When and How Do Competitive-Authoritarian Regimes Supress Academic Freedoms? A Theoretical Framework, Applied to Serbia

Academic freedom has remained a peripheral topic in the literature on (competitive-)authoritarian regimes. Recent literature on authoritarian backlashes and on competitive-authoritarian regimes has focused primarily on threat to liberal institutions and bias in electoral institutions. This paper brings academic freedoms into the debate, and offers a theoretical argument about when and how competitive-authoritarian regimes restrict academic freedoms. By academic freedoms, we mean the freedom of scholars and students to teach, research and publicly express their ideas, especially the organisational autonomy of universities and research institutions that guarantees these rights. Of all the liberal rights, we posit that academic freedoms stand out because they provide for a large degree of freedom (high extent), but for a small community with little direct repercussions on the government or the electoral process (low consequences). In short, an “Ivory Tower” can serve as a fig leave for regimes that want to resemble democratic regimes on paper, but it operates in (relative) isolation from society and politics. Competitive-authoritarian regimes primarily target liberal rights when this allows them to create an uneven playing field in elections, or liberal institutions that limit their executive power. Therefore, competitive-authoritarian regimes usually do not restrict academic freedoms, unless if this is part of a process of cutting down on pluralism and liberties, on the way to a full-fledged authoritarian regime. Accordingly, government campaigns against academic freedoms in Hungary (Enyedi 2018, Ignatieff 2024), an outlier, and the recent move against academic freedoms in Serbia seem genuinely puzzling. This paper examines the recent campaign against academic freedoms in Serbia since 2021, which has reached its peak with the threats against student protests in late 2024/early 2025. We assess three rivalling hypotheses about academic freedoms in competitive-authoritarian regimes: I. restrictions on academic freedom occur in the context of more systematic attempts to eradicate pluralism and tighten control over society, i.e. authoritarianisation; II. restrictions occur within the framework of a competitive-authoritarian regime, i.e. academics become regime targets only when they affect the government, this is when the academic community may limit the power of the executive and/or affect the electoral process; or III. restrictions on academic freedoms are a pathology of irrationally acting governments in competitive-authoritarian regimes (aka regimes with sultanistic traits). Empirically, we conduct a congruence analysis of different instances of restraints of academic rights and repression against academics in Serbia, in the period of 2021-2025 analysing several instances of violations of academic freedoms, the goals associated with them, and the political context in which they occurred. Ela Zeković is a research assistant at the University of Belgrade, is the member of the student parliament at the Faculty of Political Science and is an activist in the current wave of student protests. Daniel Bochsler is a professor of Political Science at Central European University (CEU) in Vienna and at the University of Belgrade.