Lecture | China Seminar
Authoritarian Teleology
- Date
- Wednesday 19 March 2025
- Time
- Series
- LIAS China Seminar
- Location
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.31
Abstract
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.
Biography
Iza Ding is Associate Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. She is currently a research associate at the Hertie School of Governance. She is the author of The Performative State: Public Scrutiny and Environmental Governance in China (Cornell University Press, 2022).