Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing: Illiberal Regional Organizations and Autocratic States

• In Event: Democracy, Accountability, and International Organizations

Abstract

Why do authoritarian states work through regional organizations? We argue that in illiberal regional organizations, member states are able to publicly engage in repressive behavior, forming pockets of cooperation through which they can respond to domestic and international threats to their regime. These organizations, which include the Bolivarian Alliance of Our Peoples of America (ALBA), the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), allow states to engage in their preferred form of governance, while muting external criticism, avoiding judgment from cooperation partners, and enhancing domestic legitimacy. Working through a regional organization allows member states to send signals to domestic and international audiences that threatens domestic opponents, makes their actions harder for international watchdogs to criticize, and shapes alternative norms within their own organizations. Because they are able to act publicly through these organizations, they can also be more effective at suppressing threats to their regimes.

We make three primary contributions. First, we propose a new type of international organization: illiberal organizations, which we classify based on their attitude towards Western liberal norms, rather than by the level of democracy of individual member states. By not making democracy endogenous to the classification, the effects of membership in an illiberal organization on democracy can be tested. It also acknowledges that democracies are sometimes active members of these organizations.

Second, we theorize two unique benefits that authoritarian states receive from working within illiberal organizations. By forming pockets of cooperation with states - including both democracies and autocracies - that share their permissive attitudes towards illiberal practices, they are able to engage openly in repressive behaviors and publicize those activities that threaten domestic opponents. They also gain some of the benefits of legitimacy conferred by working through a regional organization, while being subject to none of the constraints through which legitimacy is meant to be conferred. This saves them the trouble of hiding their behaviors, making it easier to engage in things like joint military exercises and meetings of heads of state. It also allows them to make shows of force and send costly signals of resolve to their domestic opponents through things like regional peacekeeping operations and treaties broadly enabling extradition of anyone suspected of involvement in terrorism or separatist movements, in contravention of international asylum law.

Third, we hypothesize that membership in an illiberal organization leads to increased success countering terrorism and responding to domestic unrest, along with increased state capture. Using our new classification, we identify all illiberal regional organizations and then use this classification to create a country-year dataset from 1990-2019 to test these hypotheses. Our findings offer preliminary support for our hypotheses. We also find that, across a number of indicators, states are increasing their cooperation with fellow illiberal organization member states and decreasing cooperation with the West.

Our paper cuts against the prevailing view that regional and international organizations are the sole purview of liberal states. According to this view, organizations challenge authoritarian regimes through membership conditionality, scrutiny of domestic practices, incentivizing domestic reform, and socializing domestic actors into liberal democratic society. This perspective suggests that the benefits of international cooperation are out of reach for authoritarian regimes. Given this, it is puzzling that the overwhelming majority of authoritarian regimes maintain active membership in regional organizations, and that many have been creating new organizations in previous years. While in the past, authoritarian states may have formulated clandestine partnerships, they are now increasingly using formal regional forums to hold public meetings, monitor elections, conduct joint military exercises, and sign and publicize treaties. We argue that the member states of these regional organizations have learned to use the tools of international cooperation to aid their repressive behaviors, resulting in a very particular and unexpected type of cooperation.

Authors

• Melissa Samarin, University of California, Berkeley

• Katherine M Beall, University of California, Berkeley