Regime change

Alexander Downes and Jonathan Monten’s article “Forced to Be Free? Why Foreign- Imposed Regime Change Rarely Leads to Democratization” offers important contributions to the study of foreign-imposed regime change (FIRC). The authors should be commended for their use of advanced empirical methods to tackle such an important substantive question. According to Downes and Monten, past research on the democratizing effect of foreign-imposed regime change has overemphasized the characteristics of the intervener and underemphasized the existing preconditions for democracy in the state targeted for intervention. Rather than the FIRC itself, it is these preconditions, Downes and Monten suggest, that explain whether a given state will democratize or not. That is, their argument posits that targets of FIRC that democratize would have done so independently of the foreign intervention.

Although Downes and Monten offer promising results in support of their hypotheses, two factors should make us skeptical of the conclusions drawn from their interpretation of the evidence. First, even though Downes and Monten duly explore the efficacy of varieties of FIRC, they omit the most critical analytical category related to the dependent variable. In evaluating the ability of FIRC to produce democracy, one should focus on cases of foreign-imposed democratization (FID) where the intervener intended to replace a nondemocratic regime with a democratic one. Second, the nature of FIRC operations has changed over time in ways unaccounted for by Downes and Monten. For historical and theoretical reasons outlined in this letter, FIRC carried out before World War I looks significantly different from FIRC carried out since 1918. A closer examination of the targets of FID after World War I reveals a fairly remarkable success rate: thirteen out of seventeen targets transitioned to consolidated democracies within ten years of the intervention. Such a record should give us pause before concluding that FIRC has little or no independent effect on a state’s democratization prospects.

We apply the “security-hierarchy paradox” to nuclear proliferation. Global security requires a certain amount of hierarchy. A world in which no nuclear proliferation rules exist to constrain states, for example, would not be secure. Global security requires legitimate and authoritative rules, which we define as rules that are mutually negotiated, binding to all and which provide a stable social order. Too much hierarchy, however, amounts to coercion and undermines global security. Rules that are not mutually negotiated, binding to all or do not provide a stable social order are not authoritative. We argue that North Korea and Iran have attempted to build nuclear weapons because they interpret the proliferation rules to lack authority. The coercive U.S. approaches to enforcing proliferation rules – including diplomatic isolation, preemption, and regime change – have undermined the legitimacy of those rules. When the U.S. pursues less hierarchical policies, as it has recently toward N...

Has the international movement for democracy and human rights gone from being a weapon against power to part of the arsenal of power itself? The book explores this question and looks at how in the 1990s the U.S. government, the World Bank, political scientists, NGOs, think tanks, and various international organizations have appropriated the movement for democracy and human rights to export neoliberal policies throughout the world. It charts the various symbolic, ideological, and political meanings that have developed around human rights and democracy movements. It suggests that these shifting meanings reflect the transformation of a progressive, emancipatory movement into an industry, dominated by "experts," ensconced in positions of power.

The story begins in the 1950s when U.S. foreign policy experts promoted human rights and democracy as part of a "democratic international" to fight the spread of communism. Later, the unlikely convergence of anti-Stalinist leftists and the nascent neoconservative movement found a place in the Reagan administration. These "State Department Socialists," as they were known, created policies and organizations that provided financial and technical expertise to democratic movements, but also supported authoritarian, anti-communist regimes, particularly in Latin America.

This article examines transitions between presidential, parliamentary and semi-presidential systems in democracies. Using two major datasets, it identifies nine such transitions in eight different countries: Brazil 1961, France 1962, Sri Lanka 1977, Slovakia 1999, Moldova 2000, Turkey 2007, Kenya 2008, Kenya 2010, and the Czech Republic 2012. Findings from a close examination of these cases include the following: most transitions involve the semi-presidential regime type; serious crises precede the transitions in nearly all the cases and change is often used as a means of solving these crises; electoral volatility and turnover in government precede most transitions; change serves different functions in different political contexts, ranging from facilitating acceptance of anti-establishment executives to implementing power-sharing deals; and once achieved, regime change becomes an almost permanent fixture on the political agenda, with debates escalating rather than dying down.

