Luke Cooper

The 21st century has not seen the triumph of democracy that some predicted, but instead, in many cases, a turn towards authoritarian forms of government as an imagined solution to the many crises facing humanity.

This innovative and important book draws on examples from around the world to examine the spread of draconian and nationalistic forms of government: a lurch towards ‘authoritarian protectionism’ which observes a simple maxim, that ‘the world may end for others, but not for us’.

While there is hope that the COVID-19 crisis could lead to a reinvigoration of democracy and a new economic agenda, there is also the risk of a further slide towards authoritarian rule and an urgent need for democratic renewal and change to combat this. The novel conceptualization offered in this book will give readers a new and deeper insight into the changing nature of the authoritarian threat to democracy – and how it might be overcome.

https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/authoritarian-contagion

Hong Kong’s ‘Umbrella Revolution’ has been widely regarded as a watershed moment in the polity’s post-1997 history. While public protest has long been a routine part of Hong Kong’s political culture, the preparedness of large numbers of citizens to participate in civil disobedience represented a new moment for Hong Kong society, reflecting both a very high level of politicisation and a deteriorating relationship with Beijing. The transformative processes underpinning the dramatic events of autumn 2014 have a wide relevance to scholarly debates on Hong Kong, China and the changing contours of world politics today.

This book provides an accessible entry point into the political and social cleavages that underpinned, and were expressed through, the Umbrella Movement. A key focus is the societal context and issues that have led to growth in a Hong Kong identity and how this became highly politically charged during the Umbrella Movement. It is widely recognised that political and ethnic identity has become a key cleavage in Hong Kong society. But there is little agreement amongst citizens about what it means to ‘be Hong Konger’ today or whether this identity is compatible or conflicting with ‘being Chinese’. The book locates these identity cleavages within their historical context and uses a range of theories to understand these processes, including theories of nationalism, social identity, ethnic conflict, nativism and cosmopolitanism. This theoretical plurality allows the reader to see the new localism in its full diversity and complexity and to reflect on the evolving nature of Hong Kong’s relationship with Mainland China.

This article is based on a lecture given at the Fifteenth Global Studies Conference on July 21, 2022. It analyzes the causes and implications of the global process of authoritarianization and considers the question of how and whether we can be democrats in an increasingly illiberal world. The article offers an explanation for the offensive against democratic institutions and the rule of law that locates it within the trend toward heightened systemic risk or “cascading crises.” Drawing on the arguments of my 2021 book, “Authoritarian Contagion: The Global Threat to Democracy,” I introduce the concept of authoritarian protectionism, as a framework highly attuned to the “demand for protection” from populations in a situation of systemic risk and breakdown. The closing section of the article considers the implications of this analysis for the future of multilateralism and collective security in light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

This article analyses the migration agreements between the European Union (EU) and Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. These international policy frameworks were negotiated in tandem with one another, and all were announced in 2016. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in the three countries, the article argues that they fuse humanitarian elements with a bloc-based security logic in an ad-hoc mix that lacks substantive legitimacy in the three states, rendering the frameworks unstable. The article introduces the idea of hybrid migration governance which we have developed inductively to conceptualise the empirical findings from our fieldwork, building on existing work on hybridity in the conflict and security studies literature and Nora Stel's conception of governance as the ability to shape the field of action of others. In our usage, hybrid migration governance refers to the efficacy of EU intervention in the institutional management of migration in the three case study countries (‘shaping the field of action’), the ‘frozen’ character of the societal relations formed through this process and their underlying lack of domestic legitimacy. In conclusion, we argue that hybrid migration governance poses problem for the EU's ‘Barcelona’ conception of human security, because rather than expanding the bloc's ‘zone of security’ to the international neighbourhood, these policies have generated downstream security-risks.

This book chapter was published in the open access edited volume, Kolozova, K., and Milanese, N. (eds), "Illiberal Democracies" in Europe: An Authoritarian Response to the Crisis of Liberalism. The Illiberalism Studies Programme, George Washington University: Washington, DC.

