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"Authoritarianism has emerged as a prominent theme in popular and academic discussions of politics since the 2016 US presidential election and the coinciding expansion of authoritarian rhetoric and ideals across Europe, Asia, and beyond. Until recently, however, academic geographers have not focused squarely on the concept of authoritarianism. Its longstanding absence from the field is noteworthy as geographers have made extensive contributions to theorizing structural inequalities, injustice, and other expressions of oppressive or illiberal power relations and their diverse spatialities. Identifying this void, Spatializing Authoritarianism builds upon recent research to show that even when conceptualized as a set of practices rather than as a simple territorial label, authoritarianism has a spatiality: both drawing from and producing political space and scale in many often surprising ways. This volume advances the argument that authoritarianism must be investigated by accounting for the many scales at which it is produced, enacted, and imagined."--Page [4] of cover.

AbstractStarting from the debate on democratic decline, this article introduces the concept of 'mainstreaming authoritarianism' in a bid to turn attention to the role and agency of traditional political actors in the process. The article summarises key findings of relevant studies on autocratisation and highlights issues with the many concepts employed to describe the problem. It moves on to define authoritarianism and suggests a turn towards practice‐based approaches. This facilitates the analysis of authoritarian discourses and practices of mainstream political actors in established democracies and helps bridge the gap between social psychology‐based and political science‐based classic conceptualisations of authoritarianism. Testing the hypothesis that authoritarianism has been mainstreamed, the author develops a comparative survey of the actions and practices of key political actors in Europe, concluding with a note on the importance of acknowledging this authoritarian turn, dealing with its consequences and focussing on the role of agency.

Authoritarianism has emerged as a prominent theme in popular and academic discussions of politics since the 2016 US presidential election and the coinciding expansion of authoritarian rhetoric and ideals across Europe, Asia, and beyond. Until recently, however, academic geographers have not focused squarely on the concept of authoritarianism. Its longstanding absence from the field is noteworthy as geographers have made extensive contributions to theorizing structural inequalities, injustice, and other expressions of oppressive or illiberal power relations and their diverse spatialities. Identifying this void, Spatializing Authoritarianism builds upon recent research to show that even when conceptualized as a set of practices rather than as a simple territorial label, authoritarianism has a spatiality: both drawing from and producing political space and scale in many often surprising ways. This volume advances the argument that authoritarianism must be investigated by accounting for the many scales at which it is produced, enacted, and imagined. Including a diverse array of theoretical perspectives and empirical cases drawn from the Global South and North, this collection illustrates the analytical power of attending to authoritarianism's diverse scalar and spatial expressions, and how intimately connected it is with identity narratives, built landscapes, borders, legal systems, markets, and other territorial and extraterritorial expressions of power.

This article traces the roots of the Authoritarian Personality (AP) project in the neo-Freudian/phenomenological tradition of the Frankfurt School (FS). It focuses on three of its major proponents (Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno and Herbert Marcuse) and examines the construction of the F-scale. It outlines how, according to FS-influenced scholars, the AP arose from the disciplinary measures inflicted on late 19th and early 20th century German middle-class youth, and details the sado-masochistic political style of the prototypical AP. It covers the critical reception of this characterization and explanation of authoritarianism by Bob Altemeyer and Anglo-American positivism. It concludes by arguing that in overlooking the inner life of the AP, positivism blinds us to compelling truths, about authoritarianism, and also about ourselves.

One of the Cold War's commonplaces about Russia was its abiding embrace of authoritarianism. Across the centuries, successive regimes, whether Tsarist or Communist, have been characterised by Western scholars as highly centralised, personalised power structures, with an intolerance of dissidence that too easily descended into barbaric brutality. Living on Europe's farthest edge, Russia's peoples are said to have been bypassed by Enlightenment modernity, the rise of liberal constitutionalism and the gradual entrenchment of individual rights and democratic freedoms. For those commentators inspired by such Cold War thinking, it is a legacy that continues to shape contemporary politics. The assumption is that Putin's reclaiming of the presidency in 2012 is emblematic of an inevitable reversion to authoritarianism. Drawing on research in Russia during the March 2012 election, this article takes a critical look at the plethora of global statistical surveys that point to authoritarian trends under the current regime. It concludes that the conceptual framework underpinning the West's revelations about the descent into authoritarianism in contemporary Russia is neither clear nor convincing.

One of the Cold War's commonplaces about Russia was its abiding embrace of authoritarianism. Across the centuries, successive regimes, whether Tsarist or Communist, have been characterised by Western scholars as highly centralised, personalised power structures, with an intolerance of dissidence that too easily descended into barbaric brutality. Living on Europe's farthest edge, Russia's peoples are said to have been bypassed by Enlightenment modernity, the rise of liberal constitutionalism and the gradual entrenchment of individual rights and democratic freedoms. For those commentators inspired by such Cold War thinking, it is a legacy that continues to shape contemporary politics. The assumption is that Putin's reclaiming of the presidency in 2012 is emblematic of an inevitable reversion to authoritarianism. Drawing on research in Russia during the March 2012 election, this article takes a critical look at the plethora of global statistical surveys that point to authoritarian trends under the current regime. It concludes that the conceptual framework underpinning the West's revelations about the descent into authoritarianism in contemporary Russia is neither clear nor convincing.