This thesis examines the reasons for the survival of Robert Mugabe's regime in Zimbabwe over more than thirty years. Approaching this question from comparative politics perspective the author examines the type of regime, its capacity (including capacity of the state and of other institutions) and strategy of survival that can be found in Zimbabwe, in the context of relevant historical events before and after Mugabe's seizing of power. Thereby the author devaluate those aspects taking into account all the broader context of sub-Saharan African regimes.

After independence from the Soviet Union Tajikistan fell into civil war in 1992. The armed conflict ended in 1997 after a peace agreement had been signed between the warring parties. Since, Tajikistan has become increasingly authoritarian, and experts have predicted the renewed onset of war. Yet, peace has been kept for over 20 years. Within peace and conflict research, scholars have turned attention to illiberal ways of ending conflict and building peace. Can two of the concepts from this illiberal turn, illiberal peacebuilding and authoritarian conflict management (ACM), explain the Tajik peace? With the ACM framework as the starting point, this thesis introduces the distinction between containment and termination from the illiberal peacebuilding concept to capture variation. Focus is on how the Rahmon regime attempts to (re)establish control over the ACM domains of discourse, space and economics to manage conflict and build peace in the immediate aftermath of civil war. The results demonstrate how ACM functions in the absence of violence, that there is no linear relationship between violence and termination methods, and that containment first, termination second is often opted for. Two improvements are suggested for the ACM framework. First, that a legal domain is introduced, and second, that the distinction between containment and termination is applied to future research, as it has proven useful in capturing variation. The results suggest that the indicators that supposedly point to a failure of peacebuilding in Tajikistan is in fact indicative of how the peace proliferates. However, violence continues to occur, even though the peace has lasted for two decades. Could this present us with a paradox of peace – one that is simultaneously durable and instable?

Existing studies on the formulation of regulations for online ride-hailing platforms merely see the process as a struggle between interest groups. They do not address how policymakers perceive this struggle and act on their own initiative to govern these platforms. This study supplements existing studies by exploring how the metropolitan governments of two Chinese cities, Beijing and Shanghai, perceived conflicts between contending forms of chauffeur businesses and brought in regulations for new platform ventures. This thesis employs a policy change approach in the Chinese authoritarian context and reaches three conclusions. Firstly, it explains that the "special interests" of taxi entities institutionalized by the old regulatory regimes for taxi businesses incentivized the two metropolitan governments to protect taxi entities. Thus, even if Beijing and Shanghai had different first responses towards platforms with one initially emphasizing "cracking-down" and the other working on a "loose" regulatory approach, they adopted similar platform-capping policies. Secondly, this thesis finds that the two metropolitan governments cautiously disobeyed the central government's "loose" directives for platforms by combining their capping policies with selectively implementing a central directive of differentiating the markets of ride-hailing platforms and taxi operators. Thirdly, this thesis addresses obstructions to the establishment of "new regulation" that respects the business logic of platforms, which is proposed by the platform coalition. It argues that the interaction between the vested "special interests" and the fragmentation of authority makes local governments resistant to this "new regulation." / Graduate

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There is a recent emergence of open government initiatives for citizen participation in policy making in China. Open government initiatives seek to increase the level of participation, deliberation and transparency in government affairs, sometimes by use of Internet fora. In contemporary political science the introduction of these initiatives in authoritarian contexts has been described as a paradox of authoritarian deliberation. This thesis uses cybernetic theory, perspectives of information steering in all systems, to resolve the paradox and present a new view on authoritarianism and autocracy. A cybernetic definition of autocracy allows for an analysis of different types of autocracy in different models of governance. The theoretical tools developed are used to define and assess the potential for democratic autocracy, representative autocracy, deliberative autocracy and collaborative autocracy in online open government initiatives in China.   The argument of the thesis is that these initiatives must be understood within the environment in which they are introduced. In the case of the Chinese online environment, individuals often have limited possibilities of acting anonymously. To explore how online identity registration affects citizens, a lab-in-the-field experiment was set up. Chinese university students were invited to engage with a government sponsored online forum under conditions of both anonymity and identity registration. Previous research suggests that anonymity would lead users of online fora to be more active and produce more content. This hypothesis was partly proven false by the experiment. This study shows that users who have their identities registered, sometimes even produce more content. The study also shows that registered users tend to act against their own preferences and participate more in nationalistic debates. The concluding discussion is focused on the wider implications of these effects. If citizens are incentivized to channel their dissatisfaction as loyalty, rather than voice or exit, they might become complicit in sustaining authoritarianism. Interviews with experiment participants show that open government initiatives primarily enable deliberative and collaborative autocracy when introduced in the Chinese online environment. This has the potential of increasing the amount of dissatisfaction that citizens channel as loyalty via mechanisms of authoritarian collaboration.

