Contesting Autocratisation: Actors and Institutions of Democratic Resistance in a Global Perspective

While authoritarianism continues to gain ground globally, this book offers a global and nuanced perspective into how, when, and where autocratisation may be contested and sometimes reversed. Drawing on rich case studies from across Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Southeastern Europe, the chapters in this book map the actors and institutions of resistance, ranging from political parties and bureaucrats to social movements and transnational alliances. Rather than offering a binary view of success or failure of opposition and resistance, this book adopts a dynamic, process-driven approach, considering the conditions under which resistance emerges, adapts, and persists even in shrinking civic and political spaces.

Whether through informal bureaucratic defiance, legal mobilisation, elite rivalries, transnational alliances, strategic litigation, or protest coalitions, these strategies reveal the agency of opposition actors navigating complex and often hostile terrains. These diverse experiences force us to rethink resistance as an ongoing, collective effort rather than a single moment of reversal.

This volume spans multiple disciplines, including political science, sociology, international relations, and legal studies, making it essential reading for students, scholars, and policymakers to understand how resistance emerges, evolves, and endures in the face of authoritarian resurgence.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Bilge Yabanci is a Faculty member at the University of Deusto’s Faculty of Social and Human Sciences in Bilbao, Spain, where she also holds the positions of Ikerbasque Research Fellow and Ramón y Cajal Fellow. She is the author of Civil Society and Autocratisation: Co-optation, Repression, and Contestation in Turkey (Edinburgh University Press, 2025). Her research has been featured in academic journals, including Government and Opposition, Democratization, Journal of Civil Society, British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Politics, Religion & Ideology, and Ethnopolitics, among others.

Karabekir Akkoyunlu is Research Associate at the Department of Politics and International Studies, SOAS University of London, and Visiting Professor at the Department of Political Science, Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). His research focuses on democratisation, autocratisation and militarisation in the Global South, with a particular interest in Turkey, Iran and Brazil. His recent publications include Guardianship and Democracy in Iran and Turkey: Tutelary Consolidation, Popular Contestation (2024) and ’Blood Gambit: how autocratizing populists fuel ethnic conflict to reverse election setbacks - evidence from Turkey and Israel’ (Democratization, 2024, with Yusuf Sarfati).

Kerem Öktem is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and a Senior Research Associate at the Orient-Institut Istanbul. His research focuses on the politics and international relations of Turkey, with particular emphasis on diaspora, minority, and citizenship policies. He co-edited the volume Turkish Jews and their Diasporas: Entanglements and Separations (2022) with İpek Yosmaoğlu (Northwestern University). Currently, he is working on two interconnected research projects: one explores the role of cultural policies in reshaping Turkish citizenship discourses, while the other examines the exercise of these discourses in the context of neo-imperial power projections in the Balkans. Kerem Öktem also serves as Chair of the Consortium for European Studies on Turkey (CEST) and sits on the editorial boards of several leading journals in the field of Turkish Studies.