Great powers,civil society and authoritarian diffusion in Central Asia

ABSTRACT

This article draws on the authoritarian promotion literature to assess contending pressures for democratization and authoritarianism in Central Asia. Domestic actors ultimately determine receptivity to democracy promotion, but external pressures for democratic transformation or authoritarian persistence exist in Central Asia. A brief overview of authoritarian trends in Central Asia is followed by the theoretical arguments for authoritarian persistence, with special attention to the civil society dimension in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Western programmes supporting liberal democracy and civil society have encountered resistance from authoritarian leaders in Central Asia, though the evidence for direct influence from authoritarian external actors is limited. A process of indirect authoritarian diffusion, in combination with the region’s illiberal societies and Western democracy promotion fatigue, undermines the development of civil society and makes authoritarian persistence in Central Asia likely.     

Soft competitive authoritarianism and negative stability in Kosovo: statebuilding from UNMIK to EULEX and beyond

ABSTRACT

After 1999, democratization, normalization and Europeanization were the key processes through which Kosovo’s final political status was expected to take shape. All three processes, however, were guided by the stability paradigm. Though Kosovo cannot be categorized as a typical authoritarian state, its political leaders have openly displayed illiberal tendencies, governing in an unaccountable manner and utilizing public assets for their private gain. In the period from 1999 to 2008, while UNMIK’s approach was based on maintaining stability instead of democratization, a soft competitive authoritarianism began to emerge incrementally. In its first decade of independence, Kosovo’s statehood remained internationally disputed, whereas its governance culture was characterized by a lack of internal accountability, which is a key component of the soft competitive authoritarianism in the country. Thus, the negative trajectory of political developments did not change even after the deployment of EULEX and the 2008 declaration of independence. This article analyses the development of authoritarian and illiberal tendencies in Kosovo and suggests that the democratization and Europeanization discourses served to conceal soft competitive authoritarian practices in Kosovo.     

Orientalism and binary discursive representations of Tunisia’s democratization: the need for a “continuity and change” paradigm

ABSTRACT

Mainstream analyses of Tunisia’s post-2011 democratic transition have been largely divided along two mutually exclusive narratives. There are those hailing the country as ‘the Arab Spring’s only success story’ on the one hand and those sounding sensationalist alarms about the country’s democratization failure and return to authoritarianism on the other. This is consistent with, and perpetuates, a problematic zero-sum binary in Middle East and North Africa (MENA) scholarship between either a linear democratization process or authoritarian resilience. Furthermore, these reductionist representations highlight the failure of predominant democratization theories to account for the nuances and complexities of democratic transition. This paper critically examines the binary discursive representations of Tunisia’s democratization and explores their underpinning in two competing Orientalisms: the classic Orientalism underscoring an ontological difference (and inferiority) of the ‘Arab world’ to the West, and a liberal civilizing Orientalism which, while acknowledging an ‘essential sameness’ between the West and the ‘Arab world’, places the West as the temporal pinnacle of democracy and the normative monitor of democratic success. This paper thus rejects the binary discursive representations of Tunisia’s transition and advocates for a more nuanced narrative which accounts for the patterns of continuity with and change from authoritarian structures within the democratization process.     

Remaking the public through the square: invention of the new national cosmology in Turkey

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the formation of authoritarian populism in Turkey by analysing mass mobilization and its repercussions in the symbolic and imaginary realms as authoritarian right-wing populisms have gained global popularity. It scrutinises the AKP government’s mobilization of the masses in the so-called ‘democracy watches’ after the coup attempt on 15 July 2016. During the demonstrations that took place in various locations in Istanbul, authors carried out participant observation fieldwork and field interviews. The paper concludes that democracy watches constitute a significant means of constructing and consolidating a new authoritarian regime, thereby endowing this consolidation process with a popular legitimacy.     

