How does our understanding of authoritarianism change when we study it through the experiences and practices of migrants, diasporas, and the actors who govern, support, or organize them? Political transformations – both towards and away from authoritarianism – are neither confined within national borders nor experienced by citizens only. This Workshop, endorsed by ECPR’s Migration and Ethnicity SG, proposes migration as a distinctive analytical lens through which to innovate the study of authoritarian transformation, collective resistance and democratic reconstruction. Workshop participants will be invited to contribute to a special issue that leverages migration studies for comparative politics research on authoritarianism.
This Workshop examines authoritarianism “from the outside in” to generate new concepts, mechanisms, and methods for understanding authoritarian transformation, collective resistance and democratic reconstruction.
Research on authoritarianism has focused on transformations at the core of political life: formal institutions and national political membership (Bermeo 2016; Levitsky/Way 2010; Lührmann/Lindberg 2019). Yet we know much less about what becomes visible when political transformation is observed and influenced from its margins.
Migration scholarship offers a distinctive lens for addressing this gap: Transnational perspectives can reveal processes otherwise obscured by nation-centred analysis, such as the circulation of ideas and expectations about authoritarianism and democracy across borders (Levitt/Glick Schiller 2004); migrants and diasporic organizations may mobilize for or against authoritarian transformation from abroad (Moss 2021; Adamson 2020); and restrictive migration policies might act as a “canary in the coalmine” for democratic decay and rule-of-law erosion (Stoyanova/Smet 2022; Natter/Slingenberg 2026).
Bringing migration studies into direct conversation with research on authoritarianism, this Workshop treats “outsiderness” as an epistemic position. Indeed, as simultaneous insiders and outsiders to multiple political communities, migrants and diasporas may reveal transformations in rights, surveillance, and state-society relations earlier or differently than established institutional indicators on democracy.
The Workshop consequently seeks to make a broader contribution to comparative politics: using migration and diaspora studies not simply as another empirical domain in which authoritarianism can be studied, but as a perspective from which to identify, theorize and compare processes of authoritarian transformation and resistance in novel ways.
Adamson, F. B. (2020). Non-state authoritarianism and diaspora politics. Global Networks, 20(1), 150–169.
Bermeo, N. (2016). On democratic backsliding. Journal of democracy, 27(1), 5-19.
Levitsky, S., & Way, L. A. (2010). Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War. Cambridge University Press.
Levitt, P., & Schiller, N. G. (2004). Conceptualizing simultaneity: A transnational social field perspective on society. International Migration Review, 38(3), 1002-1039.
Lührmann, Anna & Staffan I. Lindberg (2019). A Third Wave of Autocratization Is Here: What Is New About It? Democratization, 26(7), 1095–1113.
Moss, D. M. (2021). The Arab Spring Abroad: Diaspora Activism against Authoritarian Regimes. Cambridge University Press.
Natter, K. & Slingenberg, L. (2026). “Who Rules over Migrants? Autocratic Tools in Migration Policies.” Hague Journal on the Rule of Law.
Stoyanova, V. & Smet, S. eds. (2022). Migrants’ Rights, Populism and Legal Resilience in Europe. Cambridge University Press.
1: What does a migratory lens reveal about the mechanisms and manifestations of authoritarian transformation?
2: How do migrants, diasporas and migration-related actors experience, support or resist authoritarianism?
3: How do migrants and diasporas imagine and construct (transnational) political communities and democratic futures?
4: Under what conditions do migration institutions and policies become sites of broader political transformation?
5: How can we best study political transformation from the margins of political membership?
1: Migration as a lens to theorize what authoritarianism and resistance are and how we study them
2: Comparative or case study analyses of political transformation from the vantage point of migration
3: The role of diasporas in (transnational) political change – towards and away from authoritarianism
4: The role of migrant, refugee and civil-society actors in supporting or resisting authoritarianism
5: The role of street-level bureaucrats and everyday migration governance in political transformation
6: Migratory actors’ imaginations of democratic political futures
7: Innovative methods to study political transformation from the margins of political membership
