Ideology and the Authoritarian Turn in Global Politics

09:15-09:30 Welcome and opening remarks

09:30-10:45: Panel I: New Approaches to Authoritarianism (I) (Chair: David Lewis) 

• Catherine Owen (University of Exeter) and Xuan Qin (Fudan University): CCP ideology shaping public sector at grassroots level in urban China

10:45-11:00: Coffee break

11:00-12:15: Panel II: New Approaches to Authoritarianism (II) (Chair: John Heathershaw)

• Fiona Adamson (SOAS): Non‐state authoritarianism and diaspora politics

• Alex Dukalskis (University College Dublin): Authoritarian states, reputation management abroad

12:15-13:30: Lunch

13:30-15:00: Roundtable I: Law, Policy and Politics (Chair: Dario Castiglione)

• Stephen Skinner (Exeter, Law): Law, Fascism, democracy
• Marc Valeri (Exeter, Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies): Legitimacy in authoritarian regimes
• Nelly Bekus (Exeter, History): Soviet and Post-Soviet history, nationalism, memory and identity
• Stephane Baele (Exeter, Politics): Online extremism, far-right propaganda

15:00-15:30: Coffee Break

15:30-17:00: Roundtable II: International and Transnational Politics (Chair: Gregorio Bettiza)

• David Lewis (Exeter, Politics): Russia, conservative ideology, foreign policy
• Xianan Jin (Exeter, Politics): Neoliberal authoritarianism and street vendors in Rwanda
• Kevork Oskanian (Exeter, Politics): Russia, Africa, democracy, contestation
• Irene Fernandez Molina (Exeter, Politics): Morocco, authoritarian contestation, liberal democratic norms and the influence of the EU

17:00-17:15: Break

17:15-18:00: Roundtable III: Concluding Reflections on Ideology and the Authoritarian Turn (Chair: David Lewis)

19:30: Dinner

Fiona Adamson (SOAS, London)

Diasporic Geopolitics and the Rise of the Global South

The presentation by Fiona B. Adamson (SOAS University of London) was based on a joint paper with Enze Han (University of Hong Kong). It examined ‘diasporic geopolitics’ as a significant factor in the future of global politics and highlighted the extent to which different regions of the world are entangled via ongoing migration processes, and their legacies in the form of global diasporas. The presentation examined the significance of these interconnections in light of broader changes in Global North-South power relations. Major migration-sending states such as China, India and Turkey are now aspiring great powers that seek to exert global influence in international affairs. In this context, their diaspora governance policies are also undergoing a transformation, with diasporas increasingly understood as important assets in promoting sending states’ geopolitical agendas, and as tools for realizing great power ambitions. The presentation set forth three mechanisms by which such states exert power transnationally via their diaspora engagement policies. States can treat “their” diasporas as economic assets that facilitate trade and foreign investment; as soft power assets that contribute to the promotion of ‘civilizational’ politics; and as diplomatic assets that can be strategically mobilized or repressed as a means of managing and promoting states’ public image abroad. The rise in diasporic politics has implications for how we think about the nature of global order and power politics, including the spatial dimensions of the “authoritarian turn.” https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/fiona-adamson

Alex Dukalkis (Director Centre for Asia-Pacific Research, University College Dublin)

Authoritarian states, reputation management abroad

Leaders of non-democratic states frequently view the spread of liberal ideas associated with democracy and individual human rights as threatening, both to national power and their regime security. This reality has become newly salient as powerful authoritarian states, principally but not only China and Russia, have displayed renewed confidence about their non-democratic models. While for decades after the end of the Cold War authoritarian states appeared to be in a defensive crouch when it came to the spread of liberal democratic values, there are signs that transnational authoritarianism is now adapting and going on the offensive. Authoritarian states are much more powerful today as a share of global clout than they were in the 1990s. The changing global context has unlocked for authoritarian states the possibility to contend with Western liberal soft power in new ways. This talk proposes a stylized 5-step theoretical model of authoritarian snapback, which we define as a process in which non-democratic states at minimum attempt to block the transnational resonance of liberal ideas at home and at maximum attempt to advance anti-liberal norms and ideas into the global public sphere, often re-purposing the institutions associated with liberalism to do so. Empirically, the talk illustrates the argument by focusing on campaigns against forced labor in China's cotton supply chain and Beijing's response. This is a story not just of the limits of liberal influence across the world, but of how governments came to strategize and repurpose the very actors, tools, and norms that afforded US-backed liberalism such outsized global influence.  https://people.ucd.ie/alexander.dukalskis

Stephen Skinner (Law, University of Exeter)

