In the light of changing geopolitical alignments, institutional pressures, and systemic crises, political science should look again at authoritarian dynamics and go beyond the strict binary distinctions like democracy on the one hand and authoritarianism on the other. Instead of seeing authoritarianism just as a “default category” or as a fixed kind of regime, this panel aims to study contemporary authoritarianism as a dynamic process, characterized by specific trajectories, institutional reconfigurations, and modes of political domination that unfold across multiple levels of governance.
This panel, aligned with the central themes of RC40 - New World Orders, looks at the way in which authoritarian tendencies, hybrid practices, and illiberal mentalities interact with globalisations, regionalisms, and internationalisation processes across both democratic and non-democratic settings, at various scales, and over different historical periods. The core aim is to interrogate the fundamental novelty of contemporary authoritarianism (or authoritarianisms). More precisely, the panel investigates whether the current authoritarian dynamics amount to a structural break with the models that existed after World War II and examines whether the classical theoretical frameworks remain sufficient or if alternative concepts offer greater explanatory power in today’s global landscape.
To address these conceptual and empirical challenges, the panel focuses on the spatial, temporal, and institutional fragmentation of contemporary authoritarian practices across multiple levels of analysis:
• The internal and subnational dimensions: The emergence of localized “authoritarian pockets” or temporal exceptionalities, such as those concerning border control, emergency regimes, or climate crises, within nominally democratic systems.
• Multilevel and Transnational Dynamics: compared with the classic twentieth-century regimes that usually stayed away from international organizations, modern authoritarian actors are increasingly involved in multilateral institutions, transnational networks, and epistemic communities to take advantage of governance asymmetries and weaken democratic norms from within.
• Knowledge, Technology, and Legitimation: the use of advanced technologies for surveillance and control at the same time as the challenge or exploitation of scientific knowledge, expertise, and academic freedom, are mechanisms for achieving political legitimacy.
We invite paper proposals that address these questions from both theoretical and empirical points of view, using either monodisciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches and employing qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods.