Authoritarian Forms Research Articles

Authoritarian constitutionalism, judicial capture or the ambivalence of modern law

Authoritarian constitutionalism, judicial capture or the ambivalence of modern law

Mobilising youth for elections: electoral inclusion of youth in Turkey under competitive authoritarianism

Scholars have paid scant attention to how state–society relations are shaped in contexts where democratic and authoritarian institutions co-exist under new forms of authoritarianism. Furthermore, the realm of youth citizenship in such regimes is a nascent area warranting deeper exploration. This study draws on the case of Turkey to address these gaps by investigating why political parties, which previously marginalised young voters, have fervently mobilised youth during elections that paradoxically coincided with the process of autocratisation. We employ a content analysis of party programmes, election manifestos, and social media campaign content of major political parties, as well as secondary sources on Turkish and youth politics spanning from 1983 to 2023, to address this puzzle. Our analysis unveils three key findings. Firstly, transformative events such as the Gezi Park Protests and digital activism have invigorated youth political involvement, compelling both government and opposition parties to prioritise youth electoral engagement. Secondly, the shift from a parliamentary to a presidential system has heightened political parties’ focus on securing the youth vote to win elections. Lastly, political parties strive to align youth political values with their own ideologies, and the process of election campaigning provides ample opportunities for such a goal.

Hybrid digital authoritarianism in Turkey: the ‘Censorship Law’ and AI-generated disinformation strategy

ABSTRACT This article introduces the concept of hybrid digital authoritarianism, a model of digital governance that combines consolidated digital authoritarian practices with strategically limited digital freedoms to sustain a façade of democratic governance. The evolution of Turkey’s digital governance, marked by the enactment of the ‘censorship law/disinformation law’ in October 2022, represents a deliberate shift toward more entrenched digital authoritarianism. The dissemination of pro-government AI-generated disinformation, particularly targeting opposition during the 2023 national and presidential elections and the 2024 local elections, underscores Turkey’s progression towards a more consolidated form of digital authoritarianism. This study examines the impact of recent legislative changes, including the contentious Press Law and Internet Regulation Law, and the role of AI-generated disinformation in shaping Turkey’s digital governance.

Of course people can reject democracy: psychological perspectives

Concerns have been expressed about a worldwide retreat from liberal democracy and a turn toward more authoritarian forms of government. Along with that concern has come surprise: when the cold war ended, it was widely believed that a new historical era was dawning during which alternatives to Western liberalism would wither away. Influential psychological theories also assume that freedom and autonomy are powerful human needs—needs that are thwarted by dictatorships. However, a number of theoretical perspectives and programs of research in psychology lead to the conclusion that in certain circumstances, turns toward authoritarian forms of government and restrictive societies are not only explicable, but also predictable. Fromm's analysis of why people might want to escape from freedom, Baumeister's work on escape-from-self mechanisms, and Schwartz's review of the literature on choice overload all provide ways of understanding why in turbulent times, members of free countries might intentionally seek out—and perhaps even ecstatically embrace—authoritarian forms of government.

Health and social care leaders’ and employees’ perceptions of remote leadership and the associated factors

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to describe health and social care leaders’ and employees’ perceptions of remote leadership and the associated factors.Design/methodology/approachA total of 45 leaders and 177 employees from one Finnish health and social care organization completed an electronic questionnaire between October and November 2020. The questionnaire included questions related to background information, along with structured and open-ended questions addressing remote leadership and the associated factors. The collected quantitative data was analyzed with statistical methods, while inductive content analysis was used to analyze the qualitative data.FindingsRemote leadership emerged as a developing form of leadership that was part of everyday life at a regional health and social care organization. However, it was also considered by some as a distanced and authoritarian form of leadership that reduced communication to a one-way flow of information. Remote leadership and digitalization in health and social care were generally perceived positively, especially among higher educated participants and those working mainly in a remote context. However, digitalization was also perceived as a burden and remote leadership as a source of uncertainty at work, especially among lower educated participants and those who worked mainly in traditional contexts.Originality/valueThis study expands the little-researched area and provides insights that can be used to further develop remote leadership and the related education.

