Resisting Autocratisation across the Mediterranean: Legacies, Learning, and Transnational Linkages

Autocratisation has become a global trend. For the first time since the turn of the century, the number of democracies worldwide is lower than the number of autocratic regimes (V-Dem Report, 2025). On the southern shore of the Mediterranean, the Middle East and North Africa continues to be the region with the highest concentration of authoritarian regimes. The failure of the democratic transitions initiated in 2011 has opened new perspectives on the reconsolidation of authoritarianism (Heydemann and Leenders, 2013; Hinnebusch, 2015). Meanwhile, Europe has not been exempt from this trend. Developments since the turn of the century have shown that European illiberal democracies are not solely the result of incomplete transition processes, but also reflect processes of democratic advance and regression (Plattner, 2019), with some episodes of democratic backsliding subsequently being reversed. This has opened a broader debate on ‘democratic resilience’ in the face of authoritarian tendencies (Zika and Szent-Iványi, 2026).
These developments have prompted an emerging literature on resistance to autocratisation. This literature has advanced new conceptual understandings of resistance (Tomini, Gibril and Bochev, 2023; Bochev, 2026), examined the spaces in which it unfolds (Tomini, Sandri and Szymański, 2025), and explored the learning mechanisms shaping resisters’ actions (Casani and Colin, 2026). Drawing on this trend, this panel seeks to expand critical knowledge of resistance to autocratisation, its different forms, capacities, and limits. It proposes three research axes: the role of historical legacies in shaping resistance, particularly how they are mobilised and contested in processes of deconstructing state legitimacy; the adaptation of opposition tactics, organisation, and symbolic repertoires under different trajectories of autocratisation; and the transnational linkages of resistance through diasporic mobilisation across domestic and international arenas. The latter highlights transnational connections across the two shores of the Mediterranean and how diasporas may challenge traditional conceptions of the nation-state and its attempts to exercise control over populations beyond its borders (Burgess, 2020). Bringing together case studies and comparative analyses from both shores, the panel assesses how resistance is shaped by historical legacies, learning mechanisms, and domestic–transnational linkages under different trajectories of autocratisation.