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Alexander Cooley and Alexander Dukalskis, "Dictating the Agenda: The Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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Dr. Alexander Cooley
Limu Emu and Doug.
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Dr. Alexandra Dukalski
Here we have the Limu Emu in.
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Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
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Dr. Alexandra Dukalski
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Dr. Alexandra Dukalski
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera.
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Dr. Alexander Cooley
They see us.
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Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today because I have both of the authors with me of a very interesting new book from Oxford University Press titled In Dictating the Agenda, the Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics, which, I mean, pretty much does exactly that helps us understand why and how we've gotten to a point now with a lot of authoritarian states across different parts of the world that are not just sort of quietly resisting liberal ideas or advocacy around human rights, but are increasingly actively pushing back in a lot of different aspects of global economics, global politics, global society. We're going to be talking about all sorts of things to make a bit more sense of kind of where we're at now, what this might mean, sort of theoretically, as we're studying this and making sense of things that to some extent in the news can seem like it's sort of popping up all over the place. But how is it all related? This book kind of helps pull a lot of different strings together. So I'm very pleased to welcome both of the authors. As I said, I've got Dr. Alexander Cooley and Dr. Alexandra Dukalski with me today on the podcast. Alex. And Alex, thanks so much for joining me.
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Dr. Alexandra Dukalski
Thank you for having us. We appreciate it.
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Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
Could we start off with each of you introducing yourselves a little bit and tell us why you decided to write the book and write it together. Alex C. Maybe you want to start us off?
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Dr. Alexander Cooley
Yeah, sure. So it's a pleasure to be with you here. I am a political scientist. I study post Soviet politics and have done so for close to 30 years now. And many of my projects have been in this field of interactions between the west and the post communist region, and especially in terms of governance reforms and the transition. I'm also very interested in questions of world order. Right. What are the rules, the norms, the big kind of emerging powers that are shaping world politics. And so this was a natural fit between my interest in the post communist space Russia and world order and Alex D's previous work and ongoing work on the authoritarian public sphere, the impact of authoritarian institutions in areas like media and sport. It was a natural fit. I think one additional driver for both of us is in parallel or prior to our academic careers, we had been involved in advising and working for organizations that were engaged in parts of the world promoting things like speech and anti corruption and social mobilization. And so I think we've both also seen in parallel to our academic work the kind of spread of a lot of these authoritarian tactics and backlash against liberal advocacy. So, yeah, it just seemed like, like the time was right and we had been on several workshops during the pandemic over zoom. And, and I think at some point we, we just said, let's, let's team up and let's talk about the greater sweep of authoritarian backlash, not against just human rights, but against all these other areas of global governance where we just assumed that somehow liberal values would naturally be sustained.
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Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
Thank you for that introduction. Alex D. I have gotten to hear a bit about your previous work because you've been on the New Books Network with me before. But for listeners who maybe haven't heard that interview, could you add your intro too, please?
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Dr. Alexander Cooley
That's right.
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Dr. Alexandra Dukalski
Thanks so much. So my name is Alex Dukalski. I am at University College Dublin in Dublin, Ireland, and I research authoritarian states. My first book was about domestic authoritarian control, domestic information controls, propaganda ideology. My next book, which you and I talked about on your as one of your first thousand interviews on the New Books Network, was about authoritarian states promoting a positive image of themselves abroad abroad to, you know, to foreign audiences and squelching criticism of themselves abroad. And so kind of the, the next natural progression is to think about authoritarian states operating abroad in a changing global order. And so when the opportunity came up to team up with Alex C. To write this book, I certainly was excited to do so because I was a longtime Admirer of his work on. On these themes.
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Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
That definitely sounds like a obvious sort of progression and teaming up between the two of you. So a great foundation for our conversation, getting into then kind of where taking all of those very big ideas where it means to start a book. There's obviously a lot of places that we could go. So if you could tell us a bit about why we might look at the seeds of this authoritarian resurgence. Why might we look at the Beijing 2008 Olympics as being a place to start to figure that out?