We are future ancestors: on authoritarian politics and the deepening of our radical roots

ABSTRACT Written in a conversational exchange, this essay charts urgent connections among queer/trans/disability frameworks of environmental, climate, and reproductive justice centered around community planning and county level democratic politics. We reflect on the lessons learned in our local context of Iowa between 2023–2024, during unprecedented legislative control of queer and trans lives and reproductive politics. In our conversation, we argue anti-trans legislation is a form of authoritarianism and political violence, a frame which shifts how organizers might draw connections among issues and energize future struggles. We reflect on the organizing strategies and advocacy work in our community and connect this labor as crucial care work necessary for queer and trans life.

Innovation and leadership in computational social science’s prevalent trend: implications to management science, public policy and social development

A group of prominent researchers recently introduced Computational Social Science (CSS) in a Nature article, highlighting its potential with a call for more institutional support. The companion composed by prevalent researchers sees no scientific limitations in CSS. However, this paper argues that despite CSS's popularity, it harbors scientific, methodological and philosophical shortcomings leading to a form of academic authoritarianism, highly consequential for Higher Education. It evaluates critically its impact on Management Science, Public Policy, and Social Development. While CSS appears promising, its current trajectory fails to deliver substantial innovation and leadership, misleading both leaders and policymakers. The paper advocates for alternative approaches within CSS, more useful for Higher Education and societal advancement.

Educational management and schooling in crisis contexts and regulation

The text highlights the complexity of power relations in educational management and schooling, emphasizing the importance of resisting authoritarian forms of regulation with innovative practices that promote freedom and autonomy in management and schools. Currently, the field of education is under pressure from global political and economic movements that seek to impose a centralized management logic based on objective results, thus affecting the autonomy and creativity of schools. Although schools constitute spaces of freedom and autonomy, they face institutional contradictions and significant challenges in management. Despite these challenges, it is understood that there are still spaces for innovation.

The Neural Orchestra: Cognitive Instrumentalities

Abstract Over the past several decades, the field of cognitive neuroscience has drawn with increasing frequency on the figure of the “neural orchestra,” a metaphor mapping the activities of localized cortical areas onto sections of a musical ensemble. Popularized by (among others) the neuroscientist Elkhonon Goldberg, the trope is often hailed by contemporary scientists as a new invention—a modern alternative to computational paradigms of cognition. And yet, as I argue here, the concept of the brain orchestra is far from new. Neural-orchestral cartographies originated in the phrenological theory of Franz Joseph Gall in the 1810s, then threaded through medical, ethnographic, anthropological, and pedagogical writing of the later nineteenth century, from the phreno-magnetic tracts of Mariano Cubí y Soler to the psychiatric diagnoses of Théodule-Armand Ribot. Fusing metaphysical concepts of harmony with theories of hierarchical cerebral organology, symphonic minds were products of an epistemological overlap between neural and musical discourses. Crucial to both domains was the newly powerful figure of the podium conductor, conceived as an overarching form of attentional control yoking players into powerful cognitive, musical, and political wholes. The result was a musical neurophysiology refracted through the lenses of imperial technocracy and authoritarian forms of centralization. Today, the historical and neuropolitical forces that generated the Romantic mind orchestra have been largely forgotten, but they continue to exert a spectral influence, hovering behind our conception of the “well-conducted mind,” our descriptions of “orchestrated” attention, and our psychopolitical fear of distraction.

