Understanding the Changing Geographies of Authoritarianism

Authoritarianism is growing, but the drivers and modalities of this phenomenon escape neat state boundaries: authoritarian trends are driven by multiplying authoritarian practices (Glasius 2023), reactionary ideas and policies (Abrajano and Hajnal 2015; Abrahamsen et al. 2024; Ma 2024; Roggeband and Krizsan 2024), and technologies enabling surveillance, repression, and disinformation (Michaelsen and Ruijgrok 2024; Roberts and Oosterom 2025). Yet dominant analytical frameworks remain state-centric (Tomini 2021). Scholarship is beginning to respond through a "triple turn", that is local (Giraudy et al. 2019; Le Galès 2021; Tomini et al. 2025), transnational (Cooley and Heathershaw 2019; Gurol et al. 2024; Michaelsen and Ruijgrok 2024; Holvikivi et al. 2024), and practice-oriented (Koch 2022; Glasius 2023), challenging the long-standing methodological nationalism of comparative politics. This shift is becoming visible across different research areas, including authoritarian diffusion, digital authoritarianism, and anti-gender networks. This workshop aims to bring together this nascent but still disjointed scholarship to discuss the conceptual, methodological, and empirical advances that are needed to understand the current political moment. Building on the on-going Horizon-funded project “Resisting Inter-Scalar Authoritarian Networks and Coalitions (RESISTANCE)”, the workshop proposes to look beyond go-to methodologies and datasets to design new, interdisciplinary approaches, capable of accounting for the role and interactions not only of “usual suspect” actors (parties, executives, state actors), but also e.g. corporate actors, tech and fossil fuel interests, the super-rich, and the sprawling array of think tanks, foundations, social media influencers etc. that populate and fund reactionary and authoritarian infrastructures.

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1: How do local, national and transnational actors interact to shape authoritarian ecosystems?
2: How can we theorise authoritarianism to make sense of its geographical complexity?
3: What is the role of non-state actors in fostering and shaping authoritarianism?
4: What forms of resistance are emerging to counter authoritarian and reactionary growth?
5: What new methods can we employ to study contemporary authoritarianism and its global spread?

1: Geography-inspired and other interdisciplinary approaches to authoritarianism and autocratisation
2: How authoritarian ideas, practices, technologies, and policies circulate and interact across contexts
3: The role of corporations, tech & fossil fuel interests, the super-rich and other actors beyond the “usual suspects”
4: Conceptual, methodological or empirical advances on the changing geographies of authoritarianism
5: Networks and other transnational infrastructure for authoritarian diffusion
6: Modes of resistance against authoritarian and reactionary formations