Five Questions on the Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics

Your book describes a process you call the “authoritarian snapback,” where autocrats push back against liberal initiatives in five steps. The first three steps are defensive and inward focused: stigmatizing liberal ideas and institutions, such as universal human rights; shielding the domestic public from liberal influence; and reframing engagement and setting new rules for liberal actors. In the last two steps, autocrats move to the offensive: projecting control and influence outward to co-opt or silence liberal institutions abroad, and finally, repurposing transnational networks to dictate an illiberal agenda globally. Are autocrats likely to succeed in dictating the agenda?

Completely rewriting the global agenda according to an authoritarian playbook will prove difficult, just as it proved difficult for liberal activists and watchdogs to convert a majority of governments into sincere defenders of international human rights frameworks. Even governments that publicly acknowledge the legitimacy of human rights-related legal commitments do not always fulfill those commitments consistently. Wholesale normative change is difficult in either direction.

What we demonstrate, however, is that authoritarians have developed—and are having some success with—an offensive playbook for aggressively promoting their norms and agendas, rather than simply critiquing or protecting themselves from of liberal criticism. One area where we expect the arc to continue to tilt towards authoritarians is global sport, where increasingly it appears that remaining “apolitical” is a more sustainable path for embattled leaders of global sporting federations—such as FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) or the International Olympic Committee—and major corporate sponsors. FIFA’s Club World Cup in the United States this summer, for example, has reportedly avoided anti-discrimination and anti-racism messaging at the tournament so as to not anger Donald Trump and his supporters. This follows the organization pressuring players at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar to refrain from supporting LGBTQ rights. The World Cup will be held in 2034 in Saudi Arabia and advocates fear it will legitimize the monarchy, with FIFA’s chief reportedly personally close to Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. Market power and investment allow authoritarians a greater likelihood to dictate the agenda when it comes to political matters. The fact that both the next FIFA men’s World Cup and summer Olympic Games will take place in the United States under an American presidency hostile to liberal norms will probably severely curtail the use of these occasions for liberal protest or agenda-setting.

On the other hand, it’s not all smooth sailing for authoritarians. In the realm of global internet governance, for example, Russia and China’s promotion of more state control has faced stiff opposition within internet governance bodies and at standard setting conferences, with many countries determined to maintain a more rights-based and multistakeholder-based approach to internet access.

In the heyday of liberal influence after the Cold War in the 1990s, multilateral institutions and transnational networks were expected to support the democratization of authoritarian governments. Are illiberal transnational networks uniting behind the inverse goal: to increase the odds of autocratization among democratic governments?

This is a great question but one that is tough to answer because actors’ motivations are often hard to pin down. One characteristic of the liberal heyday is that many multilateral institutions and networks were pretty clear about what they wanted, which was democratization and human rights. Activists like Amnesty International, for example, have causes they want to advance and wear their allegiances proudly, highlighting their programs and successes. But organizations’ stated motivations can mask other motives, and motives can change over time. Universities, for example, which now almost all have transnational collaborations or even branch campuses, may use a rhetoric of fostering liberalism and critical thinking, but financial motives are also a major factor that drives their internationalization.

Gauging autocrats’ motives is even harder, since they are not transparent, their media cannot investigate them, they often don’t produce paper trails or archives of decision making, and they frequently lie or mislead the outside world about their intentions. That said, we think we can draw a few conclusions about their goals.

First, motives vary considerably between and within states depending on the issue area. Sometimes autocracies clearly want to take some polities they do not control and fold them into authoritarian structures that they do control. Witness Russia’s invasions of Ukraine and China’s move on Hong Kong and its stated desire to take over Taiwan. In these cases, yes, part of the goal seems to be undoing democracy, at least in places that are seen as part of the “greater Russia,” et cetera. At other times, autocracies may want to project influence by doing things that make their autocratic systems look normal and legitimate, as is the case with hosting big sports tournaments or organizing state media to look and feel like independent media, even though everyone knows it’s not.

Second, one underlying motivation that we can discern is that all the autocracies we study want to use globalization and selective interconnectedness to solidify their rule at home. This runs contrary to the way many people think about authoritarian rule—as isolated and cut off from the world. On the contrary, we see across many examples autocracies looking to the “liberal international order” for things they can exploit.