PeaceRep’s Ukraine programme are extensively involved in providing analysis, evidence and data to prepare discussions at the London Ukraine Recovery Conference, 21st – 22nd June 2023. As part of this work, I recently undertook a study trip to Kyiv. With support and assistance from the Kyiv Office of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, the Kyiv School of Economics, US Aid Economic Resilience Activity and Ukraine Industry Expertise, I met government officials, civil society activists, trade unions, and academics, and made a number of visits to industrial sites in the Kyiv Oblast region to see their challenges up close. In this policy brief, I argue that the Government of Ukraine should pursue policies that prioritise Ukraine’s economic resilience and mitigate against the risk of balance of payments crisis in the event that there is a significant reduction in donor support. The starting point for this analysis is that markets cannot function in wartime. The Ukrainian state therefore needs to embrace its inevitably central role as the coordinator of an integrated war-economy.

This report offers a summary analysis of the acute economic challenges facing the Ukrainian war effort and critically reviews the current policy agenda of the Government of Ukraine. Ukraine’s success in the war to date is reflective of popular support for the war-effort. Citizens are willing to mobilise and sacrifice to protect the country’s democratic public authority from its military overthrow by Russia.

Despite serious social and economic problems, this has hitherto allowed Ukraine to avoid the societal collapse and state fragmentation, which are major risks to Ukraine’s ability to win the war. To mitigate these risks, it is recommended that the Ukrainian government adopt a policy of social partnership and aim to achieve full employment, so that all resources can be directed to support the war-effort.

Drawing on the concept of uneven and combined development this article critically interrogates Benedict Anderson’s theory of the ‘imagined community’ through an historical investigation into the English-realm-cum-British-empire. Placing its rise in the context of the conflicts of Post-Reformation Europe, it identifies vectors of combined development (money, goods, ideas, people) which shaped the formation of new imagined communities. These post-Reformation struggles were not defined by nationality but subjecthood, which saw ‘the realm’ displace the monarch as an object of rights and duties. The 18th century rise of British nationalism was a response to the long crisis of subjecthood (1639–1688). However, this emergence was uneven and non-linear, such that it co-existed as a political imagination with continued belief in – and political support for – subjecthood. Ironically, given its latter-day mythology, the American Revolutionary War was fought to protect subjecthood under the Crown from subordination to the British nation and its parliament.

This article explores the implications of uneven and combined development for how system-change is conceptualised. The current moment has featured extensive discussions of how technological transformation is altering the nature of our economy, labour force and environment. Postcapitalists argue that zero cost production undermines the price mechanism in capitalism and opens up new emancipatory possibilities for the construction of the commons. This powerful critique and political vision is let down, however, by a failure to incorporate 'the international' dimension into the theory of change. U&CD provides a vitally needed correction to this unilinear thinking. To recover an understanding of how societal multiplicity affects the nature of system-change, this article makes the until-recently unusual step of turning to fictional literature. Specifically, it investigates the dynamics of uneven and combined development within the imagined universe brought to life by Kim Stanley Robinson's science fiction odyssey the Red Mars trilogy. Despite the events Robinson describes existing wholly in the realm of imagined fantasy, I argue the book contains five images of uneven and combined development relevant to real world social struggles. Drawing these out can start to develop a normative, political conception of uneven and combined development for the twenty first century.

The Umbrella Movement was an unprecedented event in the polity’s post-handover history. During the era of Chinese sovereignty Hong Kong’s vibrant civil society has regularly taken to the streets to defend local rights and freedoms. However, while many people have joined previous protests, the Umbrella Movement’s novelty lay in the willingness of participants to take civil disobedience in huge numbers. This, in turn, reflects a deep and on-going politicisation within Hong Kong society. A key expression of this is the increasing stress of many on their Hong Kong identity as something distinctive that cannot be reduced to ‘being Chinese’. Many of the ‘new Hong Kongers’ form part of a generation that have only known Chinese rule, yet feel deeply alienated from it, seeing it as a threat to their way of life. Populist political currents have emerged within this cultural and societal context. Advocating independence of Hong Kong as a city-state, they are fiercely hostile to what they call the ‘mainlandization’ of the polity, and have promoted anti-migrant discourses and direct actions that have led to accusations of xenophobia. Drawing on unstructured, in-depth interviews with participants in the Umbrella Movement, who had varying levels of activity and diverse political affiliations, this paper explores these developments through a revised conception of Benedict Anderson’s theory of the imagined community. The chapter argues that this deeply alienated ideological form of ‘localist’ has been constituted geopolitically by the nature of Hong Kong’s combined development with the Chinese Mainland.