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Dr. Alexander Cooley
Yeah, we use this example in the book, but also in our own thinking as we formulated the arguments, the contrast between the run up to the Beijing 2008 Olympics and the 2022 Winter Olympics. So 2008 were the summer Games, and for us, Beijing and its lead up was a kind of a classic case of all of These liberal actors, NGOs, international organizations, international media putting pressure on Beijing using the upcoming Olympics to advocate for reforms, whether it be improvements in human rights, better urban conditions, rights in Tibet, this basket of issues that the Chinese government was grappling with. And I think tellingly, when Beijing was awarded the bid, the messaging from the International Olympic Committee was that having the responsibility of the Games, welcoming the world, would push Beijing into a reform mode. Right. That it would be good for Beijing and China's integration into the international community. And then you saw that practically with how the global community set up the infrastructure to lobby and advocate prior to the Games. So the organizing Olympic committee heard testimony and advice from international non governmental human rights groups. We saw a massive campaign launched about Darfur and China's support for Darfur as well. The specific protests that were targeted against China's policies in Tibet. Also very open concern about whether the international press would have full access and freedom of expression, full access to the media in Beijing. All of these issues were buzzing and live in the run up to the Games. And it seemed as if this infrastructure of liberal influence would, I don't think, transform Beijing, but certainly exert enough social pressure on Beijing that the gains would appear to be a vehicle to promote liberal values.
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Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
That's definitely taking us back to a very specific moment where, yeah, as you're saying it, it's like, oh, yeah, I remember all those things kind of being there. Alex D. Is there anything else you want to add?
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Dr. Alexandra Dukalski
I think it's useful to remember that Beijing 2008 was widely framed as China's coming out party. It was very important to the government to show a positive image of itself and to present itself as a Modern, powerful, newly rising power. And so they had a lot of incentives to kind of play nice basically and deal with activists in a particular kind of way. And if we Fast forward to 2022, the 2022 Beijing Olympics, which were the winter variety, we saw quite a few things change between those two mega events.
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Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
Yeah, that's where I'd love to go next. Can you tell us more about that comparison and what sort of we can see by putting them next to each other about these questions of authoritarian resurgence?
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Dr. Alexandra Dukalski
Yeah, absolutely. So the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the aftermath of it are often described as a shock to the system for the Chinese propaganda apparatus and the Chinese foreign affairs apparatus. If you recall, you know, the, the Tibet, the activism around Tibet and the Olympic torch relay that went around the world eventually ending, ending in Beijing. Of course, Beijing felt that it lost control of the global narrative basically that it wasn't able to shape the conversation in the way that it wanted to. And it was a wake up call for them that more needed to be done to influence international conversations about China and about Chinese politics. And so what you saw after that is a major focus on international messaging and international message control by the party. So we often think about China's new assertiveness as bound up with Xi Jinping and a lot of it is. But this predates Xi Jinping actually and has some roots in the lessons learned from, from the Beijing Olympics. So one's to control the narrative to. And invest. To invest serious money and resources into controlling the narrative. So the party has invested money in its foreign television stations, in its news wires, it's hired lots of Western public relations firms to promote its image and to advance its messaging to sideline critics and so on. So we come to the 2022 Olympics and what we see is that human rights are largely downplayed. In the 2022 Winter Olympics. There is an effort to lead a boycott of the Olympics from. It's a diplomatic boycott led by the United States. A handful of other countries are involved. But really it, the activism, human rights activism around 2022 doesn't reach the levels of 2008. You know, some activist groups try to engage in, in boycotts or pressure companies that are sponsoring the Beijing 2020 basically because at this time China is repressing its Uyghur ethnic minority. The well known story now of re education camps for this particular group is, is now a global story. So there are some groups that are trying to pressure Beijing, but Beijing basically just shuts them out and they don't have Those activist groups don't have a voice inside the Olympic Committee to advance their, their narrative. So the boycott basically doesn't catch on at all. One thing we do in the book is we do a very rough comparison of global media attention to human rights and the Olympics, comparing 2008 to 2022 and the drop off is pretty remarkable that by 2022, far fewer newspapers and media sites in kind of the global conversation are talking about human rights and, and China as it pertains to the 2022 Olympics. So we draw from this lesson that China, yes, is more powerful, but also that it's learned to message itself better, to control criticism and to exert leverage on companies or other actors that might be considering boycotts.
