To block or not to block: Pathways to blockchain-based digital authoritarianism in the Global South.

In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto created the first decentralized digital currency, launching the global cryptocurrency market. Since the mid-2010s, regimes in the Global South have taken divergent approaches to blockchain-based finance, from making bitcoin legal tender to using Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) to exert financial and societal control. This paper argues that blockchain-based digital authoritarianism (BDFA), defined as the pursuit of CBDC or restrictive cryptocurrency policies, erodes financial privacy and enhances state control over transactions, thereby serving as an instrument for pursuing infrastructural power (Mann, 1984). However, not all Global South regimes adopt BDFA, which raises the question: why do some embrace it while others resist? Under Pearson’s (2024) typology, BDFA is positioned as a promotion‑based subtype of digital authoritarianism, framed under the guise of financial or monetary efficiency, consumer protection, innovation, or an anti‑money‑laundering safeguard. Thus, BDFA is benign, yet can systematically generate authoritarian outcomes. The pursuit of a state-owned, potentially programmable CBDC and the restriction of decentralized, privacy-protecting financial instruments demonstrate the creation of infrastructure to monitor and constrain various degrees of society's financial, economic, and potential political behavior. In the best case, under cryptocurrency regulation, society is subject to the same level of privacy restrictions and currency control as under fiat currency. In the worst case, transactions can be hypothetically used as a restrictive measure against certain parts of society or during political protests through CBDC programmability. On this basis, BDFA is theorized as instrumental infrastructural power (Coombs, 2025), enhancing the state’s logistical capacity to reshape financial instruments and penetrate social structures. This study uses cross-sectional data from regimes in the Global South to understand the pathways and conditions under which BDFA is enacted or not. Empirically, the study applies fuzzy‑set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to identify the multiple causal pathways to the presence or absence of BDFA, allowing for equifinality and causal asymmetry. Five macro-political conditions are applied. To capture the despotic dimension of broader political conditions, two conditions are used: political repression and regime type. Digital infrastructural capacity, the third condition, measures the extent to which states have built the information and communications systems that “run through” society, including digital identification, e‑government platforms, and digital payments. The presence of COVID‑19 digital contact‑tracing provides an indicator of states’ willingness and ability to mobilize digital infrastructures for population‑wide monitoring and coordination during a crisis, serving as the fourth condition. This condition also seeks to test the hypothesis that digital contract tracing served as the launch pad for recent BDFA. Finally, financial repression, operationalised through instruments such as capital controls, foreign‑exchange restrictions, and limits on cash payments, captures infrastructural penetration specifically in the monetary domain. This paper makes two contributions: conceptually, through the novel conceptualization of BDFA, and methodologically, demonstrating how Mann’s theory of infrastructural power can be translated into a set‑theoretic comparative design that combines political, digital, and financial dimensions.