Authoritarian legitimation: assessing discourses of legitimacy in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan

ABSTRACT

What are the sources of authoritarian persistence in Central Asia? This study explores the argument that authoritarian regimes persist through effective authoritarian legitimation. Drawing on the theory and analysis of discourse, it develops an approach to authoritarian legitimation and examines discursive appeals to legitimacy by the Kazakh and Uzbek presidents. The study also assesses the effectiveness of the presidential discourses of legitimacy for public perception of the governing regimes in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. This research shows that by defining what constitutes legitimate power and presenting political rule as consistent with this definition, authoritarian governments can foster certain modes of reasoning and evaluation among citizens, and create possibilities for their acceptance of the regime as ‘right’ or ‘proper’.     

Conceptualising Party-State Governance and Rule in Laos

ABSTRACT

This article develops a framework for conceptualising authoritarian governance and rule in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. After introducing the national and academic context, which go a significant way towards understanding the paucity of comparative political work on Laos, we propose an approach to studying post-socialist authoritarian and single-party rule that highlights the key political-institutional, cultural-historical and spatial-environmental sources of party-state power and authority. In adopting this approach, we seek to redirect attention to the centralising structures of rule under the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, illustrating how authoritarian institutions of the “party-state” operate in and through multiple scales, from the central to the local level. At a time when the country is garnering greater attention than at any time since the Vietnam War, we argue that this examination of critical transitions in Laos under conditions of resource-intensive development, intensifying regional and global integration, and durable one-party authoritarian rule, establishes a framework for future research on the party-state system in Laos, and for understanding and contextualising the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party regime in regional comparative perspective.     

The 2014 Thai Coup and Some Roots of Authoritarianism

ABSTRACT

Thailand is the only country currently ruled by a coup-installed military government. The 2014 coup aimed not only to abolish the influence of Thaksin Shinawatra but also to shift Thailand’s politics in an authoritarian direction. While the army authored the coup, the professional and official elite played a prominent role in engineering the coup and shaping political reforms. This article examines some historical antecedents of this authoritarian turn, first in the broad trends of Thailand’s modern political history, and second in the emergence and political evolution of the Bangkok middle class.     

The Remorseless Power of Incumbency in Fiji’s September 2014 Election

Abstract

Fiji’s September 2014 election was the first since the military takeover of December 2006 and the first under a new open list proportional representation system. It proved a landslide victory for coup leader turned Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama’s FijiFirst Party. This was a ‘competitive authoritarian’ election, characterised by careful controls over media outlets, manipulation of rules regarding political parties and candidate nominations, and selective use of state finances to harass opponents. It was a genuine contest only in so far as the government could control the process. The outcome demonstrates the potency of incumbency in Fiji, which was also an important factor in the country’s previous post-coup elections in 1992 and 2001.     

The Right Turn in India: Authoritarianism,Populism and Neoliberalisation

ABSTRACT

This article argues that the growth of authoritarian forms of politics in India should be seen in the context of a long-term crisis of the state as successive governments have been unable to establish legitimacy for the policies of neoliberalisation that have been pursued since the 1990s. These policies contributed to the fracturing of dominant modes of political incorporation. The previous Congress Party-led government’s mode of crisis management – which it dubbed, inclusive growth – failed to create new forms of political incorporation by addressing long-term structural problems in India’s political economy, such as jobless growth, and gave rise to new problems, such as large-scale corruption scandals. Subsequently, it increasingly developed what Nicos Poulantzas called, “authoritarian statist” tendencies to marginalise dissent within a framework of constitutional democracy. The current Bharatiya Janata Party-led government’s mode of crisis management builds on these authoritarian statist tendencies but has sought to build legitimacy for these tendencies and neoliberalisation through an appeal to authoritarian populism. This seeks to harness popular discontent against elite corruption with majoritarianism to create an antagonism between the “Hindu people” and a “corrupt elite” that panders to minorities.     

Ferrets in the Caribbean: Britain,Grenada and the Curious Case of the Armoured Cars

Abstract

When the Marxist-Leninist New Jewel Movement seized power in Grenada in March 1979 they set about securing and defending their ‘revolution’ against the threat of a countercoup organised by the deposed Prime Minister Eric Gairy. Military aid was quick to arrive from expected allies, namely Cuba and Guyana. Grenadian Prime Minister Maurice Bishop also requested arms from Britain and the United States. The People’s Revolutionary Government’s (PRG’s) ties to Cuba and evasiveness over election plans ruled out the US providing any support. Britain remained more open-minded about the PRG’s intentions. Using recently declassified British government documents, this article will examine London’s deliberations over supplying armoured cars to Grenada. It argues that Foreign and Commonwealth Office officials focused on the bigger picture of steering the PRG away from Cuba at the cost of considering how the sale of the armoured cars to the PRG would appear to a wider audience and that the PRG’s increasingly authoritarian behaviour ultimately vetoed the sale.     