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Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
Yeah, that's a very useful comparison. Alex C. Was there anything you wanted to add?
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Dr. Alexander Cooley
No, I think Alex D. Pretty much covered it.
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Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
Yeah, it definitely gives us a really good introduction into kind of what you both are looking at and analyzing. But of course, the book isn't just about the Olympics hosted in China. It's looking at China, but many other countries as well. So before we get into some other sort of examples of this, could you maybe outline the theory of authoritarian snapback that you develop in the book?
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Dr. Alexander Cooley
Yeah, certainly. So I'll begin by just a small detour. In the late 1990s, an extremely well written and well argued book was published called Activists Beyond Borders by Katherine Sikink and Margaret Keck. And it became the defining work on a theory of advocacy. How was it that NGOs and their allies could take on and spotlight and shame and promote change in reluctant authoritarian states? And their operational theory was one of the boomerang effect. And this was a theory of how liberal norms were promoted even when a state was initially reluctant or sought to repress or hide its actions. Right. And it points to how the infrastructure of the international system, by gaining allies in international media, powerful state, international organizations could exert leverage back on the target state. In essence, the theory wasn't wrong. Right. But what we see now 20 and 30 years later is a whole playbook of how to actually block, stop and push back against these kinds of transnational liberal tactics. And so our theory called authoritarian snapback, identifies five stages that we see across authoritarian states and the liberal states of how. And a real set of commonalities of how they go about taking on these unwanted actors. Right. The first stage is to stigmatize the actor to say that no, they're not actually a committed civic organization or ngo. Stigmatize them usually as an alien or a foreign actor to even designate them as a foreign agent, right, as Russia's 2012 law did, to make them not part of the body politic. The second stage after stigmatization is to shield, to actually censor control questions. The kinds of messages that the actor is bringing, say about human rights violations or about state led corruption that's being engaged in. And this has become increasingly more sophisticated as authoritarian governments have developed more effective tools for controlling the information space. So first stigmatizing, then shielding, then the third stage is what we call reframing the rules of engagement. And this is really for us one of the really critical steps that perhaps doesn't get noticed as much as it should, that when you have a liberal actor or any kind of actor in an authoritarian state, be it a private company, a university, an ngo, a journalist, and they face the first kind of wave of restrictions, saying, you know, we don't want you covering this. This is not a proper, appropriate domain to teach a class. We don't want coverage of this particular issue. At that point, the actor has a choice, right? They can say, they can insist and say, no, we want full autonomy. They can withdraw or they can stay under these reframed rules of engagement. And usually they stay with these sort of narrowed scopes. This is incredibly important because the argument that used to be made about engagement with authoritarian states was through engagement, authoritarian states start to appreciate and get socialized into liberal values. And at this step we see the opposite or the inverse happening. We see the liberal actor changing its behavior to comply with the authoritarian state. Then steps four and five are projecting control and influence outward, which means the authoritarian state becomes more aggressive transnationally. It uses its market power and leverage to set new rules for this engagement. It actually projects its influence using transnational actors, whether it's technologies, security services, its own kind of paid agents. And then the fifth and final stage is what we call dictating the agenda, also the title of the book. And we can think about this as the kind of mirror end state of liberal socialization. And this is when the domain itself, the governance of the domain itself is now proceeding along the preferences and image of the authoritarian state. So for instance, let's take the example of China in Hollywood movies, right? It's been effectively 30 years since a main Hollywood movie has cast a Chinese character or an antagonist or government antagonist or policy in a negative light. Whereas, you know, they, they cast Russians all the time, right? That's okay. Or sort of, you know, rogue terrorist organizations. And that's because Chinese influence in terms of its consumer power, its censorship, its ability to exert pressure on the financing and dissemination of these films is very high. That that kind of content isn't even conceived of. Now we stress to add that there aren't a lot of domains in which full on dictating the agenda is happening right? Just like there aren't actually a lot of domains where you had full blown liberal socialization. A lot of this was authoritarian governments going through the pretense that they were complying with human rights or press freedoms or election monitorings. But in any case, that would be the ideal state end state for authoritarians, that the world is actually viewing a particular issue or domain through their lens and regime self image the holidays have.