Law, Fascism, democracy

(Intervention in the Roundtable on Law, Policy & Politics)

The main connection between my research and the themes of ideology and authoritarianism is that my research largely focuses on the history of criminal law and criminal justice under Italian Fascism and Fascist legal ideology, which I have explored in comparison with law in democratic Britain in the same period, mainly from the end of WWI to the end of WWII. The starting point for my research has been the 1930 Italian Penal Code, which was introduced under the Fascist regime and is still in force today in revised form. The 1930 Penal Code built on some of the authoritarian legal tendencies of the preceding Liberal order and reflected Fascist priorities and values, including an increase in authoritarian and repressive measures. By exploring the origins, terms, and interpretation of political crimes in the 1930 Code, I have investigated its specifically Fascist dimensions, and the similarities and differences between it and the supposedly more liberal rule of law based criminal law in Britain. Both systems used criminal law to tackle political offences in similar ways, which illustrate common concerns with security and what can be understood as forms of authoritarianism. By authoritarianism I mean broadly a focus on repressive control, limitation of freedom, an erosion of legal certainty, an erosion of constraints on state power, and a prioritization of state interests over those of individuals and society. In this sense, authoritarianism cannot be easily associated with a simple dichotomy between liberal and democratic versus illiberal or undemocratic. It calls into question the nature and meaning of the concept of the rule of law, and it cannot be easily periodized to singular disconnected time frames. In other words, I am interested in the idea of authoritarianism as a continuum. This includes the underlying ideas, ideologies, and strategies apparent in the form, content and aims of criminal law in the interwar period (and the legacies thereof) and, in a deeper sense, the ways in which criminal law, especially when used to tackle security issues, is in and of itself a form of authoritarian governmental practice or ‘modality of rule’. However, although constructing a critical historical and theoretical analysis of these forms of authoritarianism across systems and over time needs to involve reflection on their intersections, it must avoid reducing one sort of system to the other, legitimating authoritarianism, and undermining liberal democracy. https://law.exeter.ac.uk/people/profile/index.php?web_id=skinner

Nelly Bekus (History, University of Exeter)

Authoritarian Practices of Controlling the Past: Memory Laws in Post-Communist States  

(Intervention in the Roundtable on Law, Policy & Politics)

The presentation focused on the use of memory laws as a form of authoritarian practice deployed by a number of post-communist states for controlling the production of historical narratives to support state-sponsored visions of national identity. First introduced in the 1980s-1990s, memory laws were initially applied as a tool to combat racism, Holocaust denial, and revisionism. In the late 1990s - early 2000s, however, the concept of memory law was reinvented in Eastern Europe with the purpose of criminalising certain interpretations of the past and empowering official narratives.  

The paper discussed memory laws as one of the most restrictive measures used for regulating and curating collective memory production, alongside Institutes of National Memory, History commissions, Museums and memorials and the like.  

Memory laws not only regulate collective representations of the past and commemorative practices but also use legislation for establishing an authoritarian ‘monopoly of truth’. They are often used to anchor the source of legitimacy of the current political system in the events of the past and ban the critical discussion of historical events.  

Cases of memory laws in Russia (2014), Ukraine (2006, 2014), Poland (2018) and Belarus (2022) demonstrate how legal codification of selective narratives results in the limitation of freedom of speech as well as prevents open public debates on contested issues of the past.  

While each of these laws represents a national manifestation of mnemonic authoritarianism, they can be seen as reiterations of the transnational pattern of the authoritarian practices controlling the production of historical narratives. 

https://arch-history.exeter.ac.uk/history/profile/index.php?web_id=bekus

Kevork Oskanian (Politics, University of Exeter)

Africa, Democracy, Contestation

(Intervention in the Roundtable on international and transnational Politics)

My intervention attempted to explain the ambiguous positioning of the “Global South” towards Russia’s ongoing war on Ukraine from a Bourdieusian perspective. Indeed, while most states outside the Western core have tended to express support for Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in international fora including the United Nations General Assembly (with the notable exception of several dozen serial abstainers and a handful of ‘rogue states’), their broader foreign-policy practice has been more ambivalent. Most states in the “Global South” are not participating in the hardened Western sanctions regime against Russia; neither have their diplomatic interactions with Moscow been negatively affected by the conflict. Beyond the formal UN votes, pronouncements on the conflict by members of their elites have also not been marked by an explicitly pro-Ukrainian line, to the frustration of both policymakers and commentators in the West.