George Lawson and Barry Buzan's The Global Transformation advances the claim that International Relations (IR) has mistakenly overlooked the Long Nineteenth Century as a transformative era. They argue this period saw a shift in the mode of power, i.e. how power was utilised and expressed, and not merely a change in how it was distributed amongst competing political entities. The following offers a sympathetic critique of their theoretical claims. Highlighting the role of geopolitics and the societal changes of the public sphere, the article argues that the historical sociological method utilised by these authors is 'neither realist nor liberal enough'.

Jürgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is a paradigmatic text of postwar historical sociology and critical theory. By integrating an account of the cultural transformation of early modern Europe with the formation of a distinctively capitalist state as a sovereign public body – one capable of securing private property rights in the name of the 'general interest' – the work formed a key part of a wider turn towards culturally sensitive applications of historical materialism. While Habermas has inspired scholarly innovation in the discipline of International Relations (IR) this has focused on the normative dimensions of his theory of modernity. Less attention has been paid to the empirical and methodological underpinning of his historical argument on the formation of the public sphere. As a result, the internalist methodology present in the The Structural Transformation, which IR scholars are naturally in a strong position to critique, has not been subject to sufficient debate. Moreover, the excessively normative account of the public sphere outlined in the British 'model case' does not accord with the empirical reality of the rise of political nationalism in this period and the forms of exclusion and violence it entailed, arguably throwing into question Habermas' broader claims regarding European modernity. This article offers a critique of Habermas through an application of the theory of uneven and combined development. Focusing on the British case it argues what Habermas sees as the emergence of the rational public should be recast as the national public and located within the war-prone environment of European geopolitics.

Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities has long been established as one of the major contributions to theories of nations and nationalism. Anderson located the rise of national identities within a long-evolving crisis of dynastic conceptions of identity, time, and space, and argued print-capitalism was the key cultural and economic force in the genesis of nations. This article offers a critical appropriation and application of Anderson's theory through two steps. Firstly, it evaluates the conceptual underpinning of his approach through an engagement with recent scholarship on the ‘theory of uneven and combined development’. The fruits of this interchange provide a deeper analytical framework to account for what Anderson calls the ‘modularity’ of national identity, that is, its universal spread across the globe. Modularity is now reconceptualised as a product of combined development with its causal efficacy derived from the latent dynamics of a geopolitically fragmented world. The latter gave shape and form to the new national communities. Secondly, this revised framework is applied to the emergence of Chinese national identity in the late nineteenth century. This allows Chinese nationalism to be recast as an ideological amalgam of indigenous and imported elements that emerged out of the crisis-ridden encounter between Imperial China and Western imperialism in the nineteenth century.

Can general mechanisms governing social life (necessity) and the possibility of multiple outcomes in socio-historical processes (contingency) be incorporated into a single theoretical framework? In recent years, the critical realist philosophy of science has emerged as an intellectual strand within international relations (IR) that makes theoretical claims about necessary social processes while recognizing the irreducible role of contingency. However, critical realist scholars treat contingency as an ‘externality’, thereby declining to theorize social processes that result in contingent outcomes. Here, it is argued that contingency emerges out of the combination of events and processes as theorized by the law of uneven and combined development. This provides a general conceptualization that treats differentiated historical outcomes, and their contingencies, as inherent to human development. Out of these assumptions a workable approach to historical sociology in IR can be developed—one predicated upon uncovering the form of historical ‘combination’, the contingent fusion of elements, in international systems.