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Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
Very helpful explanation of the different stages there. Alex D. Was there anything you wanted to add?
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Dr. Alexandra Dukalski
No, I would say another thing we do in the book is we kind of situate this model in a time in which authoritarian states have renewed power globally. So we present some empirical evidence to suggest that relative to the 1990s, when liberal democracies were dominant globally, politically, economically, socially, today, that's not the case as much that authoritarian states not only deploy this playbook, but also they have increased power, opportunities and leverage to be able to actualize the steps that we describe. So it's one of a playbook that has emerged through learning from previous lessons and also learning from one another, but also is facilitated by renewed underlying power of authoritarian states.
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Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
Yeah, I want to talk about some of these empirical investigations of this theory as you helpfully situated us there in terms of time. You also look at certain aspects of kind of the global system to understand what's going on within this period. So I was curious as to kind of which bits were chosen and why. So obviously sport is one of them. We've already talked about it a little bit. The other ones that are emphasized are media, consumer activism, and higher education. Why those areas? To look at the theory in practice.
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Dr. Alexander Cooley
There is a growing literature, both scholarly and in terms of policy reports, on the backlash, global backlash against human rights, against election observers, and in general, the kind of transformation of official bodies like the UN Human Rights Council. Right. And so we do review some of that literature and we do draw upon it. We thought it would be interesting to investigate some domains of global social life that we don't normally think about as being political, and that because we have grown up and worked in the west, we assume these areas globally are just natural liberal values, conveyor belts. Right. And so we chose global media because we have assumed for several decades that news organizations like cnn, BBC, wire services like Reuters or the ap, that these are somehow the globe, the gold standards of global news coverage. Right. And that other emerging outlets are sort of rifting off of them or that can't really sort of challenge them. Same thing with transnational higher education. We assume that Western universities are models, paragons of academic freedom and independent research. And interestingly enough, they all went through, not all, but Many of them went through this phase of going global in the 2000s, where they intentionally created branch campuses in authoritarian settings with clusters in China, in Singapore, in the Arabian Gulf, as part of their globalization strategy. And the assumption there was that they would bring their brand, their research and educational and pedagogical practices. Right. And that would be fused with authoritarian hosts and financing and that somehow. Right. The liberal values, the university brand would endure unscathed. And that turned out to be quite naive and also very ignorant of the kinds of power relationships and political economy of higher education. And consumer boycotts is another one of these areas where, you know, certainly when I was in college and graduate school in the 1990s, I remember the campaign against Nike, the consumer campaign, where the anti sweatshop labor that was putting a spotlight on these horrific labor practices that were used by Nike subcontractors across Southeast Asia, including countries like Indonesia and Vietnam. This was something that students were very much involved in and that seemed to be quite effective. At some point, Nike's revenue plummeted, it halved. And this is regarded as a successful campaign. Also involved in things like the cotton campaign against Uzbekistan, creating these classic consumer advocacy campaigns. But what's the assumption here? That they're based on the power of the Western consumer. And what fascinated Alex and I was when we started seeing these boycott campaigns driven by authoritarians, mostly China, leveraging their newly found consumer power against Western companies and their practices. Right. So in each of these domains, we don't normally think of them as geopolitical or as pertaining to international relations. We sort of assume that the kind of dominance of Western markets and ideas would always sustain these in a certain way. And we're seeing changes that aligns, I think, with the general arguments of the book across each of these four.
