Resources and Regime Resilience in Post-Communist Asia

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

What are the sources of authoritarian resilience in post-communist regimes? As the study of authoritarian regimes has grown in the last two decades, many efforts have been made to distinguish among their variety ranging from personalist to military to single-party kind. Scholars have also increasingly focused on the critical roles of institutions as well as regime origins in sustaining authoritarian regimes. Recent approaches on post-communist regimes, a special group of authoritarian regimes, have similarly emphasized either institutional adaptation or the violent origins of these regimes as explanations for their endurance.

This panel focuses on regimes in East and Southeast Asia that are ruled by a communist or formerly communist party (China, North Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia). Except China, the other regimes in this group have been understudied, and political scientists have ignored Laos altogether. Yet Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia have all displayed dynamic economies and political systems during the last two or three decades. Formerly communist leader Hun Sen of Cambodia has gradually retaken power for his renamed People’s Party since the UN-brokered peace agreements that democratized Cambodia in 1992; and North Korea has continued to defy repeated predictions about its collapse through two dynastic changes of leadership.

In contrast with recent scholarship, we advance a set of explanations for their resilience based primarily on the ideological, organizational, and material resources these regimes can mobilize to sustain their rule. Without these resources, we argue, neither regime origins nor post-communist institutional adaptation would work. Our set of cases not only contributes to the study of comparative post-communist politics and general theories of authoritarian durability, but also to theories on the relationship between development and democratization.

Sub Unit

• Division 13: Politics of Communist and Former Communist Countries

Individual Presentations

• The Founding Myths of Party-States and Regime Resilience in Communist East Asia - Qingming Huang, University of Florida

• Organizational Resources and Authoritarian Durability in Cambodia - Kheang Un, Northern Illinois University

• Authoritarian Resilience in Vietnam: Ideology, Strategies, and Organization - Thuy Nguyen, University of Oregon

• Resources and Regime Durability in Laos: Nature, Ideology, & Institutions - Keith Barney, Australian National Univerity; Simon Creak, Nanyang Technological University

Chair

• Tuong Vu University of Oregon

Discussants

• Martin Dimitrov Tulane University

• Karrie J. Koesel University of Notre Dame