The Crisis of Democracy and the Legitimate Rule of Law: Kelsen, Populism, and the Politics of Recognition

RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: This essay examines how deliberation and recognition contribute to our understanding of democracy as a form of government combining two sources of legitimacy, one based on a legal procedure and the other based on ideological faith commitment.
 THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: Although joint deliberation about policy aims and recognition of person’s political identities are often assumed to be complementary (Habermas, 1996; Honneth, 2014; Taylor, 1994), I argue that this need not be the case. Political identities oriented by faith commitments pose a challenge to deliberation oriented by rational compromise. A one-sided emphasis on deliberation or recognition as exclusive sources of democratic legitimation threatens to debase the res publica to an arena of identity politics whose populist proclivities are antithetical to liberal democracy. Exacerbating this trend is the phenomenon of political polarization caused in large part by the economic stratification and socio-cultural fragmentation of a global, digital form of capitalism. My method for examining and resolving the problem relies on notable philosophers who have written about the legal and political implications of deliberation and the politics of recognition: Charles Taylor, Jürgen Habermas, and Hans Kelsen.
 THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: The paper begins by summarizing the importance of recognition for political life and its ambivalent humanistic and nationalistic (and sub-nationalistic) senses (Part 1). I then turn to Kelsen’s critique of recognition as incompatible with the rule of law, followed by his qualified endorsement of recognition, understood as a necessary political ethos underwriting a liberal, deliberative form of democracy (Parts 2 and 3). Turning to our contemporary democratic crisis, I show how structural transformations within and between political parties and the public sphere have given rise to authoritarian forms of populism (Part 4). I conclude by noting how imperatives within digital capitalism produce ambivalent effects regarding the restoration...
 

Democratic Transition or Autocratic Adjustment? Constitutional Amendments in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in 2022–2023

Central Asian states have recently implemented significant constitutional reforms. In the case of the authoritarian republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the nature of the constitutional amendments, introduced in 2022 and 2023, respectively, is hard to accurately assess. On the one hand, they are a step towards democratization and strengthened guarantees of human rights and freedoms; on the other, they reinforce the current undemocratic government mechanisms. This article discusses the most recent constitutional reforms in both countries, distinguishing three main areas of change: ideology, social issues, and governance mechanisms. It is argued that these reforms generally fall within the paradigm of authoritarian constitutionalism and are an adjustment of the countries’ constitutions to the current needs of their undemocratic presidents.

Alienation and authoritarian appropriation – the spatiotemporality of political subjectivation under East German urban neoliberalism

This paper contributes to a growing field of spatial analyses of authoritarianism by asking how urban neoliberalization impacts authoritarian subjectivation. It analyses why working class long-term tenants in a gentrifying working class district of the East German city of Leipzig are susceptible to authoritarianism. It traces how their political subjectivation operates through space and time. The theoretical contribution is a spatio-temporally sensitive theorization of subjectivation between alienation and appropriation. Tenants’ experiences of alienation and their attempts of appropriation depend on processes of political economic restructuring in a row of scales from their flat to the reunited nation, and their classed position within these. The tenants in focus develop a nostalgic temporality of belonging, reminiscent of a lost past and devoid of present engagement or an imaginable future. This fosters ideological, authoritarian forms of appropriation, reproducing social hierarchies and scapegoating instead of encouraging practical engagement with present conditions.

The limits of liberal justice: on authoritarianism and instrumental theories of law

ABSTRACT In this essay, I use Professor Shucheng Wang's recent book Law as an Instrument: Sources of Chinese Law for Authoritarian Legality as a point of departure for reconsidering the conventional opposition between liberal and authoritarian forms of legality. I suggest that opposition is in turn embedded in an even more elemental distinction between different state forms. Turning to Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws, I first investigate the historical and geopolitical processes by which modern political theory reduced the political universe into three species of states (republics, monarchies, and despotisms) and then merely two (democracies and authoritarian states). I then turn to the contemporary genealogy of the concept of rule of law, which arose first as a critique of the rise of the administrative state in the West and then became a means to delegitimize socialist conceptions of legality. I conclude by focusing on the People's Republic of China to evaluate the utility of assessing its legal order in terms of authoritarian legality as well as in terms of democracy more generally.

