21St Century Authoritarians
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UNDERMINING DEMOCRACY 21st century authoritarians june 2009 RFA Radio Free Asia RFA Radio Free Asia 21st Century Authoritarians Freedom House Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Radio Free Asia JUNE 2009 Copyright of this publication is held by Freedom House. You may not copy, reproduce, republish or circulate in anyway the content from this publication except for your own personal and noncommercial use. Any other use requires the prior written permission of Freedom House, 1301 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20036. Published by Freedom House in association with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia. © Freedom House June 2009. contents Acknowledgements and Study Team . vii Authors . .ix Overview Essay “Undermining Democracy: Strategies and Methods of 21st CenturyAuthoritarians”. 1 Country Studies China: Resilient, Sophisticated Authoritarianism . 13 Iran: Clerical Authoritarianism . 29 Pakistan: Semi-Authoritarian, Semi-Failed State . 39 Russia: Selective Capitalism and Kleptocracy . 49 Venezuela: Petro-Politics and the Promotion of Disorder . 65 v acknowledgements and study team In producing Undermining Democracy: 21st Century Authoritarians, Freedom House, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia undertook an 18-month strategic research effort to analyze a set of complex and geopolitically important states. The fi nal product, whose contents are the sole responsibility of the three organizations that oversaw its publi- cation, would not have been possible without the contributions of an extensive number of people who offered their time, expertise and intellect to this initiative. The organizers of this project therefore would like to thank and acknowledge the following people, who provided valuable contributions to the development of this study: Ali Afshari, Michael Allen, Catherine Antoine, Andrew Apostolou, Akbar Atri, Parnaz Azima, Asta Banionis, Jarret Blanc, Dan Blumenthal, Ellen Bork, Jan Brambilla, J. Scott Carpenter, Gordon S. Chang, Jennifer Chou, Patrick Clawson, Louis Coan Greve, Sarah Cook, Thomas Dine, Nadio Diuk, Jake Dizard, Ashley Esarey, John Estrella, Stephen Fairbanks, Steven Flanagan, Charles Gati, Viviana Giacaman, Ari Goldberg, Steven Heydemann, D. Jeffrey Hirschberg, Sarah Jackson-Han, Donald Jensen, Enver Kadir, Karin Deutsch Karlekar, Joshua Kamp, Glenn Kates, Daniel Kimmage, Letitia King, Joanna Levison, John Lindburg, Perry Link, Masha Lipman, Drew Liu, Ronald McNamara, Alan Makovsky, Clifford May, Thomas Melia, Mariam Memarsadeghi, Sarah Mendelson, Joan Mower, Damian Murphy, Jigme Ngapo, Nina Ognianova, Robert Orttung, Marc Plattner, Elena Postnikova, Arch Puddington, Eric Richardson, Michael Rubin, A. William Samii, Robert Satloff, Gary Schmitt, Paula Schriefer, Michael Shifter, Steven Simmons, Jeff Smith, Henry Sokolski, Dan Southerland, John Squier, Kathryn Stoner-Weiss, Jeffrey Trimble, Jennifer Windsor, Donna Woolf, Diane Zeleny, Martins Zvaners Authors: Javier Corrales (Venezuela) Daniel Kimmage (Russia) Joshua Kurlantzick (China co-author) Perry Link (China co-author) Abbas Milani (Iran) Rashed Rahman (Pakistan) vii viii undermining democracy Advisors: Anne Applebaum Brian Katulis Andrew Nathan Ahmed Rashid Anibal Romero Dan Southerland General Editor: Christopher Walker Assistant Editor: Elizabeth A. Floyd Copy Editor: Tyler Roylance Additional Research: Eliza Young Cover Design: Words by Design Typesetting: Girl of the West Productions authors Javier Corrales is associate professor of political science at Amherst College in Amherst, Massachusetts. This semester, he is a visiting scholar at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. He obtained his Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University in 1996. He is the author of Presidents Without Parties: the Politics of Economic Reform in Argentina and Venezuela in the 1990s (Penn State University Press, 2002). His research has been published in academic journals such as Comparative Politics, World Development, Political Science Quarterly, International Studies Quarterly, World Policy Journal, Latin American Politics and Society, Journal of Democracy, Latin American Research Review, Studies in Comparative International Studies, Current History, and Foreign Policy. In 2008, he testifi ed before Congress on the political situation in Venezuela. In 2005, he was a Fulbright Scholar in Caracas, Venezuela, and then a visiting lecturer at the Center for Research and Documentation on Latin America, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In 2000, he became one of the youngest scholars ever to be selected as a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. He has also