Wednesday, October 30, 2024
4:00pm – 5:30pm
McKinney Conference Room (353)
oin Iza Ding on a discussion on Authoritarian Teleology.
After the fall of the Soviet Union and the withering away of planned economies, the 20th-century literature on communism shifted decisively toward the 21st-century literature on authoritarianism. Iza Ding argues that, while the field of comparative politics appears to have moved on from communism, enduring questions and concepts have lingered through their doppelgängers, with the modifier “communist” now replaced by “authoritarian.” Paradigmatic thinking about communism has find expression in contemporary studies of authoritarianism. Ding identifies two threads connecting these two literatures: first, the centrality of questions surrounding non-democratic legitimacy and regime resilience; and second, binary assumptions about authoritarian states and their citizens. She critiques this paradigm on two grounds: first, a functionalist tendency in explanations of legitimacy and resilience; and second, incommensurability between dueling binaries about states and citizens.