The target of this assignment is to answer the question why Egypt has not succeeded to become a democracy when Israel has. The method of this assignment has been a comparable study where Larry Diamond’s internal and external factors have been used to compare why Egypt has not become a democracy when Israel has. The result shows that Egypt is not democratic because of several reasons, such as a big and influential military, unfair civil society, national insecurity, non-democratic leaders, wars and an unsuccessful consolidation of the democratic influences, especially after the Arabic spring in the early 21st century. Israel, on the other hand, is a democracy due to its successful democratic institutions, a functional civil society and with democratic influences from the western world such as the EU and USA. Israel’s “ethnic” democracy is not perfect though and have hinders such as discrimination and a limited democratic leadership but compared to Egypt, the country has become a stable democracy, in a region that is mostly surrounded by undemocratic regimes.

How do authoritarian stales foster civil society growth while keeping unruly organizations in line? This governance dilemma dogs every state that attempts to modernize by permitting civil society to pluralize while minding its potential to stir up restive social forces. This dissertation's main finding is that the Chinese party state the world's largest and arguably the most resilient authoritarian regime-has engineered a flexible institution of state control in which the "rules of the game" arc created, disseminated, and enforced outside of institutionalized channels. This dissertation demonstrates how the coercive apparatus improvises in an erratic manner, unfettered by accountability mechanisms. The regime does not necessarily pull the levers of hard control mechanisms-the tanks, guns, and tear gas-whenever dissenters cross a line of political acceptability. Instead, in keeping with its decentralized political system and its tradition of experimental policy-making, the Chinese state continually remakes the rules of the game which keeps potential rabble-rousers on their toes. Although the regulatory skeleton of state corporatism remains intact, flexible repression is the informal institution-the set of rules and procedures-that structures state-civil society interactions. Specifically, this institution is made up of three key practices: a) decentralization b) ad-hoc deployment c) mixed control strategies. These three practices manifest in two concrete strategies used to govern aboveground and underground civil society: fragmented coercion and controlled competition. Flexible repression enables the Chinese party-state to exploit the advantages of a flourishing third sector while curtailing its threatening potential. Through participant observation, interviews, and comparative case studies of aboveground and underground independent labor organizations, this dissertation accomplishes three goals. First, it identifies the within-country variation in state control strategies over civil society, which includes the above-ground sector as well as the underground sector of ostensibly banned organizations. Secondly, it traces the patterns of interactions between the state and civil society, generating hypotheses about the mechanisms of change. Finally, it identifies new concepts relevant for studying organized contention in authoritarian regime.. .... Overall, this dissertation contributes to the study of authoritarian state control and civil society contention, with an emphasis on the nexus between the two.

O presente trabalho é um estudo dos editoriais dos jornais Cruzeiro do Sul e Diário de Sorocaba entre os anos de 1964 e 1974, no contexto do Estado Autoritário, sob o governo militar, com o objetivo de compreender o papel dos dois principais jornais da cidade de Sorocaba, com influencias em outras cidades da região, durante esses dez anos de construção e consolidação da ordem autoritária. A investigação dos editoriais permitiu observar e reconstituir as trajetórias destes jornais demonstrando aspectos importantes tanto para a história social e política do período, quanto para a história da cidade de Sorocaba e de sua imprensa diária local. / This Paperwork is a study of the editorials from Cruzeiro do Suland Diário de Sorocaba newspapers between the years of 1964 and 1974, in the context of the Authoritarian State Regime, under the Military Government Rule, in order to understand the role of the major newspapers from Sorocaba city, which also had influence in the other cities in the region, during these period of ten years of construction and consolidation of the authoritarian order. This Editorials Research allowed observation and recognition these newspapers trajectories demonstrating important aspects for both the social and the political history of the period, as for the history of the city of Sorocaba and its local daily press.

