Popular Dictatorships

Electoral autocracies – regimes that adopt democratic institutions but subvert them to rule as dictatorships – have become the most widespread, resilient and malignant non-democracies today. They have consistently ruled over a third of the countries in the world, including geopolitically significant states like Russia, Turkey, Venezuela, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria and Pakistan. Challenging conventional wisdom, Popular Dictators shows that the success of electoral authoritarianism is not due to these regimes' superior capacity to repress, bribe, brainwash and manipulate their societies into submission, but is actually a product of their genuine popular appeal in countries experiencing deep political, economic and security crises. Promising efficient, strong-armed rule tempered by popular accountability, elected strongmen attract mass support in societies traumatized by turmoil, dysfunction and injustice, allowing them to rule through the ballot box. Popular Dictators argues that this crisis legitimation strategy makes electoral authoritarianism the most significant threat to global peace and democracy.

Reputation crisis management and the state: Theorising containment as diplomatic mode

This article theorises containment as a diplomatic response mode for states when faced with potentially harmful attacks on their international identity and reputation. Despite widespread agreement in International Relations (IR) scholarship that identities matter in the context of state security, studies of crisis management have paid little attention to ontological security crises. Scholarly literature on public diplomacy has concerned itself mainly with proactive nation branding and reputation building; work on stigma management has privileged the study of how ‘transgressive’ states respond to identity attacks by recognising, rejecting or countering criticism. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we make the case that states do not perform as uniform entities when faced with ontological security crises – government representatives, bureaucratic officials and diplomats have varying roles and action repertoires available to them. Second, we argue that containment is a key but undertheorised part of the diplomatic toolkit in crisis management. Unpacking containment as a crisis management response mode, we combine insights from IR scholarship on emotions and diplomacy with insights on therapeutic practices from social psychology. We substantiate our argument with a case study of how Norwegian government representatives, bureaucratic officials and diplomats responded to escalating international criticism against Norway’s Child Welfare Services following a wave of transnational protests in 2016. A key finding is that whereas the dominant response mode of government ministers and bureaucratic officials was to reject the criticism, diplomats mainly worked to contain the situation, trying to prevent it from escalating further and resulting in long-term damage to bilateral relations.

Part II Predominant Security Challenges and International Law, Economic and Resource Security, Ch.26 Financial Crises

This chapter evaluates the possible impacts of financial crises, which can be devastating. Prolonged economic recessions or depressions impede the State’s ability to provide public goods. Especially sovereign debt crises force States to reduce public spending, which requires cuts in the public health and education system, a decrease in social welfare benefits generally, lower salaries and pensions for public employees, and fewer public employees. Both a decline in public safety and higher poverty rates can cause mass migration, which can destabilize neighbouring States or even entire regions. While financial crises do not necessarily have all these consequences, they do have a destructive potential beyond the individual State. It might therefore be unsurprising to learn that one can observe structural and conceptual similarities in how States respond to situations that are more broadly perceived as security crises and financial crises. The chapter then demonstrates how an ‘emergency mindset’ is present in debates on what role law has played and should play in responding to financial crises. It considers two case-studies to illustrate the presence of an ‘emergency mindset’ in such situations that is conceptually similar to traditional security crises: the 2008 global financial crisis and the still unresolved multilevel financial crisis in the Eurozone.

Characterizing the effect of drought, conflict, and locusts on food security in Africa

Conflict, drought, and locusts have been leading concerns for African food security in recent years, but the relative importance and spatiotemporal scales of crises resulting from each hazard is poorly characterized. Here we use continuous, subnational data from Sub-Saharan Africa to characterize how food crises differ according to livelihood strategy in response to each hazard. We find that when exposed to drought, pastoralists experienced more widespread, severe, and long-lasting food crises compared to those in agricultural zones. From 2009-2013 drought was the primary trigger of food security crises in all non-riverine zones; after 2013 conflict-related food security crises become prevalent. The few confirmed famines coincided with both conflict and drought. Locusts had little effect on food security during this time. These results provide multidimensional empirical evidence of how hazards affect food security in different livelihood zones, which provides an opportunity to improve scenario development in food security early warning forecasts.

Prospects for Nigeria in 2021

Significance These shocks will sustain already heightened reform pressures on the government during a period of diminishing public revenue. Security crises across various states and regions will continue to pose grave operational and humanitarian hazards amid widening inequality and poverty.

Conditioned integration during security crises: the role of Israeli sports media from 1996 to 2014

This study examines peace journalism as manifested toward the Israeli Arab minority in a time of seven security crises from 1996 to 2014 in the Israeli Hebrew sports media. Studies of peace journalism in periods of crises focus mainly on political news and find that the media largely conform to alienation practices. This study argues that sports media encourage a ‘conditional integration’ of all actors that participate in the sport. The sports media have three strategies: acknowledging a notion of ‘normalcy’ in which Arabs encourage the maintenance of the sports season at the national and international levels, curtailing alienation practices such as condemning racism and objection to boycott of Arab teams, and encouraging integration that allows the Israeli-Arabs to have a unique voice, as long as they do not openly adopt anti-Israel political stances such as making pro-Hamas or Hezbollah statements. Therefore, sports sections in the news can deepen our understanding of the diverse role of media in times of security crises.

Prospects for Nigeria to end-2020

Significance This has increased pressure on President Muhammadu Buhari’s government to fast-track reforms amid worsening unemployment and inequality. Meanwhile, ongoing security crises continue to embarrass the president.

Kamerhe arrest will destabilise Congo’s presidency

Subject Dynamics within Congo's coalition government. Significance Vital Kamerhe, President Felix Tshisekedi’s chief of staff and main political ally, was on April 8 arrested on corruption charges, the first time since independence that such a senior official has been imprisoned. Should the charges stick, Kamerhe’s exit from the centre of power would seriously disturb the fragile balance within the uneasy coalition government between Tshisekedi and Kamerhe’s parties, united in the Camp for Change (CACH) alliance, and the Common Front for Congo (FCC) of former President Joseph Kabila. Impacts The arrest creates a political crisis when the nation already faces two health crises (COVID-19 and Ebola) and multiple security crises. Kamerhe’s arrest will weaken the presidency’s capacity to exercise executive power, as Tshisekedi is not known for decisive action. The judiciary’s lack of independence will fuel fears of politicisation and may limit the potential for a wider anti-corruption effort.

Donald Trump and the Arab World: The Disrupter in Chief faces the Status Quo*

For the last fifty years, every US Presidency has come to be defined by momentous events in the Arab world. This pattern also applies to Donald Trump, whose approach to the region is shaped by the preference for reduced military exposure and a break with his predecessor’s policies as well as a general deference and even admiration for authoritarian personalities and systems. The result has been a policy mishmash which offers disruption where continuity is required and continuity where disruption is needed. Trump’s policies are thus likely to exacerbate the region’s security crises at the inter-state and intra-state levels.