Big dreams and small steps: comparative perspectives on the social movement struggle for democracy in Serbia and North Macedonia

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a comparative analysis of social movements’ characteristics and capacities to struggle against illiberal tendencies and incite political change in Serbia and North Macedonia. First, we discuss the illiberal elements of political regimes in the countries in question, Serbia and North Macedonia. Then, we provide a comprehensive overview of progressive social movements in the two countries, formed and organized as a response to different authoritarian and non-democratic tendencies. Finally, we point to some differences in their organizing, coalition-forging and issue-defining principles, which, we believe, may help to explain the relative success of social movements in North Macedonia in producing relevant political outcomes, compared to the weak political impact of social movements in Serbia. Empirical data were collected during the summer of 2018 through in-depth interviews with members of social movements in North Macedonia and Serbia.     

An alternative reading of religion and authoritarianism: the new logic between religion and state in the AKP’s New Turkey

ABSTRACT

Since roughly 2011, the Turkish state and the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) have been going through a process of mutual transformation. Some of the historical apprehensions, biases and frustrations exhibited by Turkey as a middle power have been absorbed by the relatively reformist AKP. Conversely, the AKP and its undisputed leader Erdo?an have seen their socio-political fears, power based conflicts and ethno-religious desires become dominant in all areas, including religion. As a consequence of this bilateral transformation, Turkey has become both an inclusionary and a hegemonic-authoritarian state, and at the same time a weak one. Within this new identity and structure of the state, Sunni Islam has become one of the regime’s key focal points, with a new logic. This article seeks to explain the transformation of the relations between the AKP’s Turkish state, religion and religious groups, by scrutinising Karrie Koesel’s logic of state-religion interaction in authoritarian regimes.     

Opposition Coordination in Singapore’s 2015 General Elections

Abstract

Recent political science scholarship suggests that when opposition political parties are able to coalesce into a united coalition against an authoritarian regime, they will perform better in authoritarian elections, and can more credibly bargain with the regime for liberalising reforms. Yet, most of this literature pays little attention to the variety of ways in which opposition parties cooperate with each other. Drawing on the literature on the bargaining model of war, the author sketches out a theoretical framework to explain how opposition parties coordinate to develop non-competition agreements. Such agreements entail opposition parties bargaining over which political party should contest or withdraw in which constituencies to ensure straight fights against the dominant authoritarian incumbent in each electoral district. The author then applies this framework to explain opposition coordination in Singapore’s 2015 general elections, focusing on the conflict between the Workers’ Party and the National Solidarity Party.     

Discourses of Russian-speaking youth in Nazarbayev’s Kazakhstan: Soviet legacies and responses to nation-building

ABSTRACT

Research into post-independence identity shifts among Kazakhstan’s Russian-speaking minorities has outlined a number of possible pathways, such as diasporization, integrated national minority status and ethnic separatism. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with young people in Almaty and Karaganda, I examine how Russian-speaking minorities identify with the state and imagine their place in a ‘soft’ or ‘hybrid’ post-Soviet authoritarian system. What is found is that Russian-speaking minorities largely accept their status beneath the Kazakh ‘elder brother’ and do not wish to identify as a ‘national minority’. Furthermore, they affirm passive loyalty to the political status quo while remaining disinterested in political representation. Russian-speaking minorities are also ambivalent towards Kazakh language promotion and anxious about the increasing presence of Kazakh-speakers in urban spaces. This article argues that two factors are central to these stances among Kazakhstan’s Russian-speaking minorities: the persistence of Soviet legacies and the effects of state discourse and policy since 1991.     