This article takes a closer look at the internal evolution of the North Korean political system and how it has been subjugated to the personalist regime of the Kim family. The author argues that North Korea should no longer be perceived as a totalitarian regime since it is now a fully entrenched personal regime in the first place. The author investigates how this process of personalization took place in the institutional, ideological and mobilizational dimensions of the DPRK as well as the influence on its international relations (gatekeeping). Based on these insights the author provides some scenarios for endogenous transitions from this regime type and how hereditary succession and personalism affect its survival strategies..

Abstract: This paper investigates the effects of foreign aid on the survival of political regimes by distinguishing between financial aid, which can be misused by the ruling political party in order to remain in power at the expense of the productive capacity of the country, and political aid, which enhances the probability of regime alteration. To this end, we construct a simple model for the behavior of the ruling party and we derive a number of testable hypotheses. We investigate empirically these effects using data from 70 aid-recipient countries covering the period 1984-2002 and we find evidence that support the central predictions of the model.

In this article, I study the relationship of the Justice and Development Party's (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) populism-in-power and democracy, from a comparative and historical perspective, and based on a critical engagement with the populism literature. I begin by highlighting the political institutional expression of the populist political vision (to reflect the popular will in power), which prioritizes competitive elections among a variety of modern democratic institutions and mechanisms. Based on this perspective, I outline a particular populist route to competitive (or electoral) authoritarianism: when in power, because populists exalt elections and undermine existing liberal democratic mechanisms that bridge people to power, they deprive citizens of the power to hold rulers accountable. I then trace the lineage of the populist political imagination in Turkey, demonstrating the continuities and discontinuities between the Democrat Party's (Demokrat Parti, DP) and the AKP's conceptions of the people and democracy. I argue that despite these parties' differences on the level of the politicization of cultural divisions, there is a crucial continuity: the equalization of democracy with an exalted elected executive branch. Finally, I concentrate on the impact of the AKP's populism-in-power on the Turkish political regime. I argue that because the AKP came to power in a defective democracy (with extra-democratic checks on elected rulers and prone to concentration of power), by 2011, the party managed to reframe Turkish political institutions according to its right-wing populist vision of democracy, an authoritarian regime with competitive elections.

Although information is nothing new to war or confl ict, the speed at which it reaches a much wider target audience, and thus its potential impact and consequences, is changing due to the rapid development of information and communications technology. Regime change and information warfare have been around for a very long time in the history of organised human societies. An undertaken review of academic literature demonstrates a great interest today to these concepts in academic, policymaking and practical terms. The present article attempts to track the evolution of the Western conceptual and theoretical thinking on the use of regime change and information warfare, seeking to understand the factors that precipitate it. In the paper I address the following, what is the relationship between information warfare and regime change? The high level of information and communications technology development and persisting leadership globally have allowed the United States to engage in regime change and information warfare more eff ective, although not without risks. The author considers the most illustrative examples of such engagement and, based on them, concludes that we have seen a shift in motivation from an off ensive stance (the desire to spread infl uence) to a defensive one (the desire to prevent other international actors from gaining infl uence and power) on the global level. The theoretical method chosen for the analysis is phenomenology, as a means of the reading and analysis of a lived experience as well as a qualitative method will be used to analyse the data, where the goal is to capture the complexity of the object of study. KEYWORDS hybrid warfare, information warfare, political warfare, regime change, evolving global order, information operations

Howard Gruber, a founder member of Psychologists for Social Action, reviewed the dissertation. His review, dated May 7, 1978, as Parkovnick (2015) points out, "... is worth quoting in full, as it captures the very essence of the dissertation":
“This is an effective dissertation and could become an important book. I began reading it very favorably disposed to it. Then I got more and more riled up, made many hostile notes. By the end I found myself almost won over, certainly illuminated. Francks [Gruber’s spelling] has a style that gets under your skin and stays there. This is a good thing and should not get lost in the process of expansion, rewriting, and editing. It will take some work to make it a persuasive book to a less sympathetic reader, and to reduce its present excessive vulnerability to academic criticism. Its very sweep opens many avenues to criticism, crit. of a kind that detracts the reader and potential reader from the central ideas. But all this can be worked out. As an academic type, I often find myself cringing, wanting things toned down. But by the time I finished, I felt that the direction of the change should be to strengthen the tone of the book, to make its central, disturbing message more apparent, bring it more up front.”  Gruber, H. (1978). Review of A history of American social psychology up to the Second World War by Peter Francks [Gruber’s spelling] for Ablex Publishing Corporation, May 7.

