Violence and Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization

Abstract

This panel addresses how institutionalized violence favours authoritarian resilience. Authoritarian regime analysis have been focusing since the beginning of the 21st century on dynamics of resilience and policy changes after the 3rd wave of democratization. Recent research demonstrated the existence of new kind of authoritarian states that can be distinguished from their predecessors, whose new central characteristic is the implementation of supposedly democratic institutions (Tripp 2004, Levitsky and Way 2002; Diamond 2002). This reformed form of authoritarianism means that these governments are far less likely to use violence as a maintenance strategy (Picard 2008). Consequently, the recent literature concentrates on elite cooption measures, demonstrating that those often involve pseudo-democratic institutions (Brownlee 2007, Gandhi and Przeworski 2006, Schedler 2006). While this literature has greatly improved our understanding of the internal dynamics of authoritarian states, these researches overlook how violence can be used by current authoritarian regimes as a mean to hold together (Geddes & al. 2014, 149; Magaloni andt Kricheli 2010, 137; Saideman and Zahar 2008, 11-12). The events of the “Arab Spring” demonstrated that violence is still used by authoritarian regimes and that security services, are central actors in the process of regime resilience. Furthermore, a certain number of researches pointed that there seems to be a positive link between violence and the durability of authoritarian regimes (Krain and Myers 1997; Lacina 2006; Walter 2004). In line with these recent developments, it is becoming critical to understand how violence is used in the reformed authoritarian states. The participants to our panels will therefore explore the dynamics of the use of coercion, reflecting on which contexts are more favourable to its use, which strategies are used to limit its negative consequences on the stability of regimes, and its ties to other maintenance strategies.

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