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The turbulent year of 2011 has brought the appearance of mass popular unrest and the collapse of long lived autocratic regimes in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and possibly Syria. The sudden and unanticipated fall of these regimes – often thought of as exemplars of authoritarian resilience - has brought much of the conventional wisdom on the durability and vulnerability of nondemocratic regimes into question. This book seeks to advance the existing literature by treating the autocratic state not as a unitary actor characterized by strength or weakness but rather as a structure or terrain that can alternatively inhibit or facilitate the appearance of national level forms of protests. In the mode of the Arab Spring, the color revolutions of the former Soviet Union, and the people power movement of the Philippines, such movements overcome the daunting impediments presented by autocrats, appeal to likeminded counterparts across society, and overwhelm the ability of regimes to maintain order. Conversely, in other settings, such as contemporary China, decentralized state structures provide an inhospitable environment for national-level protest, leading collective actors to opt for more local and parochial forms of contention. This outcome produces paradoxical situations, such as in the PRC, where protests are frequent but national-level mobilization and coordination is absent.
Authoritarianism has emerged as a prominent theme in popular and academic discussions of politics since the 2016 US presidential election and the coinciding expansion of authoritarian rhetoric and ideals across Europe, Asia, and beyond. Until recently, however, academic geographers have not focused squarely on the concept of authoritarianism. Its longstanding absence from the field is noteworthy as geographers have made extensive contributions to theorizing structural inequalities, injustice, and other expressions of oppressive or illiberal power relations and their diverse spatialities. Identifying this void, Spatializing Authoritarianism builds upon recent research to show that even when conceptualized as a set of practices rather than as a simple territorial label, authoritarianism has a spatiality: both drawing from and producing political space and scale in many often surprising ways. This volume advances the argument that authoritarianism must be investigated by accounting for the many scales at which it is produced, enacted, and imagined. Including a diverse array of theoretical perspectives and empirical cases drawn from the Global South and North, this collection illustrates the analytical power of attending to authoritarianism’s diverse scalar and spatial expressions, and how intimately connected it is with identity narratives, built landscapes, borders, legal systems, markets, and other territorial and extraterritorial expressions of power.
What drives politics in dictatorships? Milan W. Svolik argues authoritarian regimes must resolve two fundamental conflicts. Dictators face threats from the masses over which they rule - the problem of authoritarian control. Secondly from the elites with whom dictators rule - the problem of authoritarian power-sharing. Using the tools of game theory, Svolik explains why some dictators establish personal autocracy and stay in power for decades; why elsewhere leadership changes are regular and institutionalized, as in contemporary China; why some dictatorships are ruled by soldiers, as Uganda was under Idi Amin; why many authoritarian regimes, such as PRI-era Mexico, maintain regime-sanctioned political parties; and why a country's authoritarian past casts a long shadow over its prospects for democracy, as the unfolding events of the Arab Spring reveal. Svolik complements these and other historical case studies with the statistical analysis on institutions, leaders and ruling coalitions across dictatorships from 1946 to 2008.
In Authoritarian Containment, Marie-Eve Reny examines why local public security bureaus tolerate unregistered Protestant churches in urban China--an officially atheist country where religious practice is controlled by the state--when the central government considers them illegal. She argues that local states tolerate these churches to contain the underground practice of Protestantism. Containment necessitates a bargain between informal religious organizations and the state. Even though they are not regulated, unregistered churches are allowed to operate conditionally, so long as church leaders keep a low profile, share information as needed with local authorities, and agree that the state will not grant them formal institutional recognition. Reny also considers authoritarian regimes other than China that employ a similar strategy to control informal religious communities. She focuses on two Middle East cases-President Sadat's control of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1970s Egypt and the Jordanian monarchy's containment of jihadi Salafists after 2006. By reducing the incentives for local religious leaders to politicize and inducing such leaders to willingly provide inside information, governments can avoid the heavy hand of coercion and forceful co-optation. Based on extensive fieldwork, Authoritarian Containment offers insight into the way authoritarian regimes neutralize underground religious leaders and discourage opposition to the state.
