Expert Voices: Building Democratic Resilience
Originally published in the May edition of the IFES Voice. Subscribe here.
Democratic backsliding is, unfortunately, a defining characteristic of the current era. Autocrats have a well-rehearsed script for undermining the norms and institutions that define democracy, reshaping or jettisoning them – sometimes slowly and other times all at once. Today’s autocrats aren’t working in isolation; they are collaborating with like-minded leaders in other countries around the world.
In this landscape of rising autocracy, the International Foundation for Electoral Systems (IFES) Democratic Resilience Lab is working to help defenders of democracy better identify and counter democratic backsliding and disrupt authoritarian collaboration in their countries. Building on our global expertise and academic research and partnerships, the Lab has published a framework for building democratic resilience. We define democratic resilience as the ability to maintain democratic governance functions and principles, despite attempts by illiberal actors to damage or diminish the accountability mechanisms core to democracy. A resilient democracy prepares for those threats, but also has the capacity to respond to and recover from crises. IFES and others in the DRG sector can best support democracy champions by designing interventions appropriate to each unique backsliding context.
The democracy community also needs to figure out how to disrupt the autocratic playbook. We need to better understand how and why autocrats collaborate so that we can better support democracy champions in pushing back. For instance, to squash pro-democracy groups and domestic opponents, autocrats engage in transnational, collaborative repression by coercing the return of dissidents abroad. A newly published paper, Understanding and Interrupting Modern Day Autocratic Collaboration, commissioned by the Democratic Resilience Lab, explores the range of collaborative tactics autocrats are using to entrench their rule and suggests concrete ways to interrupt that behavior.
Armed with these twin frameworks, IFES’s Democratic Resilience Lab is advancing the conversation about authoritarian behavior in the current wave of backsliding and setting standards for what the DRG community can and should be doing to advance democracy globally.
