Resurgent Authoritarianism: Manifestations and Implications for Research

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The tension between democracy and its countervailing forces is a main challenge of our time. The panel addresses its implications in the post-Soviet region, with a particular focus on the post-Soviet states’ slides back into authoritarianism. Two papers focus primarily on Russia. Petersson examines the overarching myths used by the regime to legitimise its existential mission: the idea of an eternal Russia, the perceived encirclement of Russia by the putatively ‘depraved’ West, and the concept of the ‘Russian world’. Hutcheson and McAllister look at this from the bottom up: has the regime’s self-projection of itself as a great power and bulwark of illiberal ‘traditional values’ resulted in changes of attitudes and perceptions of threat in the Russian population? Does the regime’s mythmaking build on or drive public sentiment to legitimise itself? The other two papers examine the implications of these developments for our wider understanding of authoritarian regimes. Waller looks at how well the Russian Federation travels, conceptually. The country is generally held to be an example of an electoral authoritarian state which has tipped into the full-blown variety of authoritarianism – but what can we learn from this degradation in other parts of the world? And, as researchers, how do we address the new need for reliable knowledge of closed authoritarian states that for the last 30 years have been open to researchers and traditional political science research methods? This is a matter that Bedford addresses, based on personal and autoethnographic reflections as a researcher of multiple post-Soviet states.

Sub Unit

• Politics/Law

Chair

• Anna Schwenck, Freie Universität Berlin (Germany)

Papers

• Sustaining Authoritarianism?: Mythmaking in the Legitimization of Russia’s War against Ukraine - Bo Petersson, Malmo U (Sweden)

• The 'Illiberal Turn' in Russian Mythmaking: Have the Voters Turned Too? - Derek Stanford Hutcheson, Malmö U (Sweden); Ian McAllister, Australian National U (Australia)

• Authoritarian Consolidation in Practice: Implications for Research and Researchers - Sofie Bedford, Uppsala U (Sweden)

Discussant

• Anna Schwenck, Freie Universität Berlin (Germany)