Introduction: Understanding Thailand’s Politics

ABSTRACT

Thailand’s politics from the mid-2000s has seen considerable conflict and contestation, with seven prime ministers, two military coups, and scores of deaths from political violence. This article, as well as introducing the eight articles in the Special Issue, examines various aspects of this tumultuous period and the authoritarian turn in Thai politics. It does this by examining some of the theoretical and conceptual analysis of Thailand's politics and critiquing the basic assumptions underlying the modernisation and hybrid regimes perspectives that have tended to dominate debates on democratisation. While the concepts of bureaucratic polity and network monarchy shed light on important political actors in Thailand, they have not grappled with the persistence of authoritarianism. In theoretical terms, the article suggests that it is necessary to understand historically specific capitalist development as well as the social underpinnings that establish authoritarian trajectories and reinforce the tenacity of authoritarianism.     

Assessing public opinion’s influence on foreign policy: the case of China’s assertive maritime behavior

ABSTRACT

English-language analysis of Chinese foreign policy has often cited nationalist public opinion as a key driver of Beijing’s recent assertive maritime conduct. Yet these important conjectures have not been systematically tested. How can we know whether public opinion has been driving an authoritarian state’s foreign policy? What are some cases in which concern about popular nationalism may have influenced Beijing’s behavior in disputed maritime spaces? To answer these questions, this article constructs a methodological framework for assessing the likely impact of public opinion on particular instances of state action. Applying this to five cases typical of China’s on-water policy in the South and East China Seas since 2007 indicates that popular nationalism has had little to do with China’s assertive turn on its maritime periphery.     

Beyond ‘brotherhood’ and the ‘caliphate’: Kurdish relationships to Islam in an era of AKP authoritarianism and ISIS terror

ABSTRACT

Since the rise of the Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi (AKP), Islam has come to play a more prominent role in public and political spheres in Turkey. This paper draws on ethnographic data gathered in Istanbul and Diyarbakir between 2013 and 2015 to highlight Kurdish attitudes to Islam. Following the electoral success of the AKP amongst Kurds in the general election of 2007, Kurdish actors have sought to incorporate Islamic sensibilities into their political offering in order to appeal to Kurdish constituents. Amid the AKP’s recent authoritarian turn and instrumentalization of religion, and the rise of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), many Kurds have sought to redefine their relationship with Islam to clearly demarcate distinctly Kurdish religious and political spaces.     

The Fiji Election of 2014: Rights,Representation and Legitimacy in Fiji Politics

Abstract

Fiji’s 2014 election was its first in eight years, first under the 2013 constitution, and first using a common roll of electors with proportional representation. In the new parliament of 50 seats, the coup leader of 2006, Frank Bainimarama, emerged triumphant. His FijiFirst Party won 32 seats, with the Social Democratic Liberal Party, a successor party to earlier indigenous Fijian parties, winning 15 and the National Federation Party three. The election of the new parliament marked the end of Fiji’s longest period under a military government since independence. How should the significance of these elections be judged in the context of Fiji’s history? Do they represent the breakthrough to democratic stability that so many Fiji citizens have wanted for so long? Or are they just another phase of Fiji’s turbulent politics, a democratic pause before another lurch into authoritarian government?     

Narratives of Islam in Uzbekistan: authoritarian myths and the Janus-state syndrome

ABSTRACT

Under the late Islom Karimov, the authoritarian regimes in Uzbekistan created dual myths of Islam. On the one hand, Islam was encompassed in the larger context of manaviyat (spirituality), and on the other, a myth of an Islamic ‘extremism’ that challenges security and stability on a regional scale was cultivated. This ‘threat’ is so pervasive and pernicious that it commands the authoritarian nature of governance that characterizes the Karimov era, leading to a Janus-state syndrome in which Islam is simultaneously cast as a sine qua non of national myth and an existential threat to state security. This article examines the mythology of political Islam in Uzbekistan and the Janus-state syndrome resulting from the duality of Islamic myth. It argues that a civil society cannot flourish in Central Asia unless moderate Islamic groups are allowed to build the very social structures that provide the foundation for interaction, peaceful coexistence, toleration and pluralism.