The International Authoritarian. Analysing authoritarian politics in global perspective

Guest Editors: Fabrizio Leonardo Cuccu (Dublin City University), Daniela Musina (Università di Palermo), Paola Rivetti (Dublin City University)

Recent work on authoritarianism has moved beyond regime-type classifications to examine how coercive practices (Glasius 2023; Dukalskis et al. 2024), authoritarian narratives and propaganda (Rasheed 2022; Gurol 2023; Rivetti 2023), repertoires of legitimation (Yabanci, Akkoyunlu & Öktem 2025), and use of digital tools (Maharmeh 2025; Jones 2022; Bashirov et al. 2025; Garbe et al. 2025) circulate globally and across different regimes. While approaching this issue from distinct disciplinary and sub-disciplinary angles, debates on the convergence of governance, convergent illiberalism and democratic backsliding point to processes of diffusion of authoritarianism (Cavatorta 2010; Teti & Mura 2013; Waldoner & Lust 2018), with elites learning from one another (Heydemann & Lendeers 2011), emulating each other’s technologies of control and actively promoting “authoritarian gravity centres” (Kneuer & Demmelhuber 2020) through networks of material and ideational linkages (Lemon & Antonov 2020; Hall & Debre 2025). This scholarship demonstrates that authoritarian consolidation is rarely a purely domestic process; rather, it is embedded in wider transnational infrastructures: security partnerships, migration management regimes (Natter 2021; Tsourapas 2021), digital surveillance markets (Michaelsen 2017), and counterterrorism cooperation (Cuccu 2025). All these connections allow ideas, practices, and policy templates to travel and be repurposed across regimes traditionally identified as democratic and authoritarian.

This Special Issue discusses authoritarian politics as an epistemology for the present. As we witness the spreading and emboldening of authoritarian ideologues and political movements across the world, this Special Issue calls on scholars to re-examine how we conceptualize and know authoritarianism as a theoretical concept as well as political praxis. In this inquiry, transnational politics has a special place as an arena where political strategies for exercising power in an authoritarian manner are refined and tested. This exchange takes place between non-state and state actors alike, including those from countries normally identified as advanced democracies. In fact, democratic countries play an important role in this process as they oftentimes are the original inventors of authoritarian practices to govern territories and populations, practices which have notably been theorised and tested through colonialism (Erakat 2025). In the post-colonial era, they notably support autocratic and war-mongering rulers financially and politically in the name of market stability and halting immigration.

This process highlights the need to go beyond regime-type analyses, to focus on the spread of authoritarian practices. In particular, practice-driven perspectives (Glasius 2023; Jenss & Schuetze 2021) and sociologies of eventful moments or processes of becoming (Allal & Vannetzel 2017) suggest that authoritarianism should not be understood solely as a stable regime type, but as a set of practices and repertoires that emerge, intensify and stabilize through specific political conjunctures, often taking shape through distinctly transnational dynamics. In this sense, processes of “authoritarian restoration” can be approached as eventful moments in which heterogeneous actors, practices and institutional arrangements converge and collude to reconfigure the political order.

To that end, this special issue seeks submissions that move away from understanding authoritarianism as a domestic issue and instead interrogate it as a manifestation of transnational politics, taking into account its temporalities, and as a concept that we can use to learn how transnational politics works. This panel invites papers that examine the issues discussed above, including but not limited to:

●        the online and offline circulation of authoritarian, conservative and illiberal ideas and theories, from anti-“gender ideology” and carceral ideas, to conspiracy, racist (“Great Replacement”) and “strong men” theories;

●        the sharing and transfer of security technologies, from surveillance to detention, and the authoritarian political visions they come with;

●        the commercialization of war technologies, the formation of transnational neoliberal military-industrial complexes, and the authoritarian political imaginary they engender and foster;

●        the authoritarian strategies to deplete the right to dissent through explicit means (legislation, policing and criminalization of activism and movements) as well as means that implicitly discourage mobilizations and/or critical thinking (for example, through the privatization of public and urban spaces, the reform of employment legislation and workers’ rights, the privatization and reform of the education system, reform of the communication system and the use of social media).

The Special Issue invites papers that analyse case studies at macro, meso and micro level, but also theoretical papers focusing on the conceptualization of authoritarianism and authoritarian politics, and papers that historicize authoritarian ideas and practices. The Special Issue aims to bring together papers that showcase new approaches and under-researched subjects, and that voice new interpretations, positionalities and methodologies.

Submit your abstract (500-1,000 words - including a title and authors’ short bio) to fabrizioleonardo.cuccu@dcu.ie and daniela.musina@sns.it by July 1, 2026.

Indicative Timeline

1-31 July 2026 Abstract submission and outcome of selection.