Can authoritarian regimes use democratic institutions to strengthen and solidify their rule? The Chinese government has legislated some of the most protective workplace laws in the world and opened up the judicial system to adjudicate workplace conflict, emboldening China's workers to use these laws. This book examines these patterns of legal mobilization, showing which workers are likely to avail themselves of these new protections and find them effective. Gallagher finds that workers with high levels of education are far more likely to claim these new rights and be satisfied with the results. However, many others, left disappointed with the large gap between law on the books and law in reality, reject the courtroom for the streets. Using workers' narratives, surveys, and case studies of protests, Gallagher argues that China's half-hearted attempt at rule of law construction undermines the stability of authoritarian rule. New workplace rights fuel workers' rising expectations, but a dysfunctional legal system drives many workers to more extreme options, including strikes, demonstrations and violence.
Despite the spread of democratization following the Cold War's end, all signs indicate that we are living through an era of resurgent authoritarianism. Around 40 percent of the world's people live under some form of authoritarian rule, and authoritarian regimes govern about a third of the world's countries. In Authoritarianism: What Everyone Needs to Know®, Erica Frantz guides us through today's authoritarian wave, explaining how it came to be and what its features are. She also looks at authoritarians themselves, focusing in particular on the techniques they use to take power, the strategies they use to survive, and how they fall. Understanding how politics works in authoritarian regimes and recognizing the factors that either give rise to them or trigger their downfall is ever-more important given current global trends, and this book paves the ways for such an understanding. An essential primer on the topic, Authoritarianism provides a clear and penetrating overview of one of the most important-and worrying-developments in contemporary world politics.
Since the early 2000s, authoritarianism has risen as an increasingly powerful global phenomenon. This shift has not only social and political implications, but also environmental implications: authoritarian leaders seek to recast the relationship between society and the government in every aspect of public life, including environmental policy. When historians of technology or the environment have investigated the environmental consequences of authoritarian regimes, they have frequently argued that authoritarian regimes have been unable to produce positive environmental results or adjust successfully to global structural change, if they have shown any concern for the environment at all. Put another way, the scholarly consensus holds that authoritarian regimes on both the left and the right generally have demonstrated an anti-environmentalist bias, and when opposed by environmentalist social movements, have succeeded in silencing those voices. This book explores the theme of environmental politics and authoritarian regimes on both the right and the left. The authors argue that in instances when environmentalist policies offer the possibility of bolstering a country’s domestic (nationalist) appeal or its international prestige, authoritarian regimes can endorse and have endorsed environmental protective measures. The collection of essays analyzes environmentalist initiatives pursued by authoritarian regimes, and provides explanations for both the successes and failures of such regimes, looking at a range of case studies from a number of countries, including Brazil, China, Poland, and Zimbabwe. The volume contributes to the scholarly debate about the social and political preconditions necessary for effective environmental protection. This book will be of great interest to those studying environmental history and politics, environmental humanities, ecology, and geography.
Less than a year after the end of authoritarian rule in 1998, huge images of Jesus Christ and other Christian scenes proliferated on walls and billboards around a provincial town in eastern Indonesia where conflict had arisen between Muslims and Christians. A manifestation of the extreme perception that emerged amid uncertainty and the challenge to seeing brought on by urban warfare, the street paintings erected by Protestant motorbike-taxi drivers signaled a radical departure from the aniconic tradition of the old colonial church, a desire to be seen and recognized by political authorities from Jakarta to the UN and European Union, an aim to reinstate the Christian look of a city in the face of the country’s widespread islamicization, and an opening to a more intimate relationship to the divine through the bringing-into-vision of the Christian god. Stridently assertive, these affectively charged mediations of religion, masculinity, Christian privilege and subjectivity are among the myriad ephemera of war, from rumors, graffiti, incendiary pamphlets, and Video CDs, to Peace Provocateur text-messages and children’s reconciliation drawings. Orphaned Landscapes theorizes the production of monumental street art and other visual media as part of a wider work on appearance in which ordinary people, wittingly or unwittingly, refigure the aesthetic forms and sensory environment of their urban surroundings. The book offers a rich, nuanced account of a place in crisis, while also showing how the work on appearance, far from epiphenomenal, is inherent to sociopolitical change. Whether considering the emergence and disappearance of street art or the atmospherics and fog of war, Spyer demonstrates the importance of an attunement to elusive, ephemeral phenomena for their palpable and varying effects in the world. Orphaned Landscapes: Violence, Visuality, and Appearance in Indonesia is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.