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polices, however, as Laclau and Mouffe suggest, may lead to forms of ‘totalitarianism’ which negate the ‘logic of democracy’ inherent in the widening of popular participation. 1 Chávez has been repeatedly accused of authoritarianism, principally by opposition leaders but also by many foreign supporters of the opposition and even amongst some on the left. In this chapter, we will examine more fully this dichotomy between democracy and authoritarianism in the Chávez government. Specifically we will seek to answer two key interrelated questions
In the first part of his 1991 book, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century , Samuel Huntington asks the question, ‘What changes in plausible independent variables in most probably the 1960s and 1970s produced the dependent variable, democratizing regime changes in the 1970s and 1980s?’ In response he suggests that there were essentially five key changes: the deepening legitimacy problems of authoritarian regimes, the unprecedented global economic growth of the 1960s which greatly expanded the middle class, changes
Since taking power in 2014, India's prime minister, Narendra Modi, has made significant headway in turning a robust, socially rooted democracy into an authoritarian system. He has acquired substantial autonomy, radically centralised power, and used it to mount an aggressive, systematic assault on open politics. In pursuit of top-down control by the Prime Minister's Office, he has greatly weakened other state institutions and mounted an offensive on alternative power centres beyond the state – rival parties, civil society organisations, the
7 Chinese finance and the future of authoritarian capitalism The jury is very much out on how epiphenomenal the West’s post1800 advantage will be. Kenneth Pomeranz (2009) Reevaluating China’s financial development in historical comparative context challenges existing ways of thinking about the dynamics of global order and China’s place within it. This global order is in a deep state of flux and uncertainty, yet our posing of questions surrounding the fate of the liberal world order occlude the possibility that China is constructing its own version of capitalist
8 Radical isomorphism and the anti-authoritarian diffusion of leaderless organizations Once you begin to look at human society from an anarchist point of view you discover that the alternatives are already there, in the interstices of the dominant power structure. If you want to build a free society, the parts are all at hand. (Colin Ward) Nothing better than a good idea Anarchists are commonly depicted as selfish iconoclasts who could not cooperate with others even if their lives depended on it. Owing to this perception, the idea of an anarchist movement, which
This collection brings together work on forms of popular television produced within the authoritarian regimes of Europe after World War II. Ten chapters based on new and original research examine approaches to programming and individual programmes in Spain, Greece, Czechoslovakia, Romania, the Soviet Union and the GDR at a time when they were governed as dictatorships or one-party states. Rather than foregrounding the political economy of television or its role as an overt tool of state propaganda, the focus is on popular television-everyday programming that ordinary people watched. An editorial introduction examines the question of what can be considered ‘popular’ when audience appeal is often secondary to the need for state control. With familiar measures of popularity often absent, contributors adopt various approaches in applying the term to the programming they examine and in considering the reasons for its popularity. Drawing on surviving archives, scripts and production records, contemporary publications, YouTube clips, and interviews with producers and performers, its chapters recover examples of television programming history unknown beyond national borders and often preserved largely in the memories of the audiences who lived with them. Popular Television in Authoritarian Europe represents a significant intervention in transnational television studies, making these histories available to scholars for the first time, encouraging comparative enquiry and extending the reach – intellectually and geographically – of European television history.
We submit that this analysis of authoritarian populism requires urbanizing. The exercise of rule – and hegemony – is a space-forming practice. That is to say, it intervenes in dynamics of uneven development with territorial state strategies (that organise social
posited that authoritarian regimes can pass the costs of coping with sanctions impacts on to their people ( Haggard and Noland, 2017 : 6), which informs Pyongyang’s ability to endure sanctions through repression for average citizens and rewards for the elite ( Peksen, 2016 ). Past research has considered sanctions against the DPRK from a number of perspectives, including political economy ( Frank, 2006 ; Haggard and Noland, 2010 ), international trade ( Noland, 2009 ), economic statecraft ( Haggard and Noland, 2017 ), US policy ( Stanton et al. , 2017 ) and
Introduction The first thing to say about liberal order is that it hasn’t been that liberal. Since the Second World War, the production of subjects obeisant to the rule of liberal institutions has depended on illiberal and authoritarian methods – not least on the periphery of the world system, where conversion to Western reason has been pursued with particularly millenarian zeal, and violence. The wishful idea of an ever more open and global market economy has been continuously undermined by its champions, with their subsidies
principle of conspiracy forms the substance of this thought. (1987: 153) While the deliberate use of disinformation is mostly associated with authoritarian regimes, its use is also growing in ostensible democracies. Bradshaw and Howard (2019) found signs of ‘computational propaganda’ and the manipulation of public opinion and social media in over 70 countries in 2019, mostly prominent in China, especially in its state response to