30 October 2026 Deadline for contributors to submit full manuscripts to Guest Editors

1 November- 15 December 2026 Internal review

15 December - 30 January 2027 authors revise their papers and submit revised version to editors

1 February 2026 - 30 March 2027 external review

1 April - 1 May 2027 authors revise and resubmit their papers

1 - 30 May  2027: second round of external review

June 2027: final revision and submission to journal

References

Allal, A. and Vannetzel, M. (2017). Disillusioning Tomorrows? Toward a Sociology of Moments of Restoration. Politique africaine, 146(2), 5-28.

Bashirov, G., Akbarzadeh, S., Yilmaz, I., & Ahmed, Z. S. (2025). Diffusion of digital authoritarian practices in China’s neighbourhood: the cases of Iran and Pakistan. Democratization, 1–24;

Cavatorta, F. (2010). The convergence of governance: upgrading authoritarianism in the Arab world and downgrading democracy elsewhere?. Middle East Critique 19(3): 217-232.

Cuccu, F. L. (2025) Preventing and Countering Violent Extremism in a Postcolonial Context. Security, democracy and religion in Tunisia. Routledge;

Dukalskis, A., Furstenberg, S., Hellmeier, S., & Scales, R. (2023). The Long Arm and the Iron Fist: Authoritarian Crackdowns and Transnational Repression. Journal of Conflict Resolution, 68(6), 1051-1079;

Erakat, N. (2025) The Boomerang Comes Back. Boston Review of Books, https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-boomerang-comes-back/

Garbe, L., Maerz, S. F., & Freyburg, T. (2025). Authoritarian collaboration and repression in the digital age: balancing foreign direct investment and control in internet infrastructure. Democratization, 1–24;

Glasius, M. (2023) Authoritarian practices in a global age. Oxford University Press;

Gurol, J. (2023) The authoritarian narrator: China's power projection and its reception in the Gulf. International Affairs 99(2), 687-705;

Hall, S., & Debre, M. (2025). Developing best practices “against terrorists who protest”: Regional organizations as learning clubs for autocracies. Contemporary Security Policy, 46(4), 1225–1254;

Heydemann, S., & Leenders, R. (2011). Authoritarian Learning and Authoritarian Resilience: Regime Responses to the ‘Arab Awakening.’ Globalizations, 8(5), 647–65;

Jenss, A., & Schuetze, B. (2020). Rethinking Authoritarian Power: The Logistics Space and Authoritarian Practices in and between Secondary Port Cities of the Global South. International Studies Quarterly.

Jones, M.O. (2022). Digital authoritarianism in the Middle East: Deception, disinformation and social media. Hurst Publishers;

Kneuer, M. and Demmelhuber, T. (eds.) (2020). Authoritarian Gravity Centers A Cross-Regional Study of Authoritarian Promotion and Diffusion. Routledge.

Lemon, E., & Antonov, O. (2020). Authoritarian legal harmonization in the post-Soviet space. Democratization, 27(7), 1221–1239;

Maharmeh, I. (2025). AI as a tool for settler-colonial projects: how Israel employs AI to intensify colonial dominance under the pretext of counterterrorism. Critical Studies on Terrorism, 1-24.

Michaelsen, M. (2017). Far Away, So Close: Transnational Activism, Digital Surveillance and Authoritarian Control in Iran, Surveillance & Society, 15(3/4), 465-470;

Natter, K. (2021). Tunisia’s migration politics throughout the 2011 revolution: revisiting the democratisation–migrant rights nexus. Third World Quarterly, 43(7), 1551–1569;

Rasheed, A. (2022). The narrative of the rise of China and authoritarianism in the global south: the case of Egypt. The International Spectator 57, 68–84;

Rivetti, P. (2024). The reception of Iran’s state propaganda by the Italian far right: recasting the diffusion of authoritarian discourse and narratives. Italian Political Science Review/Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica, 54(1), 36-53;

Teti, A., Mura, A. (2013). Convergent (il)liberalism in the Mediterranean? Some notes on Egyptian (post-) authoritarianism and Italian (post-)democracy. European Urban and Regional Studies 20(1),  120-127.

Tsourapas, G. (2021). Global Autocracies: Strategies of Transnational Repression, Legitimation, and Co-Optation in World Politics. International Studies Review, 23(3), 616–644

Waldner, D., and Lust, E. (2018) "Unwelcome change: Coming to terms with democratic backsliding." Annual Review of Political Science 21(1), 93-113.

Yabanci, B., Akkoyunlu, K., & Öktem, K. (2025). Limits of autocratisation: actors and institutions of democratic resistance and opposition. Third World Quarterly, 46(2), 97–116.