The End of History and the Last Man

Europe undivided: democracy, leverage and integration after Communism

The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe. Edited by Frank Schimmelfennig and Ulrich Sedelmeier. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. 256p. $22.50. The postcommunist transformations in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have generated a rich body of literature over the past 15 years. Most works on CEE transitions have drawn from the comparative politics literature and treated international factors, at best, as secondary. Yet with the recent eastern expansion of the Council of Europe, NATO, and the European Union, there has been a growing scholarly interest in the impact of international institutions on domestic changes in this region.

The Europeanization of Central and Eastern Europe

The Formation of National States in Western Europe

The Encyclopaedia of Islam

The conceptual chapter develops the underlying notion of “Authoritarian Gravity Centres” (AGCs). Literature has only recently begun to close gaps regarding the questions of how, why, and when autocratic regimes try to promote and/or diffuse autocratic practices, ideas, and norms. By presenting the concept of AGCs, this chapter aims at making a conceptual contribution to better capture and explain possible mechanisms of autocratization by distinguishing between sources and addressees, mechanisms and motives of authoritarian pressure and attraction. The concept is then tested for the three cases: Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Kazakhstan.

Conceptualizing Authoritarian Gravity Centers : Sources and Addressees, Mechanisms and Motives of Authoritarian Pressure and Attraction 1

Arabellion: Vom Aufbruch zum Zerfall einer Region?

A trend toward autocratization and authoritarian clustering took place between 2001 and 2015 in the three world regions of Latin America, the Middle East, and Central Asia. This chapter summarizes the robust findings for Latin America and the Middle East, as well as the ambivalent findings for Asia of the small-n comparison: Venezuela was able to establish itself as the protagonist of an authoritarian gravity center (AGC) in an environment of eroding democracy in Latin America. In the Middle East, a region dominated by resilient autocracies, Saudi Arabia increasingly gained influence and attraction on its neighbors. Central Asia, characterized by the autocratization of newly established national states, qualifies as an AGC-dominated region as well. Kazakhstan could, however, not be fully confirmed as the acting authoritarian protagonist. The chapter reflects on the factors that enhance or impede the gravitational force of regional AGCs from a comparative perspective. It analyzes the differences in promotion and diffusion measures of the three researched regions and concludes with open questions for future research.

Authoritarian Gravity Centers in Cross-Regional Comparison : Future Studies and the International Dimension of Authoritarianism

Abstract The scholarly debate on the durability of autocracies is vivid. It has explored a broad spectrum of regime types and respective sources and mechanisms of regime survival. A bias towards the strong effect of material means of regime survival, for example repression, cooptation or output-legitimation, is striking. In resource-rich Middle East and North African (MENA) countries, this has been deeply rooted in the logic of rent economies. Only recently have nonmaterial factors of authoritarian power such as emotional engagement or affective behaviour of the populace gained more prominence in the literature, since autocrats are, for example, increasingly trying to strengthen societal bonds by referring to the past. In order to deconstruct this phenomenon in twenty-first-century autocracies, this article introduces sentimentality as a conceptual approach that allows a more fine-grained analysis of contemporary meaning-making attempts on a national level for the sake of regime survival. We assume three dimensions in which forms and functions of sentimentality can be seen – actors, spaces and media – and provide empirical evidence from the Gulf monarchies.

Autocracies and the temptation of sentimentality: repertoires of the past and contemporary meaning-making in the Gulf monarchies

https://www.transcript-open.de/pdf_chapter/bis 5999/9783839459737/9783839459737-066.pdf

Thomas Demmelhuber

Papers

Conceptualizing Authoritarian Gravity Centers : Sources and Addressees, Mechanisms and Motives of Authoritarian Pressure and Attraction 1

Arabellion: Vom Aufbruch zum Zerfall einer Region?

Authoritarian Gravity Centers in Cross-Regional Comparison : Future Studies and the International Dimension of Authoritarianism

Autocracies and the temptation of sentimentality: repertoires of the past and contemporary meaning-making in the Gulf monarchies

The Yacoubian Building ('Imārat Ya'qūbīān, 2006)