be found on Google.” However, Hall qualifies this statement by arguing that active collaboration and sharing of best practices between authoritarian elites constitute the “most significant” form of learning (p. 29). There is some evidence for this claim, but the two explanations are not explicitly pitted against one another and sometimes appear complementary. Clearly, authoritarian learning is messy, and the author captures it nicely. What emerges from this analysis is a tangled network of authoritarian-minded elites across the four states that watch and learn from each other, from their own internal politics, and, even from Google.
Together the books do well to add a fresh perspective to the study of authoritarian politics, alerting us to the non-state and para-state actors and processes that sustain authoritarianism. Both authors have published on these themes in article format, but with space to roam, the book format means they can explore their topics both with more depth and breadth. The result is two compelling books that will surely be on the shelves of those who study authoritarianism for years to come.
