The Modern Regency

Extant literature has shown the importance of routinized leadership succession for authoritarian resilience. However, the factors leading to orderly power transitions in autocracies are unclear. This article argues that an orderly succession requires relatively peaceful exit of the incumbent. Through a comparison of the power transition trajectories of the post-Stalin USSR and China in the Age of Deng Xiaoping, this article proposes three conditions that facilitate the voluntary retirement of dictators, including their strong political will to institutionalize successions, adequate capacity to initiate the plan, and reliable retirement packages. Meeting all three conditions, leadership succession in China has resulted in the emergence of the “modern regency” in which the elder leaders can retire relatively voluntarily and continuously influence the politics of a regime after their retirement, especially by proactively supervising future leadership successions. In contrast, without meeting the initial requirements for a dictator’s exit, the case of leadership succession in the USSR is characterized as parallel succession, which includes neither a credible plan on routinization of elite politics nor simultaneous coexistence of the elder leaders and the younger cohort as in the case of China. Moreover, during similar regime crises in the late 1980s, the arrangement of the modern regency helped prolong the authoritarian regime in China, while the USSR collapsed without this safeguard.

The Yanomami sociopolitical dynamics in the context of the Hutukara creation: the Pata Thëpë and the emergency of young political leaderships

The current study is an effort to understand the Yanomami sociopolitical dynamic in the context of mobilization and articulation that preceded the establishment of Hutukara Yanomami Association; in that context, new patterns of dialogs and knowledge were established, fact that has delineated new forms of relationship between youth and elder leaders. From reads in ethnology, history and I my own ethnography work, I try to understand the place of the new organization in the sociopolitical dynamic of Yanomami and its implication for the local groups and also in the relationship between traditional and youth leaders. I try to show that speech and knowledge are the two major principles that connect the youth and traditional leaders; the choice of youth leaders as major political speaker does not mean the elder’s loss of power; the Yanomami see the presence of the youth in the meetings as necessary, due to the necessity of decoding their relationship with non-Indians.