You trace resurgent authoritarian influence across higher education, sports, consumer activism and advocacy movements, and global media. What is interesting about this list is that it goes way beyond politics and political objectives narrowly conceived. Is there an autocratic approach to cultural and economic influence?

Indeed, we gravitated toward issue areas where “international politics” was less obvious. Areas like international organizations, the human rights regime, and diplomacy are of course important, but scholars—including colleagues like yourself—are already addressing them effectively. We wanted to explore areas where, in many liberal states, we still assume a dominance of liberal values that is no longer justified.

Even if observers and Western international relations scholars do not take these areas seriously as sites for political contestation and influence, many autocrats clearly do. We know this because they invest serious money into many of their efforts. For example, the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund routinely spends more on the transfer fees for one star soccer player to come play in the Saudi Pro League than the country pays in annual regular United Nations contributions. Sure, Saudi Arabia is trying to accomplish multiple things with its football project, but among them are gaining political status, securing celebrity endorsements of its political projects, and normalizing the kingdom as a place to visit.

The other thing we realized is that we could have written a 1,000-page book. When writing we would frequently remark that you can’t open a newspaper without seeing a headline that is directly relevant to one of these areas. It’s nearly endless: influencers working for pro-authoritarian media, footballers advocating for the World Cup to be in Saudi Arabia, Chinese regulators pressuring clothing companies that refuse to use cotton sourced from Xinjiang, and, of course, the Trump administration’s efforts to pressure American universities to adhere to its preferred political priorities.

You focus to a significant extent on China and Russia’s influence strategies. Are the two countries aligned in their objectives, or do you see differences in how they approach issues such as influencing global media outlets?

The conventional wisdom is that Russia is a disrupter and China is a builder—that Moscow is the short-term distraction while Beijing poses the true strategic threat. There is some truth to this, and the two strategies complement each other quite nicely. Russia can sow chaos, misinformation, and cynicism. Its global media strategy emphasizes themes like Western hypocrisy, the legacies of colonialism and U.S. interventionism in areas like the Middle East, and the polarization and social problems within the United States itself. Russian global media rarely spotlights Russia as a model. By contrast, China can attract followers, back its projects with more money, and lend technological and political power to advance illiberal aims.

Most importantly, however, both China and Russia are learning from each other and aligned on attacking and eroding the authority of liberal values across global governance. In the media domain, they have signed many cooperation agreements and exchanged expertise about how to improve propaganda. They echo each other’s rhetoric about liberalism’s tendency to create political instability and “color revolutions,” America’s abuse of sanctions and the international financial system, Western hypocrisy on “values” issues, and the United States’ lack of reliability in upholding international principles like international law and multilateral trade.

What strategies can concerned governments and international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) adopt to more effectively respond to autocrats’ attempts to reshape global governance and promote illiberal norms? Could your “five stages” inform a liberal alternative?

There are no easy solutions to the issues we raise. The contradictions of liberalism, combined with the fact that illiberal resurgence emerged out of complex entanglements over a long period of time, makes them difficult to untangle. That said, we do make some recommendations in the book, such as investing in and protecting independent media and public broadcasting and protecting liberal political institutions at home.

Recent political developments have us thinking about a couple additional areas as well. The first is that the United States should continue to support NGOs and other institutions that promote democratic norms and conduct high-quality research on democracy and authoritarianism. Cutting funding to organizations like Freedom House, the Woodrow Wilson Center, Voice of America, the National Endowment for Democracy, and other similar organizations and programs in the name of preventing governmental waste may be penny wise, but it is pound foolish. They do important work to help us better understand these pressing problems and to pinpoint democratic backsliding and common authoritarian tactics. Depriving them of funds deprives the rest of us of ideas. Trying to control their independence politically for partisan purposes would be even worse.

Second, and more broadly, attempted funding cuts across many federal agencies under the current U.S. administration have highlighted how much expertise and competence the federal government supports. Reliable information about weather or health, for example, is supported by the federal government and not only helps ordinary people make decisions but also bolsters U.S. authority that comes with being seen as competent or even as the global gold standard. This kind of authority helped sustain liberalism because liberal democracies were seen as highly competent. There is a lot of evidence that they still are, but moves that erode this authority will likely erode the appeal of seemingly unrelated political values, too.

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