An interview with Dr Luke Cooper for LRT, the Lithuanian public broadcaster

States at war tend to centralise their economies. This allows investment, labour and economic resources to be directed to the demands of the war. Ukraine is currently doing the opposite, pursuing liberalisation and economic deregulation, while attempting to fight a war of self-defence. This may undermine its war effort and even risk the unity and stability of the state.

In this translation of an interview with Dr Luke Cooper by LRT, the Lithuanian public broadcaster, Dr Cooper argues that recent labour market reforms and extensive privatisation by the Ukrainian government represent a repetition of economic mistakes made after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

This paper contributes to recent scholarship that has used uneven and combined development to counter eurocentric accounts of modernity. Arguing that Trotsky's theoretical framework provides a conceptual basis for the revision of prevalent understandings of British imperialism, the paper shows how Britain learnt from the large Asian empires and only superseded them industrially in the early nineteenth century. The story of the Mysorean rocket is used to illustrate how the creative appropriation and adaptation of antecedent technologies formed part of Britain's ascent. Having first encountered the weapon in their crushing defeat at the hands of the Indian Kingdom of Mysore in 1780, the British went on to adapt the design so successfully that it proved crucial to their decimation of the Qing naval forces in 1841. The battle paved the way for British victory in the First Opium War and the consequent " opening of China " to colonial-commercial interests. As such, the tale of the Mysorean rocket illustrates the non-endogenous sources of British imperial power. Moreover, it suggests the period 1780 to 1840 was critical to Britain's 'leap-frogging' of the hitherto more advanced Asian polities.

This article analyses the successful Conservative election campaign of 2019 and how it took advantage of a fractured political and economic landscape. It reviews the unique circumstances around the 2019 election and the 'surprising death' of a no deal Brexit. We then analyse the divergent political communication strategies in the 2017 and 2019 Conservative campaigns showing how the latter was much more coherent and politically unorthodox. By drawing on socioeconomic, demographic and British Election Study data, it reveals how Boris Johnson's messaging was carefully tailored towards the demands of voters in the 'red wall' seats. Conservative success was built around an appeal to voters in these economically depressed 'geographies of discontent'. While tremendously successful, the coalition this created is potentially fragile. An unconventional, 'leftish' Conservative campaign built a new, diverse bloc of voters. It includes a number of left-wingers expecting change alongside traditional Conservative supporters and will be hard to keep together given the economic turbulence ahead.

Authoritarianism has become a major buzzword of global politics today. But the public debate has often focused on headline-catching cases of democratic decline. In the European Union (EU), Hungary and Poland, have tended to dominate discussion and critique with the implication that a modern-day ‘containment’ strategy might suffice to withstand the authoritarian advance. This brings dangers for how we think about politics in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe (CESEE), involving a problematic reading of the region as a source of threat to democracy, rather than a theatre for its renewal.

This new LSE IDEAS report, Authoritarian protectionism in Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe: diversity, commonality and resistance, seeks to provide a wider regional contextualisation through the examination of Hungary and Poland in tandem with four other case studies in the region: Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Romania and Slovakia. The paper argues that the recent histories of these states provide a vantage point for reflection on the broader tendencies driving democratic decay globally. As the populaces of these states have shown tremendous civic energy in their willingness to resist authoritarianism, often in very large numbers, these case studies also point to the need to re-frame how this topic is discussed in the European public sphere. They suggest we should highlight how events in the region may be a harbinger of new opportunities for democratic advance. 

The snapshot comparative analysis of these states is undertaken through the frame of what the author, Dr Luke Cooper, calls authoritarian protectionism. This emphasises the importance of a politics of ethnonational partisanship to the contemporary challenge to democracy. In the cases examined in the report, authoritarian protectionism draws particular attention to the coherence that exists amongst such actors– despite the fact the examples are drawn from the left, centre and right of the political spectrum.

On the eve of the European elections, the Visions of Europe project produced a guide the elections in collaboration with European Alternatives.