These ambiguities can only partially be explained through realist, liberal, constructivist and critical perspectives: respectively, material interests, shared authoritarian regime types, memories of Soviet anti-colonialism, or Western double standards within the Liberal International Order (LIO) – arguments that have emerged in the public discourse during the past year. Instead, crucial to their understanding is the shared lack of symbolic capital – or status and prestige - in the Global South and Russia, based on an inability to adopt those practices of the LIO that confer such capital: mature liberal democracy, good economic governance, the adoption of certain socio-cultural practices (all three as defined in the Western core), membership of elite international organisations, among others. These structural inequalities, and the hierarchies reproduced by these practices within the international social space, engender a shared frustration – or ‘hysteresis’ –in both ‘developing’ states and (imperfectly) rising powers; this shared hysteresis is instrumentalised by Russia in its interactions with the ‘Global South’.

https://politics.exeter.ac.uk/staff/oskanian/

Irene Fernández-Molina

International Socialization in Reverse? Morocco’s Discursive Engagement with Liberal Democratic Norms and Changing Attachment to the EU

(Intervention in the Roundtable on international and transnational Politics)

This paper builds on the literature on international socialisation and norm contestation to explore how and why Morocco talked the talk of democracy in the early years of Mohammed VI’s reign, and how and why it has more recently ceased to do so. In particular, it examines the logics of Morocco’s signalled twofold disengagement from liberal democratic norms and from the EU, and the extent to which these two trends are interconnected. Drawing on a contextualised, critical analysis of high-level official discourse, it shows that the first decade of Mohammed VI’s reign was characterised by role playing through a combination of strategic norm acceptance and strategic norm localisation, with the EU as a primary socialising agent and reference point despite emphasis on the ‘Moroccan model’. By contrast, from 2008 onwards there has been a shift towards democratic norm contestation by omission driven by structural power transformations and relational factors concerning Morocco-EU interaction, and reflecting Morocco’s agency and instrumental rationality within these socialisation dynamics. At the same time, based on its discursive trail, the normative influence of alternative, non-Western socialisation agents such as the Gulf Arab monarchies has been limited at the high/macro level, and not decisive enough to tip the balance of Morocco’s official engagement with democratic norms, with its specific timing and turning points. https://politics.exeter.ac.uk/staff/fernandez-molina/

Cat Owen (Politics, University of Exeter, Cornwall campus)

Intervention in the Roundtable on Concluding Reflections

In the workshop ‘Ideology and the Authoritarian Turn’, I presented my co-authored paper with Dr Xuan Qin at Fudan University, recently published in the Journal of Chinese Political Science, entitled ‘The CCP, Campaign Governance and COVID-19: Evidence from Shanghai’, and explained how we are building on this research in our current book manuscript. The article was an ethnographic study that sought to answer the question of how was it possible to implement the zero-COVID policy in Shanghai, a policy that required blanket coverage and fundamental behavioural change in every citizen. Our article showed that local CCP units acted as managers of the policy implementation process in China’s urban grassroots governance system; the inclusion of Party units in grassroots governmental structures ensured virtually comprehensive compliance in Shanghai, eliminating the discretion of street-level bureaucrats as they implemented lockdown policies. This article leads to our current book project in which we develop the concept of ‘authoritarian policy implementation’ to capture the activities by street-level bureaucrats to ensure public compliance with policies of high political priority. The book illustrates this concept through three case study policies, two of high political priority – recycling, COVID-19 management – and one of lower priority – community care for the elderly. https://politics.exeter.ac.uk/staff/cowen/

Xianan Jin (Politics, University of Exeter, Cornwall)

A reflection on the Workshop

Overall, I quite enjoyed the discussions at the workshop. One of the key debates for me was the definition of authoritarianism and the research scope of authoritarianism. It seems a heated discussion on the mechanism of authoritarian control and strategies but unfortunately, not too much beyond cold war studies. Some of the research even unconsciously reproduced the binary thinking of liberal democracy and non-democracies, which then reduced their research scope to the cold war mentality, or sometimes even borderline Sinophobia and racial Othering. 

The other thing I had hoped to hear more was date analysis of authoritarianism. Some of the paper used surveys, discourse analysis and interviews while others did not explain explicitly their research methods, methodology and data analysis. This echoes my first point about research scope: if we are seriously about to nuance one’s understanding of authoritarianism, researchers have to demonstrate a more contextualised and data-based analysis of authoritarianism, as in what constitutes authoritarianism in and beyond a state, who are the actors performing what roles in the establishment and maintenance of authoritarianism. 

I hope this suffices as a critical reflection of the workshop. I genuinely enjoy it and felt grateful for the opportunity to participate in the workshop. I am looking forward to more opportunities to working on this topic. https://politics.exeter.ac.uk/staff/jin/