Adolescent Autocracies: Pro-government student groups in resurgent authoritarian regimes

Democracy in Retreat"" was the 2019 title of the Freedomhouse index, which ascertained 13 consecutive years of a global decline in political rights and civil liberties from 2005 to 2018.

The report foregrounds the alarming erosion of long-standing democracies and those part of ""democracy's third wave"", which began in the 1970s in Southern Europe, followed by countries in Latin America and East Asia and culminated in the dramatic regime breakdowns initiated by democratic reforms in Central-Eastern Europe (Soviet Union), South Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa.

A period that has inspired scholars to deliberate the idea of democracy representing the ""ultimate end of a country’s political development"" or even the ""end of history"" itself.

This period of democratization was initially lauded as a ""linear set sequence"", which would eventually encompass the globe.

From the early 21st century on, however, a new generation of scholars has been describing a reverse wave of regime changes (Diamond, 2015; Lührmann & Lindberg, 2019).

This ""authoritarian resurgence"" has evoked a scholarly debate on the causes, mechanisms, and perseverance of such ""new"" authoritarian regimes (Cassani & Tomini, 2019; Del Panta, 2019; Wiatr, 2019).

While (university) student movements were commonly identified as prominent actors/forces of social change during the third democratization wave, my research will examine the role students play in the creation, maintenance, and innovation of (resurgent) authoritarian/autocratic regimes.

They represent an alternative form of citizenship that neither fits needly into universalized social locations, such as ""civil society"", nor postcolonial conceptualization, such as Chatterjee's (2004) ""political society"".

Using Bangladesh and Uganda as case studies, my research project explores how globally connected student groups are influential and understudied actors in autocratization processes and the shaping of these ""new"" regimes’ ideological foundations.