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Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
Those are some pretty compelling reasons to look at these domains. Alex, D. Anything you want to add before we get into them?
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Dr. Alexandra Dukalski
No, I think that's well said.
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Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
Let's get into them then. So I think we'll go to media first. What are some of the ways that authoritarian states use and influence the media to get their messages out? Obviously this is something we've talked about already with some examples, but what sorts of things do we see across different countries rather than just looking, for example, at China?
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Dr. Alexandra Dukalski
Yeah, that's right. So I think the first thing to note is that in terms of the global media, what you see is newspapers, television stations, websites, you know, generally news outlets from liberal democracies are having financial difficulties. This is kind of a longer term issue about the changing Business model of journalism. A major casualty of that crisis has been the position of the foreign correspondent. So it used to be that newspapers, even newspapers of second tier cities, you know, from the west, would have foreign correspondents based abroad, permanently reporting on international affairs. With the decrease in journalism jobs and funding available to journalistic outlets in the west, those positions are disappearing rapidly. And this is important because those of us who want to know about the world, we rely on foreign correspondence to tell us about it. These are people who develop the skills and expertise to be able to explain the politics and society of a country or city or a region to the rest of us who don't have the time, resources or expertise to go there. What happens when these people go away is you have an information void. And what we argue is that authoritarian states are increasingly filling that void with their own content. And they're doing it in a couple ways. One is investment in good old fashioned state propaganda and just external facing state media that is branded as such. So you can think about in China, China sent China global television. With Russia, you can think about rt. Saudi Arabia has, has its, its own entities, even kind of newly authoritarian or semi authoritarian states like Turkey now have, you know, entities like TRT World. And what these entities do is they present the world and they present global affairs to be consistent with the viewpoints of their authoritarian sponsors. Controversial issues like human rights abuses or corruption in those countries are not discussed on these channels. And the role in the world of these countries is presented positively. Now there are different, you know, details about each one of these kinds of networks and outlets. But the general thing that ties them together, you know, to come into your question, is that they present the world and they present a particular image of their country to their view to viewers abroad. So what we did for the book is we tried to gather some empirical data on this phenomenon. So we started with China and Russia and, and looked for physical offices of these entities. In China's case CGTN and Xinhua, and in Russia's case RT and tos, which is their, their wire service. And we were able to find In China nearly 200 such offices, like physical offices, in which there was a person there, you know, tasked with reporting the news for this entity. And so you see kind of blanket global coverage. And part of the reason that this kind of global coverage can occur for an outlet like CGTAN or Xinhua is that they're okay to take a financial loss if needs be because it's doing work for the state, a for profit journalistic entity. From the west basically can't do that. So they would have to make cuts. So that's one way in which authoritarian states are changing the information landscape is explicit state media. Another is this phenomenon of content sharing agreements. So what we saw is that with China and Russia, which we gather empirical data on for the book, we see a major uptick in state media. Media entities from those states agreeing to content sharing arrangements with foreign newspapers and websites. Okay, so this is basically the foreign news outlet running stories or photographs or content from Xinhua or Tass in the Russian case. Okay, and why is this important? Well, if you open your, you know, national newspaper or website and you read the story about China, you might not in the, you know, in the, in the bylaw and you might not know what Xinhua is, you know, and so articles and content that is explicitly state propaganda overseen by the Chinese Communist Party Department of Propaganda is running in your local newspaper or website potentially. And so it kind of launders the viewpoints of the authoritarian state into media around the world. Now again, we don't want to be overly alarmist about this. I mean, a lot of, of websites and newspapers in the west basically don't have Xinhua as a wire service. But a lot of newspapers and websites in the developing world do have these kinds of content sharing agreements because they're cheaper. Basically if you want news from abroad, you can either subscribe to an organization like Reuters, afp, Associated Press, but those are quite expensive. So a cheaper option is to go for Xinhua or Tass, the Russian equivalent. And so this gets your news outlet global coverage for a cheaper price, but it comes at the cost of basically running state propaganda. In your news feed.
