Virtual icon Authoritarianism across space, time, and scale

Authoritarianism is a political relationship defined by univocality and subordination of difference to a central authority or vision. While established approaches to authoritarian power have largely neglected the fact that the spatial manifestation of authoritarian power structures and practices, recent scholarship has highlighted the territorial, temporal and scalar unboundedness of authoritarian political relations, recent scholarship has highlighted the territorial, temporal and scalar unboundedness of authoritarian political relations. But because this research has not yet been sufficiently integrated into established literatures, many open questions remain regarding the modes and mechanisms of authoritarianism across space and time. This ECPR joint session therefore aims to spark more in-depth discussions about innovative, interdisciplinary approaches on global authoritarianism that go beyond the ‘territorial trap’ of state-centrism in the study of authoritarian power. Non-statist theorizing of authoritarianism does not assume that the state is not important; rather, it sees authoritarianism as cutting across time and space – with authoritarian practices mobilized through state space and territorial boundaries in certain spatio-temporal contexts, and transcending it in others. Global authoritarianism thus needs to be thought beyond the territorial boundaries of states as the different experiences of authoritarian power, based on categories of class, race and gender, are obfuscated and rendered invisible, if the context in which authoritarianism is deemed to manifest itself is right from the outset and prior to empirical analysis defined based on geographical propinquity. This session will address this shortcoming and advance political science scholarship on authoritarianism by focusing on different scales, places, regions and temporalities, asking how political science and ancillary fields can extend the limits of existing scholarship on global authoritarianism. We welcome theoretically informed empirical papers that examine authoritarianism at any scale, place, region or time. We encourage papers from political, economic and geographical academics. The workshop specifically targets researchers with a strong knowledge of the theoretical background of authoritarian governance to submit papers that also include empirical research about the modes and mechanisms of authoritarianism across space and time. A variety of perspectives from academics and researchers alike are invited. These could include (but are not limited to) the following areas: • Transregional authoritarian practices • Public-private assemblages of authoritarianism • Transnational elite networks • Citizenship and authoritarian state power in and across borders • Digital authoritarianism • Authoritarian temporalities of memory and historical imaginaries