Readers should also look at: https://www.academia.edu/60033912/The_Psychology_of_Participation_Revisited_1984_2021

Publisher: BBC News
Date: 2004

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/panorama/3032147.stm

Bush Doctrine, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Fascism, George W. Bush, Iraq War, National Security State, Neo-Conservatives, Osama Bin Laden, Paul Wolfowitz, Pre-emptive War, Project for the New American Century, PNAC, Regime Change, Saddam Hussein, September 11th Attacks, Terrorism, U.S. Empire, U.S. Foreign Policy, War On Terror

The paper discusses regime change and some initial thoughts on how style and iconography reflect, and are reflected in, those changes. This paper has considerable overlap with other papers by the writer on the nascent Kushite state, and on archaism (eg the invocation of the Sandstone Stela of Piye).

Hybrid Wars : The Indirect Adaptive Approach To Regime Change by Andrew Korybko
A Review by dAvE@whenthenewsstops

This insightful book examines the theoretical framework behind the concept of 'Fourth Generation Warfare'. This centres around the utilisation of 'net centric' means to avoid a large scale direct deployment of troops in a 'regime change' intervention in a desired target State. 

Those familiar with the concept of Proxy Warfare, will recall how the use of sophisticated remote weaponry such as drone technology, the deployment of small scale special forces units, the use of Private Security Military Contractors, augmented with the training and arming of local militias specialising in guerrilla tactics against targeted governments, has been a staple of covert warfare for protecting U.S. regional interests for a number of years. This form of Indirect Warfare has been proven to be largely effective in advancing Atlanticist hegemony through the doctrine of 'Organised Chaos', by applying Unconventional Warfare to devastating effect.

"What is integral to remember is that Unconventional Warfare is indirect warfare. They are one and the same and cannot be separated from one another. Although Unconventional Warfare does at times incorporate conventional methods, it is primarily unconventional to the core.  It is non-linear, dynamic, and chaotic, presenting an ever-changing mix of tactics that is designed to throw the authorities off balance."

Hybrid Warfare represents a two stage application of this strategy, transitioning from Colour Revolution into Unconventional War, towards the goal of regime change in the targeted states. The broader goal is one of preventing the rise of larger strategic threats on the world stage, such as those presented by the Russian Federation and its allies, China and Iran. 

The inheritor to the British Empire, presented in the military power house of the United States, has long sought to maintain its global power-base, and the methods it uses in this effort have become increasingly underhanded, as the author demonstrates through this analysis of the concept of Hybrid Warfare.

"The connection between Colour Revolutions, Unconventional Warfare, US regime change objectives, and non-state actors provides yet more proof confirming the Hybrid War theory."

This clandestine technique, utilises the strategy of 'lead from behind', to initially destabilise target states through the implementation of 'colour revolutions'. These exploit pre-existing political and sectarian divides within the target nation.  In short, these divisions are agitated through the use of NGOs and Intelligence Agency networks, to establish core supporters of the cause, who are largely witting, trained to maximise their effectiveness (usually outside of the target nation), and who can spread the desired ideological opposition to the incumbent government through a largely unwitting public. The target public are unaware of the foreign agitation which is guiding their momentum.  This form of decentralised opposition largely seems to become successful at the Colour Revolution stage, as long as the unseen hand of foreign backing remains hidden.

http://www.whenthenewsstops.org/2016/04/hybrid-wars-indirect-adaptive-approach.html

This paper examines the key actors, factors, and events that contributed to the successful overthrow of Slobodan Milošević’s regime on October 5, 2000. The primary focus of this case study is the Bulldozer Revolution that put in power the first democratically elected president of Serbia, Vojislav Koštunica, and thus incentivized the nation’s transition to democracy. Since all over the world we can observe reversals of democracy and the return of semi-authoritarian regimes, this topic is crucial to detect in which ways and under which conditions main civil society and opposition actors can bring about necessary democratic changes. The case study will reflect on the key characteristics of the Milošević regime, including the ways in which it enabled the opposition to grow stronger in 2000. Then, the paper will analyze the crucial roles of youth movement Otpor and opposition DOS in the toppling of the government. The conclusion will offer a brief overview of the immediate aftermath of the Revolution to support the claim that this was a key moment for the history of democracy in Serbia. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the power of democracy lays with the people in the hope to act as an incentive to actors across the globe which are democratizing their regimes.

