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Stephen Hall argues that democracies can preserve their norms and values from increasing attacks and backsliding by better understanding how authoritarian regimes learn. He focuses on the post-Soviet region, investigating two established authoritarian regimes, Belarus and Russia, and two hybrid regimes, Moldova and Ukraine, with the aim of explaining the concept of authoritarian learning and revealing the practices that are developed and the sources of that learning. Hall finds clear signs of collaboration between countries in developing best survival practices between authoritarian-minded elites, and demonstrates that learning does not just occur between states, rather it can happen at the intra-state level, with elites learning lessons from previous regimes in their own countries. He highlights the horizontal nature of this learning, with authoritarian-minded elites developing methods from a range of sources to ascertain the best practices for survival. Post-Soviet regional organizations are crucial for the development and sharing of these survival practices as they provide ‘learning rooms’ and training exercises.

Speaker:

Stephen Hall is a lecturer (assistant professor) in Russian and post-Soviet politics in the Department of Politics, Languages, and International Studies at the University of Bath. He earned a PhD at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies (SSEES), University College London (UCL), and completed a Post-Doctoral Fellowship in the Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge. Both the PhD and Fellowship were funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), and he received the SSEES Excellence Scholarship. He has published in various journals including East European Politics, Journal of Eurasian Studies, Russian Politics, Problems of Post-Communism, Post-Communist Economies, and Europe-Asia Studies.

Moderator:

Henry E. Hale is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University (GW), director of GW’s Petrach Program on Ukraine, and co-director of the Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia (PONARS). His research has won two prizes from the American Political Science Association, and his other books include Patronal Politics: Eurasian Regime Dynamics in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, 2015).