Abstract
In this paper, we propose an interscalar approach for studying how authoritarianism is promoted, spread, strengthened and embedded. We contend that we are currently experiencing an authoritarian momentum in which even long-established liberal democracies are under threat. Scholars have responded to this by developing a rich stream of work on autocratisation, democratic backsliding, and authoritarian resilience. While we have gained enormous insights into the inner workings of authoritarian and autocratising regimes, we argue that we should complement the dominant perspective that is still regime-bound and country-specific.
Building on the emerging but still disconnected scholarship on local, transnational, and practice-based approaches to authoritarianism, we propose that political scientists should update their geographical understanding of regime-transforming phenomena and understand authoritarianism as a fundamentally interscalar phenomenon. That is, authoritarian ideas, practices and technologies are shaped and spread through the interaction and mutual influence of local, national, and transnational actors and processes.
The purpose of this paper is to lay out the main ideas of interscalarity, a concept that we borrow from human and urban geography, and show how a “scalar turn” can open a new research agenda for the study of contemporary authoritarianism. Interscalar authoritarianism provides a theoretical framework, a methodological approach, and an analytical angle that, we argue, can expand our understanding of the complexly interwoven drivers of the current authoritarian momentum and provide new insights into how the authoritarian spread can be resisted and democratic resilience conceptualised and realised.
