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The Authoritarian International [1]

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Date: 2023-09 

Stephen Hall argues that democracies can preserve their norms and values from increasing attacks and backsliding by better understanding how authoritarian regimes learn. He focuses on the post-Soviet region, investigating two established authoritarian regimes, Belarus and Russia, and two hybrid-regimes, Moldova and Ukraine, with the aim of explaining the concept of authoritarian learning and revealing the practices that are developed and the sources of that learning. Hall finds clear signs of collaboration between countries in developing best survival practices between authoritarian-minded elites, and demonstrates that learning does not just occur between states, rather it can happen at the intra-state level, with elites learning lessons from previous regimes in their own countries. He highlights the horizontal nature of this learning, with authoritarian-minded elites developing methods from a range of sources to ascertain the best practices for survival. Post-Soviet regional organisations are crucial for the development and sharing of these survival practices as they provide 'learning rooms' and training exercises.

Author

Stephen G. F. Hall is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Russian and Post-Soviet Politics at the University of Bath focusing on politics in the post-Soviet space and autocracies. He was Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge and completed his PhD at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies at University College London. He has been published in journals like East European Politics, Problems of Post-Communism, Post-Communist Economies, Russian Politics and Europe-Asia Studies.

Discussants

Gulnaz Sharafutdinova is Professor of Russian Politics and Acting Director of Russia Institute at King's College London. She is the author of the award-winning book The Red Mirror: Putin's Leadership and Russia's Insecure Identity (Oxford University Press, 2020) that explores issues of authoritarian legitimation in Russia relying on social identity theory. Her most recent book The Afterlife of the ‘Soviet Man’: Rethinking Homo Sovieticus (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2023) explores the intellectual biography of the term homo sovieticus. Her research covers digital technologies of governance, vaccine hesitancy in the context of authoritarian regimes and Russian society reactions to Russia's war against Ukraine.

Thomas Ambrosio is a professor of political science at North Dakota State University who teaches courses on international politics, terrorism, and international law. His current research interests are authoritarianism, the former Soviet Union, international relations, and the critical geopolitics of boardgames. He has most recently published on Kazakhstan-Russian relations, Belarusian and Kazakh security policy after 2014, authoritarian international organizations, and critical examinations of the boardgames Twilight Struggle and Labyrinth. He has also published works on authoritarian diffusion, Russian resistance to democratization and unipolarity, geopolitical discourse, and ethnic conflicts.

About the IPR

The University of Bath Institute for Policy Research (IPR) a leading public policy research institute in the UK. We seek to further the public good through undertaking and promoting high-quality and impactful research, building links with the worlds of policy and practice, and increasing public understanding of today’s most pressing policy challenges and possible responses.

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[1] Url: https://theconversation.com/uk/events/the-authoritarian-international-tracing-how-authoritarian-regimes-learn-in-the-post-soviet-space-12525

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