Some of the key findings –
• Europe more polarised than ever, as far right on the rise
• European issues now dominate national politics
• Momentum behind progressive proposals for European reform despite common focus on far right

The Eurozone and migration crises, Brexit and the pandemic have fundamentally changed the fabric of civil society in Europe and its attitudes towards the European project. This report distils research that mapped, tracked and monitored developments in European civil society from 2018 to 2020, and consider their implications for the future of Europe. It argues that since the 2008 financial crisis seeking change at the European level has become a central, rather than secondary, goal of civil society and social movements - a transformation it refers to as 'insurgent Europeanism'.

The rise of the AfD is a deeply threatening moment for European politics. The report draws out the dangers ahead for Europe and Germany, but also emphasises how there are positive lessons to be garnered from the German experience of tackling extremism.

This book chapter explores the relationship between neoliberalism and nationalism in contemporary Europe in the context of Brexit. Contrary to the 'super-state myth', it argues that the contemporary crisis of European integration lies in a failure to move beyond the nation-state in the context of a high level of economic integration. This has favoured the development of an, in some cases, extreme form of neoliberalism, and further reinforced tensions over sovereignty and identity between Europe's polities. A feedback loop generating more nationalism has thereby developed.

Evidence statement to the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee enquiry. Also at https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/16450/html/ and more information on the enquiry: https://committees.parliament.uk/work/603/the-evolution-of-devolution-english-devolution/

Scholarly analysis of Chinese history, culture and politics has boomed in the last two decades, reflecting the country's growing importance to the world economy and international relations. Unfortunately, this expansion in the sheer volume of academic and popular output has not always succeeded in deepening our critical understanding. One recalls a particular moment in the development of this veritable outpouring of academic literature when it became almost routine to open a text with an introductory discussion of the McCartney Mission of 1793, the first British ambassadorial visit to Imperial China. Unfortunately, this important affair often became a trope used to illustrate the supposed insularity and anti-modernity of the Qing regime. In contrast, the second British ambassadorial mission, undertaken by Lord Amherst in 1816, has received scant attention, despite its importance in the sequence of events that would eventually lead to the Opium War of 1839-1842. While formally an embarrassing diplomatic failure, it retrospectively can be seen as a pivotal moment for the rise and development of British imperial power in East Asia. Writing China uses the historical moment of the Amherst Embassy as a lift off point for a series of conceptual and empirical reflections on how the development of greater contact between the British Empire and the Qing dynasty inspired new forms of cultural representation within these two polities. The volume comprises a set of lucid and compelling essays, which will be of immense interdisciplinary value to a range of scholars, from historians to political scientists and cultural theorists. While the collection is grounded within literature studies, the writers' emphasis on what political scientists have referred to in recent years as 'combined histories'-the identification of the cultural interconnections between societies that shape moments of history-gives it this much broader remit and intellectual significance. Indeed, somewhat ironically, the traditional Orientalist narrative of imperial Chinese insularity has often gone hand-in-hand with a 'methodological nationalism' which saw the agency of the British, or other Western actors, as active and causal, while the positions and outlooks of the Imperial Chinese regime were treated as passive and inconsequential. By refusing to accept these assumptions, Writing China contributes to the growing body of work that highlights cross cultural interactions and hybridity. The essays in the volume are wide-ranging in their scope with the Amherst Embassy only treated as a historical frame for the volume, rather than its primary subject, which will no doubt be seen as a strength or weakness depending on scholars' specific interests. For this reader a number of vignettes in the book stood out as worth shining a further light on. Robert Markley draws out how the reluctance of the British to kowtow-and thus indicate an acceptance of their assigned status of a tributary regime-underlines the importance they attached to symbolic capital even if it obstructed the commercial aims they had for the Embassy (pp. 90-92). These considerations are embedded in his analysis of the fallout from the Tambora eruption of 1815, a key moment in nineteenth century ecological and economic history, albeit one which was poorly understood by contemporaries of the age. Peter Kitson also notes the importance of nationalist conceptions of international order in animating the British imperial criticism of the non-territorial understanding of sovereign authority represented by the kowtow, arguing this indicated a movement away from the nominally universal aspirations of the European Enlightenment (pp. 80-82). And