Resisting Contemporary Autocracies: The Role of Cultural Actors

While contemporary autocracies (Geddes 1999; Linz 2000; Gandhi 2008; Ezrow and Frantz 2011; Svolik 2012), as well as hybrid regimes/competitive authoritarianism (Ottaway 2003; Bogaards 2009; Levitsky and Way 2010), have increasingly been analyzed in the last decades, their cultural policies and cultural affairs (Bonet and Zamorano 2020) have not represented a central topic for political scientists. This panel discusses the plural roles of cultural actors facing the new autocratic regimes of the XXIst century. Autocracies consider art’s power as paramount to the consolidation of their authority and the examples from the XXth century are numerous. This panel invites papers that look at new approaches of contemporary authoritarian regimes in dealing with their artistic spheres from the perspective of the new institutionalism of authoritarian regimes (Schedler 2009) and the respective strategies to counter the politicization of art by non-democratic regimes. We want to investigate if these regimes innovate in their approaches of the role of cultural actors or if there is a shared approach of dealing with artists and cultural actors in general. At the same time, cultural actors can play several roles: they disrupt the unanimous discourse through a dissensus, or a rupture in the sensible (Rancière), they propose new ways of seeing the real and they create alternatives to the dominating perspective.