Understanding and Interrupting Authoritarian Collaboration

For many decades, autocrats have been considered less cooperative than democrats in international politics. While researchers endeavored to learn how international democratic practices spread through political, economic, and social networks, little attention was paid to autocratic collaboration tendencies. However, growing bodies of evidence from human rights and democracy support to international security and international development demonstrate that authoritarian regimes are collaborating through formal organizations and informal channels to stabilize or entrench their rule, disrupt democratic civil society, and even extend the reach of repressive institutions beyond state boundaries.   

Autocrats face common threats, including: pro-democracy groups and dissenters at home; stigmatization and illegitimacy of their authoritarian governance tactics abroad; conditionalities on critically needed aid or loans that prioritize democratic governance structures and policies; and evolving and increased security threats. In response, authoritarian regimes are sharing information; working to legitimate (or de-stigmatize) repressive practices; supporting one another as they weather shocks and crises resulting from international integration (economic or political); and even lending resources for co-opting and managing critical constituencies. These and other tactics allow them to entrench authoritarian practices.   

To enable the democracy support community to effectively bolster democratic resilience in the face of growing authoritarianism, we must better understand these practices. This paper provides an overview of modern authoritarian collaboration, analyzing its purposes and methods. It goes on to consider implications for international order and suggests that democracy defenders challenge pernicious authoritarian collaboration, for instance by leveraging their own transnational networks to disrupt authoritarian collaboration on surveillance and repression; provide compelling counter-narratives and debunk disinformation through effective civic education campaigns; and international standard setting and rule enforcement that cuts off authoritarian actors from financial and other resources. 

Political scientists have written extensively about the benefits and consequences of international collaboration – defined as cooperation and coordination for joint gain – focusing primarily on intergovernmental collaboration among democracies.¹ Collaboration between democratic governments was hypothesized to support democratic resilience,² reducing the risk of young democracies reverting to authoritarianism. International collaboration was also credited with promoting the “democratic peace,”³ and intensifying the spread of economic and political openness during the 20th century.⁴ By contrast, authoritarian regimes of the 20th century were viewed as peripheral and less cooperative actors in world politics. Because authoritarian regimes were expected to collaborate at a lower rate, fewer scholars studied the consequences of authoritarian international collaboration. 

In recent decades, however, it has become clear that autocracies are able and willing to collaborate in consistent ways, particularly with like-minded autocracies. Even absolute monarchs, the least accountable and most secretive autocrats, cooperate intensively, particularly through informal agreements and forums.⁵ In fact, authoritarian regimes created or comprised the majority of members in a significant share of regional and global international (governmental) organizations throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries.⁶ International organizations – once firmly under the control of democracies, either formally (as in the case of the European Union (EU)) or de facto (global multilateral organizations) – have had to accommodate authoritarian members.  

When cooperating governments are not democratic, the aims and advantages associated with international cooperation shift. Historically, autocrats relied most heavily on repression to prevent (often violent) regime change, but the 20th century’s global human rights movement and spread of online open information environments has necessitated strategic innovation and diversification.⁷ In addition to repression, legitimation and co-optation are important “pillars” of modern authoritarian and hybrid regime stability.⁸ Legitimation broadly refers to autocrats’ efforts to create positive public perceptions of their “right” to rule. Co-optation refers to creating institutions for sharing power and resources with regime supporters; this is one purpose political parties and legislatures serve in autocracies.⁹  

A growing body of research considers how autocrats collaborate to promote authoritarian regime stability and reduce prospects for democratization. Collaboration refers to joint action undertaken for mutual gain that falls on the spectrum from coordination, including self-enforcing agreements, to more difficult cooperation, including agreements where parties have incentives to defect.¹⁰ Scholars and practitioners in the democracy support community have amassed evidence suggesting that autocrats collaborate to extend the reach of repressive institutions beyond state boundaries; to legitimate (or de-stigmatize) repressive practices; to weather shocks and crises resulting from international integration (economic or political); and to lend resources for co-opting and managing critical constituencies.¹¹ Rising non-democratic powers are also cooperating in new ways across a range of economic and political domains in the 21st century. These developments pose challenges to democracies, organizations in the democracy, rights, and governance sector, and the liberal international order more broadly.  

This paper assesses the state of our knowledge on authoritarian collaboration. The scope of the paper is global, but mainly limited to the post-Cold War period. The paper presents the argument that authoritarian regimes concerned with remaining in power collaborate primarily to protect themselves from threats to their political (and personal) survival, rather than to promote the spread of authoritarianism per se.¹² The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 reviews the logic of authoritarian collaboration – whether multilateral or bilateral – through formal or informal channels. Section 3 discusses four categories of threats to authoritarian regime stability and autocrats’ collaborative responses to each threat. These threats include pro-democracy groups and domestic opponents; stigmatization and illegitimacy; traditional aid or loan conditionalities; and security threats. Section 4 considers whether and how authoritarian collaboration is changing fundamental elements of the international order. The paper concludes by reviewing what we know about how to disrupt the pernicious consequences of authoritarian collaboration. Appropriate interventions include proactive support programs for diaspora groups likely to be targeted by transnational repression and civic education programming about authoritarian-backed international organizations that produce disinformation.  

