Terrorism and Autocratization: Comparing Bangladesh and Indonesia.

While both terrorism and autocratization are prominent subjects in political science, systematic explorations on the relationship between the two remain rare. In particular, research on whether and how terrorism drives autocratization processes remains nascent. To bridge this gap, we explore how and under what conditions terrorism drives autocratization, using Bangladesh under Sheikh Hasina (2009 to 2004) and Indonesia under Joko Widodo (2014 to 2024) as case studies. Both are Sunni Muslim-majority countries with strong secular legacies and long accounted for the world’s first largest Muslim democracies. Since the early 2000s, both have experienced jihadist terrorism. Nevertheless, Bangladesh shifted from democracy to autocracy, while Indonesia remained largely democratic. To explain this difference, we construct a heuristic theoretical framework to capture autocratization in three interrelated dimensions: First, executive aggrandizement paralleling the rise of terrorism; second, the bolstering of the security apparatus in the wake of terrorism, leading to an increase in surveillance and the limitation of civil liberties; and, third, the repression of political opponents. For both Widodo and Hasina, terrorism provided an opportunity for executive aggrandizement as well as for limiting civil liberties. However, only the Bangladeshi government used terrorism as a legitimation to massively repress the political opposition. We argue that two main factors serve to explain these differences: first differing levels of pernicious polarization; and, second, differences in the power base – and, in particular, military backing – of the political opposition. The study enhances our understanding of the terrorism-autocratization-nexus by pointing to the multi-causal nature of the relationship and the role of interacting influences (1); highlighting the role of political repression (2); and showing that the political instrumentalization rather than the objective severity of terrorism matter most for its impact on autocratization (3).