Investing In Authoritarian Rule

This book shows how Rwanda's mass courts for genocide crimes helped ensure political stability and authoritarian control for Rwandan elites.

As the Internet diffuses across the globe, many have come to believe that the technology poses an insurmountable threat to authoritarian rule. Grounded in the Internet's early libertarian culture and predicated on anecdotes pulled from diverse political climates, this conventional wisdom has informed the views of policymakers, business leaders, and media pundits alike. Yet few studies have sought to systematically analyze the exact ways in which Internet use may lay the basis for political change. In O pen Networks, Closed Regimes, the authors take a comprehensive look at how a broad range of societal and political actors in eight authoritarian and semi-authoritarian countries employ the Internet. Based on methodical assessment of evidence from these cases--China, Cuba, Singapore, Vietnam, Burma, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt--the study contends that the Internet is not necessarily a threat to authoritarian regimes.

This volume explores the form and function of constitutions in countries without the fully articulated institutions of limited government.

Tying the Autocrat's Hands provides a comprehensive, empirical evaluation of legal reforms in contemporary China. Based on the author's extensive fieldwork and analyses of original data, the book tells a story in which foreign investors with weak political connections push for judicial empowerment in China, while Chinese investors struggle to hold on to their privileges.

Through a focus on Singapore, this book presents an analysis of authoritarian legalism, showing how prosperity, public discourse, and a rigorous observance of legal procedure enable a reconfigured rule of law - liberal form but illiberal content. It shows how institutions and process become tools to constrain dissenting citizens while protecting those in political power.

“When Gessen speaks about autocracy, you listen.” —The New York Times “A reckoning with what has been lost in the past few years and a map forward with our beliefs intact.” —Interview As seen on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and heard on NPR’s All Things Considered: the bestselling, National Book Award–winning journalist offers an essential guide to understanding, resisting, and recovering from the ravages of our tumultuous times. This incisive book provides an essential guide to understanding and recovering from the calamitous corrosion of American democracy over the past few years. Thanks to the special perspective that is the legacy of a Soviet childhood and two decades covering the resurgence of totalitarianism in Russia, Masha Gessen has a sixth sense for the manifestations of autocracy—and the unique cross-cultural fluency to delineate their emergence to Americans. Gessen not only anatomizes the corrosion of the institutions and cultural norms we hoped would save us but also tells us the story of how a short few years changed us from a people who saw ourselves as a nation of immigrants to a populace haggling over a border wall, heirs to a degraded sense of truth, meaning, and possibility. Surviving Autocracy is an inventory of ravages and a call to account but also a beacon to recovery—and to the hope of what comes next.

'Lawfare' describes the systematic use and abuse of legal procedure for political ends. This provocative book examines this insufficiently understood form of warfare in post-genocide Rwanda, where it contributed to the making of dictatorship. Jens Meierhenrich provides a redescription of Rwanda's daring experiment in transitional justice known as inkiko gacaca. By dissecting the temporally and structurally embedded mechanisms and processes by which change agents in post-genocide Rwanda manoeuvred to create modified legal arrangements of things past, Meierhenrich reveals an unexpected jurisprudence of violence. Combining nomothetic and ideographic reasoning, he shows that the deformation of the gacaca courts – and thus the rise of lawfare in post-genocide Rwanda – was not preordained but the outcome of a violently structured contingency. The Violence of Law tells a disturbing tale and will appeal to scholars, advanced students, and practitioners of international and comparative law, African studies and human rights.

This book rejects the notion that the 1997-98 Asian economic crisis was further evidence that ultimately capitalism can only develop within liberal social and political institutions.