Reimagining academic freedom: a companion piece

Abstract We consider academic freedom in the context of broader developments in higher education. We suggest that the tenor of contemporary debates on the subject is a manifestation of pervasive forms of authoritarianism that undermine the university as a home of adventure, a place and space that is conducive to the conduct of free inquiry. It is evident that some champions of academic freedom engage in dangerously polarized forms of spectacle, engendered by a management culture that embraces showmanship and routinely favours talking over listening. As such, they represent a force for conformity rather than dissent; division rather than collective action. These forms of spectacle jeopardize rather than promote the principles of academic freedom by polarizing the terms of the debate for maximum ‘impact’. We explore the implications of conceptualizations of academic freedom that focus on the rights of everyone in the university. We also suggest that the notion might usefully be extended to those on precarious contracts, and to students facing normative expectations about what constitutes ‘progress’ in academic practice. Drawing upon Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century and an essay by Vaclav Havel, we reassess the notion of the ‘pursuit of truth’ that underlies conventional definitions of academic freedom. We conclude with a brief vignette, a rousing endorsement of the ineffable and irreducible qualities of friendship. This entails slaying a fictitious, three-headed dragon and embracing a form of spectacle that transcends attempts to capture why it moves us. We leave the reader with warm-blooded traces of energy, curiosity, liveliness, and quiet determination.

СOMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE POLITICAL MODERNIZATION OF GEORGIA AND SINGAPORE

The article is devoted to the research of comparative analysis of the political modernization of Georgia and Singapore. The relevance of this subject is due to experience of successful development in the political and economic spheres of Georgia and Singapore, which was facilitated by the dynamic formation of political institutions. Political modernization in these states took place in an accelerated and “compressed” format.It is specified, that these countries are passing through rapid economic growth. Singapore, in particular, was part of the “first wave of Asian tigers” (along with Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea). Georgia, in turn, continues to demonstrate annual GDP growth, despite domestic political and regional instability.It is stated that Singapore is a prime example of economic transformation under authoritarianism. Singapore’s economic success was influenced by many factors, both political (effective governance, professionalism and competence of political leaders, political stability), geographical (a small island state located at the crossroads of sea routes), and cultural (Asian values). The achievements in the socio-economic sphere as a result of political changes were so amazing that they even interested the main reformer of the PRC, Deng Xiaoping. Many Chinese officials and intellectuals see Singapore as a possible benchmark for China.As for Georgia, in applying authoritarian forms of transformation, the leaders of the young post-communist Georgian democracy largely imitated the modernization that took place in Southeast Asia, including Singapore. The authors come to the conclusion that era of Mikheil Saakashvili clearly demonstrates the powerful modernization leap of the Caucasian republic, which was not afraid of temporary authoritarian measures to accelerate political evolution.The Georgian experience of reforms became so successful that the fifth President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko (2014-2019) invited a Georgian landing of reformers to Ukraine to transform individual ministries – the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of Economy, the Ministry of Health.

The Plague of Certitude: Why Fromm Matters Today

ABSTRACT Today, a plague of certitude is spreading within American psychoanalysis. This socially constructed virus is increasingly dominating our unmoderated list serves, appearing in our journals, and slowly seeping into our institutes. Having transcended the objectivism of traditional Freudian analysis, we seem to be revivifying its spirit. Rigorous claims to truth, superior knowledge, and contempt for those not in agreement abound. The life and work of psychoanalyst and sociologist Erich Fromm is offered as an antidote and model for resistance to this plague. He consistently objected to all forms of authoritarianism, from the Right and the Left. As a radical humanist he viewed us all as responsible selves, not mere vessels for instinctual drives or victims of unbearable circumstances. As Paul Roazan said about Fromm: “It still seems to me remarkable how he was willing to stand up for what he believed in. He should be a model of independence and autonomy for us all.”