The literature on authoritarian regimes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has emerged, in the past two decades, as if in a Hegelian dance between democracy and authoritarianism. 1 In the 1990s, scholars accepted the broad assumptions of the 'democratic-transition paradigm'-developed in studies on Southern and Eastern Europe, and particularly on Latin America-to search for the prospects, and later the setbacks, of democratic change in the region. In the past decade, scholars responded by criticizing assumptions borrowed from the 'transition paradigm' and demanded analytical inquiries into what was empirically present, rather than into the absence of a phenomenon, that is, democracy. The authoritarian regime literature therefore searched for the sources of regime stability, rather than the prospects of systemic change. Based on the uprisings that brushed aside the authoritarian rulers in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, and other revolts challenging autocrats in Bahrain and Syria, it is tempting to revive the debate on the prospects of democratic change and proclaim the 'fourth wave' of democratic transition. This chapter demands a more cautious perspective at a time when dynamic developments are still unfolding. Broader conceptual frameworks appear to be inapt to fully grasp the political earthquake that shook the authoritarian regimes in the MENA region.

"Representations", N. 129, Winter 2015.

The essay analyzes the project of maintaining the body of V. I. Lenin in the Mausoleum in Moscow for the past ninety years, focusing on the unique biological science that developed around this project, and the unexpected political role this body has performed.

This research paper examines thoroughly and critically all the causes and facilitators of the Arab Spring - from twitter and facebook to the relative deprivation of the numerous youth in the Arab World.  In addition, this research paper for the first time outlines the necessary and sufficient conditions under which regime change was effectuated and, thus, explains the resilience of certain regimes and the vulnerability of others.

The task to reshape governments in the countries confronted with the Arab Spring prompts the question whether there are necessary conditions to realize a stable society that simultaneously seeks to eliminate the elements that have led to the uprisings. Acknowledging some constitutional rights seems indispensable in such a process. I argue that such a state of affairs is indeed the case, at least now that the ‘old’ justifications to differentiate between people do not suffice anymore. That is not to say that the countries involved will have identical laws in each respect, but merely that a common basis has to be realized, manifested in political and legal equality, so this given does not derogate from the fact that each country’s specific legislation needs to be shaped in the light of its own history. Such a basis has no ‘moral’ character, but is simply a necessary condition to prevent sedition.

Like Weimar Germany, contemporary Russia is home to fascist actors and widespread nationalism. But unlike interwar Germany, the party system in post-Soviet Russia is heavily manipulated and civil society remains underdeveloped. This means that fascists have not had a chance to use elections or to penetrate civil society in order to build up political support. The continuing presence of a resolutely authoritarian, yet non-fascist “national leader” (Vladimir Putin) keeps the country from becoming a liberal democracy but it also, for now, makes it less likely that the regime will become fascist.

La oleada de gobiernos de izquierda que caracterizó a América Latina y el Caribe desde finales del siglo XX conformó un mapa geopolítico adverso a los intereses del sector público-privado estadounidense en la región. Para cambiar la correlación de fuerzas ha entrado en escena el lawfare o guerra judicial, un mecanismo aparentemente democrático y ajustado a derecho, por el que socavar el poder, la imagen y las posibilidades de reelección de los líderes de la izquierda. Poco se habla, sin embargo, del origen del lawfare como una estrategia de carácter militar, encuadrada en una guerra de amplio espectro, hoy denominada guerra híbrida, que busca, mediante la combinación de operaciones judiciales, mediáticas, políticas o económicas, la reconfiguración de la geopolítica hemisférica. Si en décadas precedentes los golpes de Estado clásicos sirvieron para impedir que la izquierda gobernante desplegara su agenda política desde las instituciones o, incluso, llegara a ocuparlas, hoy el lawfare ejerce una misma función, pero amparándose en la legalidad y manteniendo las apariencias democráticas. Asistimos, entonces, a la paradójica demolición del Estado de derecho en nombre de la ley.

