TY - JOUR

T1 - Crises and critical junctures in authoritarian regimes

T2 - addressing uprisings’ temporalities and discontinuities

AU - Volpi, Frédéric

AU - Gerschewski, Johannes

PY - 2020/6/2

Y1 - 2020/6/2

N2 - In this article, we aim at sharpening common understandings of the notion of political crisis to better explain the trajectories of authoritarian transformations during popular uprisings. We make three major claims. First, we propose a definition of crisis as brief moments of institutional fluidity and openness in which a process can take different directions. We delineate the crisis concept from the concept of critical junctures and outline how our approach contributes to the methodological debate on ‘near misses’. Second, we indicate how the de-institutionalisation processes leading up to a crisis are to be analytically distinguished from within-crisis moments. We argue in favour of a discontinuity approach that takes into account the different temporalities of gradual lead-up processes and rapid within-crisis dynamics. Finally, we illustrate our theoretical and analytical reasoning with concrete cases from the authoritarian crises of the Arab uprisings, whilst suggesting that our argument can travel to other areas of research in which crisis narratives have gained prominence.

AB - In this article, we aim at sharpening common understandings of the notion of political crisis to better explain the trajectories of authoritarian transformations during popular uprisings. We make three major claims. First, we propose a definition of crisis as brief moments of institutional fluidity and openness in which a process can take different directions. We delineate the crisis concept from the concept of critical junctures and outline how our approach contributes to the methodological debate on ‘near misses’. Second, we indicate how the de-institutionalisation processes leading up to a crisis are to be analytically distinguished from within-crisis moments. We argue in favour of a discontinuity approach that takes into account the different temporalities of gradual lead-up processes and rapid within-crisis dynamics. Finally, we illustrate our theoretical and analytical reasoning with concrete cases from the authoritarian crises of the Arab uprisings, whilst suggesting that our argument can travel to other areas of research in which crisis narratives have gained prominence.

KW - Arab uprisings

KW - authoritarianism

KW - Crisis

KW - critical juncture

KW - de-institutionalisation

KW - near misses

KW - situational logics

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85081909225&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1080/01436597.2020.1729728

DO - 10.1080/01436597.2020.1729728

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:85081909225

VL - 41

SP - 1030

EP - 1045

JO - Third world quarterly

JF - Third world quarterly

SN - 0143-6597

IS - 6

ER -