been a consultant for the World Bank, the United Nations, the Center for Global Development, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He serves on the editorial boards of Latin American Politics and Society and the Americas Quarterly. Daniel Kimmage received his undergraduate education at the State University of New York at Binghamton and earned an M.A. in Russian and Islamic history from Cornell University. From 1997 to 2001, Kimmage lived in St. Petersburg, Russia, where he was the English- language editor of the quarterly journal Manuscripta Orientalia at the Institute of Oriental Studies. From 2003 to 2008, Kimmage was a regional analyst at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, where he focused on politics, business, and media issues in Central Asia and Russia. During his time at RFE/RL, Kimmage co-authored Iraqi Insurgent Media: The War of Images and Ideas (2007) and authored The Al-Qaeda Media Nexus (2008), which detailed the media branding and distribution strategies of Al-Qaeda and affi liated movements. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the New Republic, Foreign Policy, and Slate. He is currently an independent consultant based in Washington, D.C. ix x undermining democracy Joshua Kurlantzick is a visiting scholar in the Carnegie Endowment’s China Program. Also a special correspondent for the New Republic, a columnist for Time, and a senior correspondent for the American Prospect, Kurlantzick is assessing China’s relationship with the developing world, including Southeast Asia, Africa, and Latin America. His new book, Charm Offensive: How China’s Soft Power is Transforming the World (Yale University Press), focuses on how China uses its soft power—culture, investment, academia, foreign aid, public diplomacy—to infl uence other countries in the developing world. Charm Offensive has been nominated for the Council on Foreign Relations’ 2008 Arthur Ross Book Award. Kurlantzick is currently a fellow at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy and the Pacifi c Council on International Policy. Kurlantzick was previously foreign editor at the New Republic. He also covered international economics and trade for U.S. News and World Report, and reported on Southeast Asia for the Economist as a correspondent based in Bangkok, Thailand. Kurlantzick’s articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, GQ, the American Prospect, Mother Jones, Current History, and the Washington Quarterly. Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University and visiting professor in the department of political science. In addition, he is co-director of the Iran Democracy Project and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution. His area of expertise is U.S.-Iran relations and Iranian cultural, political, and security issues. Dr. Milani was formerly a professor of history and political science and chair of the department at Notre Dame de Namur University; assistant professor in the faculty of law and political science at Tehran University and a member of the board of directors of Tehran University’s Center for International Studies from 1979 to 1987; research fellow at the Iranian Center for Social Research from 1977 to 1978; and an assistant professor at the National University of Iran from 1975 to 1977. Dr. Milani is the author of Eminent Persians: The Men and Women Who Made Modern Iran, 1941–1979, a two-volume study of Iran’s elite before the revolution (Syracuse University Press, 2008); King of Shadows: Essays on Iran’s Encounter with Modernity, Persian text published in the U.S. (Ketab Corp., 2005); Lost Wisdom: Rethinking Persian Modernity in Iran (Mage, 2004); Tales of Two Cities: A Persian Memoir (Mage, 1996) and Modernity and Its Foes in Iran (Gardon Press, 1998). He received his B.A. in political science and economics from the University of California at Berkeley, and his Ph.D in political science from the University of Hawaii. authors xi Perry Link is professor emeritus of East Asian studies at Princeton University and Chancellorial Chair for Teaching Across Disciplines at the University of California at Riverside. He has published widely on modern Chinese language, literature, and popular thought, and is a member of the Princeton China Initiative, Human Rights Watch/Asia, and other groups that support human rights. He has authored, among others, the books The Uses of Literature: Life in the Socialist Chinese Literary System (Princeton University Press, 2000) and Evening Chats in Beijing: Probing China’s Predicament (Norton and Co., 1992); coauthored Chinese course books; and edited several books including the recent Two Kinds of Truth: Stories and Reportage from China by Liu Binyan (Indiana University Press, 2006). He coedited The Tiananmen Papers: The Chinese