Feminist constitutional narratives, the pandemic and hyper-presidentialism in Turkey

Constitutional resilience has been tested by various crises worldwide, and the COVID-19 pandemic constituted another litmus test for global constitutionalism. In Turkey, the pandemic came three years after a constitutional revision introduced hyper-presidentialism in 2017, which undermined the separation of powers and the system of checks and balances. This article looks at the period that begins with the official announcement of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 and ends with the assessment of the general elections of May 2023 to document three years of hyper-presidentialist constitutionalism and the counter-responses to it proposed by the Turkish feminist movement and the constitutional institutions that still remain autonomous from the executive. By combining conventional constitutional methods with the critical feminist positionality approach, this article diagnosed the impact of the pandemic on authoritarian regime-building. Based on feminist constitutionalism, this scholar activist approach shed light on some overlooked aspects of the pandemic in Turkey, such as persistent déconstitutionalisation and its link with anti-gender politics, to reveal the living essence of authoritarian constitutionalism and the evolution of hyper-presidentialism in Turkey.

Foucault Meets Novel Coronavirus: Biosociality, Excesses of Governmentality and the “Will to Live” of the Pandemicariat

This essay situates Foucault`s ideas of ‘biopower’ and ‘governmentality’ within the Indian context of the Covid emergency, analysing how the excesses of ‘biopolitical’ and the authoritarian forms of ‘governmentality’ evoke a radical re-reading of Foucault within Covid-infested India. We argue how pre-existing ‘discursive’ conditions of biomedical, digital, and neoliberal India facilitated more majoritarian and undemocratic forms of (bio)politics during the Indian experience of the pandemic, exposing the migrant workers in particular to tremendous ‘precarity’ and turning them into pandemicariat. To meet our theoretical ends, we investigate through forging links between Foucauldian theory – consisting of a set of concepts like biopolitics, anatomo-politics, governmentality etc— and ideas like transmuted biosociality, truncated sociality, will to live, pandemicariat etc. Current conditions of truncated sociality render human bodies more ‘discursively’ available for ‘biomedical’ and ‘biopolitical’ interventions, disempowering people’s capacity to sustain the more synthetic biosocial substances of conviviality. However, following Agamben’s early controversial stance for braving the virus, we would like to envisage “life” to be more than “survival” alone. We would also argue that the hard times of the pandemic invoke a new grammar of the “will to live” that was practised by the pandemicariat against heavy odds.

Who Holds the Power? Political Succession & Authoritarian Regimes in Africa (1990-2020)

The paper analyzes and describes continuities of authoritarian regimes in Africa since the return to multipartism by classifying cases which have been stable in the authoritarian form in the last thirty years. Special attention is devoted to political successions, whether these are ruled by a party and/or the military or took the form of dynastic ones. In particular, the existence of collegial control on personal power is presented as an important way of ensuring continuities of party and/or military hegemony over the authoritarian regime. Collegial control may also strengthen the stability of the regime in its authoritarian form. However, it is not excluded that a moderate degree of personal power may also be helpful in ensuring stability if combined with collegial control as it helps in limiting factionalism.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL FIELDWORK AND “HAVING AN IDEOLOGY”

In European anthropological circles there was a burst of interest in the topic of ideology in the 1970s in the wake of the riots of May 1968 in Paris and consequent intense interpretative conflict about theory among French intellectuals. The ideas then discussed in the wider context of the Cold War still have pertinence to the present day when ideology seems to clothe, if not inspire, armed confrontations and authoritarian forms of government. This article reviews the intellectual formation then current among Western anthropologists, points to its deficiencies, and notes that even though the issues then debated about ideology still have some interest they were proper to their time. Since then, not only has anthropology moved on, but the world and the very purchase of “political ideology” has fundamentally changed. In this light I re-visited my fieldnotes from research in Siberia in the 1990s and 2000s and I attempt with hindsight to reflect on my ethnographic experience and its relevance for today. Finally, I introduce some remarks about the relevance of all this to the contemporary situation in Russia.