Routledge Studies on Comparative Asian Politics. London; New York: Routledge, 2017. x, 177 pp. (Tables, maps.) US$145.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-138-21035-6.
This is an important and ambitious book by Alexander Dukalskis, assistant professor of international relations at University College Dublin. The book is important because it shows that “authoritarian public spheres” exist with implications for political outcomes. In other words, regime narratives are not just window dressing for realist power variables. The authoritarian state manipulates the people’s political knowledge and discussions. This, in addition to long-studied methods of physically threatening political opponents and economically rewarding supporters, allows a regime to maintain power.
The first three chapters engage many literatures including on government propaganda, authoritarian regimes, and human rights movements. The authoritarian public sphere “is characterized by the state’s efforts to establish its foundations, delineate its boundaries, and monitor its content” (4). Authoritarian regimes legitimize their rule and delegitimize their opposition by: 1) concealing information from the public; 2) framing events in support of the governing ideology; 3) blaming failure on internal conspiracies and foreign meddling; 4) making the regime’s rule seem inevitable and unending; 5) offering myths of founding and greatness; and 6) promising deliverance from struggle to a better future (61).
Chapter 4 considers these six elements in North Korea, Burma, and China, detailing how authoritarian ideology and institutions dominate people’s political lives. The fifth chapter examines challenges to authoritarian public spheres in the forms of black markets in North Korea, independent journalism in Burma, and the Internet in China. In each case, the authoritarian public sphere persisted. Although coercive force and cronyism may be stronger explanatory variables, the book’s study of how public spheres are shaped successfully helps address the puzzle of why some authoritarian regimes have lasted so long, despite failures to deliver more public goods or allow greater civil freedoms.
The quality and economy of Dukalskis’ writing mean that the chapters are often insightful, but many questions are left wanting for attention. The book lacks coverage of the East German surveillance state, Eastern European experiences, and Stalinist or contemporary Russia. The author looks to demonstrate the generalizability of his argument in chapter 6, but this can only be so convincing when comparisons of pre-democratic South Korea, post-Cold War Cuba, and recent events in Iran are crammed into fifteen pages.
The concluding chapter usefully addresses recent academic findings on authoritarian resilience, but it would have been better if the author addressed these earlier and did more to test his explanation against others in predicting regime duration, use of violent repression, and varying levels of economic prosperity and civil freedoms. It is not clear which of Dukalskis’ six elements of ruling narratives are more important where, when, and to what effect. Further work is needed on how variation in authoritarian manipulation of the public sphere corresponds to variation in social resistance and regime control.
The book consciously addresses but does not fully overcome methodological challenges such as selection bias in interviewee samples and measuring the success of regime legitimization efforts. The author is to be commended for his rich interviews in the North Korea and Burma cases, but the China case relies almost entirely on secondary sources. Analytical comparison of the three cases is further complicated by the many political factors on which they vary. North Korea is an isolated, personalist autocracy; Burma was led by a military junta until recently and remains mired in civil war despite partial reform and opening; China is a one-party state outlier because it is so large, globalized, and economically successful.
Dukalskis admits his cases are very different. But the book’s ability to explain authoritarian resilience is limited by its focus on three long-lasting non-democracies (selecting on the dependent variable). The author’s research suggests that the North Korean shadow economy, Burmese media, and the Chinese Internet have been meaningful spheres of expression but less than transformative. Absent cases where a democratic public sphere was realized, it is not clear which types of resistance can be successful. The case selection thus limits what the book can tell us about the prospects of transitioning to a democratic public sphere, or the dangers of hybrid authoritarian/democratic public spheres under soft-authoritarianism.
The book provides a very good primer on authoritarian state practices. However, experts of the cases considered will not be surprised to read that the Burmese military justified its rule for the maintenance of national sovereignty against armed rebellion and political infighting, that the North Korean regime strengthened nationalism and the Kim dynasty mythology after the disintegration of the Communist Bloc, or that the Chinese Communist Party learned from the downfall of the Soviet Union and so pursued pragmatic reform and opening. It would be more interesting to know how the proportion of the population that is “quiescent” in these societies has changed over time. Myanmar is hardly at peace with its ongoing ethnic conflict and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya over the border into Bangladesh. In China, many citizens vote with their feet and pocketbooks by moving their families and assets overseas. Although North Korean society remains under draconian control, many people protest in code while consuming ever more products, information, and pop culture from abroad.
In terms of policy implications, Dukalskis is persuasive on why outsiders should not underestimate the influence of authoritarian narratives that preserve elite unity, prevent military defections, and preempt organized opposition. However, it is not new to recommend that sanctions should leave North Korean society open to external information, that Burma needs transitional justice and party reform, or that Chinese nationalism might drive aggressive foreign policies. Finally, by putting aside the question of whether dictators are true believers or ideologues for instrumental purposes, the book does not identify which regimes are more promising targets of international engagement.
These criticisms reflect the ambitious nature of a monograph that tackles a large and contested literature. For its contributions explaining strategies of autocratic legitimization and its wealth of documentation on three pressing cases, this book is recommended for comparative politics courses, university libraries, and researchers of East Asian politics. It is also a worthy read for citizens concerned about possible autocratic resurgence and democratic retrenchment.
Leif-Eric Easley
Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea