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The Practice of Freedom as a ‘Fourth Pillar’ of Authoritarian Stability

China
Comparative Politics
Globalisation
Governance
Welfare State
Freedom
Comparative Perspective
Catherine Owen
University of Exeter
Catherine Owen
University of Exeter

Abstract

The existence of a co-dependent relationship between practices of authority and freedom is a commonly accepted feature of democratic – or liberal – political regimes. Following Foucault, liberal governance is understood to rely on various authoritarian or disciplinary practices (the regulation of free markets, the growth of population surveillance, and the existence of corrective institutions for social groups considered unable to govern themselves appropriately). However, this understanding has hardly penetrated the study of ‘authoritarian’ regimes, whose ‘three pillars of stability’ are conceived as legitimation, repression and co-optation (Gerschewski 2013). While not denying the importance of these three pillars for authoritarian stability, this paper argues that a fourth pillar is, in fact, freedom. Freedom here is understood as a practice, rather than a goal or end-point; it refers to autonomous actions made by individuals in the public sphere that contribute towards their well-being. The paper argues that contemporary authoritarian governance relies upon such practices because of on-going, global processes of marketisation of state bureaucracy, which require individuals to make informed, rational choices about their welfare needs. Having relinquished control of many public services to private and civic actors, non-democratic governments require citizens to act in this way in order to understand which policies work and which do not – information that they cannot acquire by other means, such via as elections or the media. The paper’s theoretical proposals are supported by qualitative fieldwork in two influential ‘authoritarian’ regimes – Russia and China – where I explore practices of civic participation in local governance as illustrative of the existence of an autonomous political subjecthood. The central argument is that the globalised notion of an autonomous political subject, acting freely in the public domain to pursue her interests, is, alongside the other three pillars, central to understanding local stability in contemporary non-democratic polities.