1. For overviews of the evolving debates on the relationship between democratic or authoritarian institutions and international cooperation, see Bueno De Mesquita, B., & Smith, A. (2012). “Domestic Explanations of International Relations.” Annual Review of Political Science, 15:161-181; Drezner, D. (2022). “The Death of the Democratic Advantage.” International Studies Review, 24(2):viac017; and Hyde, S., & Saunders, E. (2020) “Recapturing Regime Type in International Relations: Leaders, Institutions, and Agency Space.” International Organization, 74(2): 363-395.

2. Shein and Emmons (2023) define democratic resilience as “the ability to maintain democratic governance functions and principles, despite attempts by illiberal actors to damage or diminish the vertical, horizontal, or diagonal accountability mechanisms core to democracy.” See Shein, E., Emmons, C., Lemargie, K., & Buril, F. (2023). “Paths to Democratic Resilience in an Era of Backsliding: A Roadmap for the Democracy Support Community.” IFES’ Democratic Resilience Lab.

3. The ‘democratic peace’ refers to the finding that democracies are less likely to fight with other democracies. This implied that when a larger share of countries democratize, international conflict is less likely.

4. See Doyle, M. W. (1986). “Liberalism and World Politics.” The American Political Science Review, 80(4): 1151-1169; Milner, H., & Kubota, K. (2005). “Why the Move to Free Trade? Democracy and Trade Policy in the Developing Countries.” International Organization, 59(1): 107-143; Pevehouse, J. (2002b). “With a Little Help from my Friends? Regional Organizations and the Consolidation of Democracy.” American Journal of Political Science, 46(3): 611-626.

5. Carlson, M., & Koremenos, B. (2021). “Cooperation Failure or Secret Collusion? Absolute Monarchs and Informal Cooperation.” The Review of International Organizations, 16: 95-135.

6. Cottiero, C., & Haggard, S. (2023). “Stabilizing Authoritarian Rule: The Role of International Organizations.” International Studies Quarterly, 67(2): sqad031.

7. Morgenbesser, L. (2020). “The Menu of Autocratic Innovation.” Democratization, 27(6): 1053-1072.

8. Gerschewski, J. (2013). “The Three Pillars of Stability: Legitimation, Repression, and Co-optation in Autocratic Regimes.” Democratization, 20(1): 13-38.

9. Ibid. The domestic strategies modern autocrats use to strengthen these pillars are widely studies in the literature on authoritarian regimes.

10. Keohane, R., & Victor, D. (2016). “Cooperation and Discord in Global Climate Policy.” Nature Climate Change, 6(6): 570-575.

11. Cottiero & Haggard (2023, n. 6); Debre, M. J. (2020). “The Dark Side of Regionalism: How Regional Organizations Help Authoritarian Regimes to Boost Survival.” Democratization, 28(2): 394-413; Debre, M. J. (2022). “Clubs of Autocrats: Regional Organizations and Authoritarian Survival.” The Review of International Organizations, 17: 485-511; Libman, A., & Obydenkova, A. V. (2018). “Regional International Organizations as a Strategy of Autocracy: The Eurasian Economic Union and Russian Foreign Policy” International Affairs, 94(5): 1037-1058; Schmotz, A., & Tansey, O. (2018). “Regional Autocratic Linkage and Regime Survival.” European Journal of Political Research, 57(3): 662-686; Tsourapas, G. (2021) “Global Autocracies: Strategies of Transnational Repression, Legitimation, and Co-Optation in World Politics.” International Studies Review, 23(3): 616-644; and von Soest, C. (2015). “Democracy Prevention: The International Collaboration of Authoritarian Regimes.” European Journal of Political Research, 54(4): 623-638.

12. This is similar to the argument in von Soest (2015, n.11), but the focus here extends beyond collaboration during moments of crisis. For a summary of the generally null results on ideologically driven autocracy promotion, see Bank, A. (2017). “The Study of Authoritarian Diffusion and Cooperation: Comparative Lessons on Interests Versus Ideology, Nowadays and in History.” Democratization, 24(7): 1345-1357.

The author would like to thank Stephen Haggard and Christina Schneider for their constructive feedback and support. Many thanks to IFES colleagues for their critical review and feedback, including: Erica Shein, Kyle Lemargie, Chad Vickery, Katie Ellena, Dr. Tarun Chaudhary, Dr. Magnus Ohman, Melika Atic, Sarah Bibler, Anya Cumberland, Anthony Bowyer, Tamar Zhvania, Keti Maisuradze, Suzanne Abdallah, Hayya Ahmed, Elizabeth Dettmer, Gracia Angulo Duncan, and Clara Cole. The IFES Democratic Resilience Lab is generously supported by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), and this publication was produced with the support of Sida.