The subject of the study is regime change understood as the modification of broadly defined political institutions and practices governing domestic politics. Democratization is a possible outcome of such a process if the modification of political institutions and practices reflects convergence with a particular set of liberal ideas and norms. During the last 25 years the interest of political scientists in such processes has steadily grown. Democratization spread from Southern Europe in the 1970s to Latin America in the 1980s and finally reached Eastern Europe and the other continents in the late 1980s and early 1990s. More recently, some have diagnosed an 'ebbing' of the wave. While the empirical record of the 'third wave' is mixed, its profound effects on the way the academic community studies democratization are undeniable. The new cases o f democratization led during the 1980s to a paradigm shift away from structuralist explanations towards more contingency-driven and agency-based approaches. Challenges to the modernization school or cultural explanations of democratic change highlighted cases of regime change under structurally unfavorable conditions and called for greater attention towards the role of political actors, institutions, and contingencies.

This paper examines the political system, attitudes towards democracy, and their determinants in Ukraine before, during and after the “Euromaidan.” The research question is as follows: What type of political system has emerged in Ukraine since the “Euromaidan?” The related research question is to what extent political values in Ukraine are supportive of democracy. This study is based on theories of democratic, semi-democratic, and authoritarian political systems, democratization, and political culture. A number of major survey-based academic studies, conducted primarily before the “Orange Revolution,” concluded that mass political values in Ukraine were generally supportive of democracy, and that they did not preclude emergence of a consolidated democracy. Many previous studies presented the “Orange Revolution” as a democratic revolution that transformed Ukraine from semi-democracy or competitive authoritarianism to democracy. Democracy was often regarded as the most likely future path of political development of this post-Soviet state. The Western and Ukrainian media, the Western governments, and the Maidan government in Ukraine also generally presented the “Euromaidan” as a democratic revolution that overthrew the authoritarian government as a result of mass peaceful protests. However, there is lack of academic studies of the political system and democratic values in Ukraine since the “Euromaidan.” This paper compares political systems in Ukraine before, during and after the “Euromaidan.” It uses data from different waves of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems surveys, the Pew Global Attitudes surveys, and the World Values Surveys to examine public attitudes towards democracy in Ukraine before and after the “Euromaidan.” It also compares democratic and authoritarian preferences in Ukraine with those in Poland and Russia, two similar post-communist countries with differing political cultures and divergent trajectories of democratization. Finally, this study implements multiple regression analysis of the determinants of attitudes towards democracy. It analyzes effects of political party preferences, regional historical legacies, religion, ethnicity, and other factors on pro-democracy views. The study also discusses implications of its findings for the prospects for liberal democracy in Ukraine and for the conflict between the West and Russia over Ukraine.

In this review article, I classify the literature on the Turkish political regime during Justice and Development Party rule as two waves of studies, and a potential third wave. The first wave was prevalent at least until the Gezi uprisings in 2013. I argue that, in this wave, the main debate was between two rival and largely culturalist perspectives with conceptual toolkits that tended to interpret regime change through the lens of social transformations. I also maintain that scholarly works written from the hegemonic perspective of this wave, utilizing center-periphery and state-society dichotomies, and a narrow range of concepts from the democratization literature (from defective democracy to democratic consolidation), have misidentified/misinterpreted burgeoning autocratization in Turkey as democratization, albeit with problems. The Gezi uprisings brought to the fore already existing authoritarian features of the Turkish political regime and led to the second wave of studies. In the second wave, the focus was on naming Turkey's new political regime as a diminished subtype of authoritarianism, and thick descriptions of different facets of Turkey's new authoritarianism. Finally, I suggest that there is a need for a third wave that builds on recent studies and focuses on explaining Turkey's autocratization process and democratic breakdown, as well as the impact of autocratization on other aspects of Turkish politics and society.

"A tanulmánykötet Böröcz munkásságának kronologikus keresztmetszetét adja. A kötet egyetlen helyen, kényelmesen elérhető formában közli a szerző munkásságának a magyar olvasó számára legrelevánsabb részét. A kötet húsz tanulmánya közül hét itt jelenik meg először magyarul, kettő pedig új fordításban olvasható.

A világrendszer-elméleten belül Böröcz a magyar történeti szociológia, különösképpen Polányi Károly – és tágabban a magyarországi modern szellemi hagyomány legnagyobbjai, Bartók, Ady vagy Jancsó Miklós – által ihletett, sajátosan közép- európai megközelítésmódot képviseli.

http://webshop.harmattan.hu/?id=aa725cb0e8674da4a9ddf148c5874cdc&p=fooldal