The International Dimension of Autocratisation: New Challenges for Democracy

Since the 2000s, two parallel phenomena–the “third wave of autocratisation” and the “reaffirmation of authoritarian great powers”–have contributed to the development of the autocracy promotion literature. This scholarship shows conceptual problems and increasingly evident scope issues. These issues arise from neglecting phenomena tied to the more assertive foreign policy of prominent autocracies, including corrosive capital, digital authoritarianism and disinformation, or new surveillance tools. Such factors contribute to autocratisation processes in both democracies and autocracies. Hence, we propose a branching tree typology to map the conceptual space of the international dimension of autocratisation. Our typology tackles both conceptual and scope issues, highlighting the growing relevance of indirect forms of external influence on autocratisation, which we call “indirect democracy prevention/erosion”. Our goal is to stimulate debate among both IR and comparative politics scholars, encouraging innovative approaches to assess the role of the international dimension in contemporary autocratisation processes.