Suchergebnisse

Georgia is sliding towards autocracy after its government moves to force through a bill on 'foreign agents'.

Under Putin's rule, Russian policy has considerably hardened both domestically and internationally. It has gone from a mixture of oligarchy, democracy, and anarchy to a regime of autocracy with some fascist features, and from an effort to imitate and join the West to a verbal aggressiveness towards the United States and an effort to reassert Russia's domination over its former empire. An important link between the two evolutions is to be found in the post-imperial nostalgia of the Russian population, in the neo-imperial ambition of its leaders, and in their fear of the spread of "color revolutions" among their neighbors.

Recent scholarship has increasingly focused on the international dimensions of authoritarian rule, and the idea of autocracy promotion has gained considerable academic currency. While the literature on autocracy promotion has identified some clear patterns of external support for autocratic incumbents, it has so far failed to demonstrate that these efforts can best be understood as a unified, coherent set of foreign policies that constitute intentional efforts to promote a particular regime type abroad. This article identifies the key deficiencies of existing treatments of the concept and identifies a roadmap to establish some conceptual clarity on the topic. It advances a "strict" definition of autocracy promotion that requires a clear intent on the part of an external actor to bolster autocracy as a form of political regime as well as an underlying motivation that rests in significant part on an ideological commitment to autocracy itself. It also introduces a new typology that places autocracy promotion within the wider context of the international politics of authoritarian rule.