Thesis advisor: David Hollenbach / This dissertation tries to show the contribution and challenge of a Jesuit university in nurturing an ethic of collaboration for the common good by responding to the problem of fragmentation in post-authoritarian Indonesia. The history of compartmentalization since Dutch colonization, the unleashing of greedy elites after the fall of the Suharto regime and the silent penetration of neoliberal ideology through commodification of higher education on one hand contribute to the decline of the massive civic movement in higher education, but on the other hand open a new form of social movement through various local initiatives (Chapter I). It is in responding to this tension that an ethic of collaboration proves to be helpful, both in initiating a strong alliance among various groups and in respecting the plurality of its manifestations. The tradition of post-Vatican II Catholic Social Teaching, especially in Sollicitudo Rei Socialis and Caritas in Veritate, provides a solid grounding for proposing such an ethic of collaboration with its three recurring important themes: solidarity, subsidiarity, and the common good (Chapter II). This normative vision of collaboration for the common good is not alien to the Indonesian world view. Three Indonesian pedagogues (Ki Hajar Dewantara, Nicolaus Driyarkara and Mochtar Buchori) not only support the possibility of a cross-cultural dialogue between an ethic of collaboration for the common good based on Post-Vatican II Catholic Social Teaching and the Indonesian virtue of gotong royong (working together), but also show how the didactic of such a vision should be started in various forms and levels of education (Chapter III). Therefore, enlightened by Ignacio Ellacuría, the historical mission of a Jesuit university in the context of a post-authoritarian society is to provide space to engage with the people’s struggle to attain its personal and communal wellbeing. This commitment to be a-different-kind-of-university is carried out through research, pedagogy and community service (Chapter IV). In so doing, Jesuit higher education in post-authoritarian Indonesia will embody the mystique of service and bears a theologal dimension in its various collaborative practices to historicize the reign of God which is in process toward its fullness (Chapter V). / Thesis (STD) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.

This dissertation addresses the question “how disasters change state-society relations under authoritarian rule?” Specifically, I investigate how space and social capital were created after major earthquakes and the relationships between local governments and civil society organizations (CSOs). Based on four years of interviews conducted with government officials and CSO leaders and two rounds of surveys in 126 villages in rural Sichuan province, utilizing experiments, focus groups, and interviews, I argue that social capital and space for CSOs were created after major earthquakes. Adding to the literature of consultative authoritarianism and graduated control, I demonstrate that within the newly created space, local governments use a deliberate differentiation strategy towards different CSOs. Such differentiation is more driven by the state’s interest to extract productivity and outsource responsibility for public goods provision by regime-supporting CSOs, and less dictated by the state’s need to acquire information from regime-challenging CSOs with collective action potential. Such approach contributes to the authoritarian resilience in China. Despite the interference from the state from above, the newly created space also faces challenges from the private sphere with individual citizens being skeptical of the CSO sector due to limited interactions, mismatch of criteria, institutional constraints, and lack of civility. I then draw from the qualitative data and construct a dynamic framework of state-society relations under an authoritarian state after disasters by starting from co-operational, complementary, competitive, and confrontational relations, and end up in either co-optation or confrontation in the long run. Finally, I trace the development of the newly drafted charity law and the foreign NGO law. I argue that the state-organized legalization process would first allow the state to use the “zone of indifference” to get to know the new developments in the public sphere. Then, through a process of toleration, participation, initiation, replication, and bifurcation, the state manages to extract productivity from, and outsource responsibility to, the regime-supporting players, and drive out the regime challenging ones. The laws, made through this process, is also vulnerable to state intervention at any time, and therefore, prevents China from having a meaningful civil society. / 2020-02-22T00:00:00Z