- [35:29]
Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
That's a very interesting example because as you said, it's not quite as blatant as like a news report that says this is from the Chinese government. Right. It's more insidious than that and has all these economic incentives built in as well.
- [35:42]
Dr. Alexandra Dukalski
And we were able to gather, so we tried to gather all instances of these agreements globally. And in the Chinese case there were about 300 that we were able to track down and document. So 300 content sharing agreements between a Chinese state media entity and a news entity abroad and about 100 in the Russian case. And these are really only the agreements that are publicly available and above board. You know, so these don't include agreements that are private agreements that are potentially subject to non disclosure agreements, information, you know, agreements that are covert even. So this is really just the tip of the iceberg I would say that.
- [36:29]
Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
Is definitely helpful to understand what we have in terms of scale. But of course, if we're talking about what's in the media, there's also what's not there. So, right, what you've just told us, there is the things that. How information that authoritarian states want out there gets out there. But what about silencing things that authoritarian states don't want to be part of the media discourse? Can you tell us about the data set that you've collected there and what that tells us?
- [36:54]
Dr. Alexander Cooley
Yeah, I'll weigh in on this.
- [36:56]
Dr. Alexandra Dukalski
So.
- [36:58]
Dr. Alexander Cooley
Yes, the other empirical research that we conduct in that chapter is we assemble a data set of authoritarian state administrative actions taken against foreign journalists. The foreign correspondence that Alex D. Was talking about that are so important to covering stories abroad. And there are many excellent organizations that have documented coercion against journalists, threats, physical assaults, this kind of intimidation, committee to protect journalists, for instance. We wanted to actually look at something that does not grab the headlines, but we feel is important to this process we outline, of dictating the agenda. And that is how governments use seemingly innocuous technocratic and bureaucratic means. Right. To deny journalist access. Right. So things like visa denials. Right. Denials of accreditation, not allowing them back into the country. Right. These sort of travel restrictions. And what we find is over the last 25 years, over a thousand instances of these. And yes, China is one of the violators. Right. But Russia and Azerbaijan are there, as is Myanmar, as is Turkey. And even smaller authoritarian countries use the same playbook and have grown increasingly assertive about this. And so one of the takeaway messages, this isn't just dependent on authoritarian regime type. This really is a dissemination of a set of practices where rather than overtly sort of censor, and there is a lot of censorship that goes on, you quietly pull the access and restrict what foreign journalists can cover as a way of shaping that environment. Then the kinds of stories that are politically sensitive that you were alluding to, Miranda, don't get covered.
- [39:24]
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- [39:54]
Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
Yeah, again, about the sort of Access institutional backend side of things, very much having an impact. So thank you both for helping us understand the pieces that influence the media side of things. The next domain I'd like to pick up is the consumer activism aspect. The boycotts we were talking about earlier, because I think it was, Alex C. You were telling us about how this is something you've seen transform from being used by Western consumers to authoritarian ones. Is there anything further we should understand about kind of how and why that transformation has been possible?
- [40:28]
Dr. Alexandra Dukalski
Yeah. So Alex C. Mentioned, you know, these consumer boycotts in the 1990s around the use of sweatshops in athletic apparel. And the. Even these boycotts drew on a larger tradition of using Western consumer power to advance social causes through boycotts and boycotts, you know, supporting companies that you. You think are ethical and boycotted ones you think are unethical. And the idea was to change policies surrounding human rights standards far away from where you are through your checkbook, basically. And that worked. I mean, it's not. We're not saying that that didn't work. It met with. With quite a lot of success, and in particular, the Nike boycott was quite successful. But what we do is we contrast that with what we saw in China from 2017 to 2021, and to some extent continuing even. Even until today. And that is a counter boycott, effectively, of Western companies and watchdog groups that found that there was forced labor, credible allegations of forced labor in the Xinjiang cotton industry. Now, your listeners will likely be familiar with the campaign of repression that China has wrought on its Uyghur ethnic minority group in the western region of Xinjiang, including re re education camps starting in around 2017 that became a global news story. What some listeners might be less familiar with is that this campaign of repression also had a forced labor element to it in which the party and the Chinese government would mobilize coercively Uyghurs to work in either cotton harvesting in Xinjiang, which is a huge. I mean, it's about 20% of the world's cotton comes from Xinjiang. So we're talking, you know, a massive scale. So either working in cotton harvesting or working in textile mills making clothing.
- [42:48]
Dr. Alexander Cooley
Okay.
- [42:50]
Dr. Alexandra Dukalski
And so cotton, you know, activists who verify and watched our groups that verify cotton sourcing, you know, we're starting to have some credible evidence of forced labor in the cotton supply chain as it pertains to Xinjiang in the late 2000 teens, early 2000s. And so some groups, like the Better Cotton Initiative, which is a group that has some kind of standards for sustainable and appropriate Usage of cotton. And companies, you know, ex consumer facing companies like H M became embroiled in, in a boycott after they said that they wouldn't source cotton from Xinjiang anymore. Okay, The Better Cotton Initiative said it couldn't verify that. It's, you know, it couldn't, basically couldn't do its work anymore in Xinjiang. So it wasn't going to try and verify this way. H and M said it was going to no longer source cotton from Xinjiang. And this, these announcements were made in mid to late 2020. Well, six months later in March 2021, these statements were kind of resurrected after having passed for about six months without much notice. They were resurrected by the social media account of the Communist Youth League and basically led and cheer led a massive national boycott of H M and other brands. There were several other brands who had, who had made comments on this because they were allegedly discriminating against Xinjiang cotton. They were quote, unquote hurting the feelings of the Chinese people. They were disrespecting China as a nation and that they were just in China to, to make money, you know, and if they were going to stay and sell things in China, they needed to play by China's rules after all. So a massive boycott of these entities and it had all the hallmarks of the authoritarian snapback model that, that Alex C described earlier. You know, information was shielded from the Chinese public about human rights abuses in Xinjiang. Activists and groups that verified cotton forced labor in the cotton industry were, were smeared as, you know, anti China forces or hostile forces or the like. Engagement was reframed. In other words, if you want to do things and sell your business, sell your wares in China, you need to play by our rules, even if you don't agree with those rules. Control was projected outwards. I mean H M was, was effectively used as an example to other companies. You know, it was taken off of China's mapping software so that if you were somebody who wanted to go buy an H and M, you know, a pair of jeans or something, and you wanted to find your nearest H and M store in China, you couldn't because the mapping software wouldn't take you there. So within six months of this boycott, China went from H&M's fourth largest consumer market to outside its top 10. It was effectively frozen out. And it, both the Better Cotton Initiative and H and M have basically been silenced since then. I mean they haven't really spoken much about this at all. And so this was a clear kind of signal to other companies that you need to use cotton from this region and not make noise about it, or else you're going to be frozen out from the Chinese market. What becomes even more interesting is that the association of Cotton Producers in China, which is a state backed body, started to produce a new set of standards for Xinjiang for, for sustainable cotton. That of course didn't mention anything about forced labor and had Xinjiang cotton as compliant with those new standards. And so here's an effort to even go further than just punishing companies that won't use your cotton or your other products, but actually to reshape the kind of global norm around what counts as ethically sustainable and ethically acceptable cotton. And so we argue that this new mode of consumer boycotts, cheerlead and abetted by governments, very often means that it's harder, not impossible, but harder for these kinds of. For Western based boycotts and consumer activism to have an effect in changing human rights and that authoritarian states are able and willing to punch back basically and to do real harm to companies invested in that market because of their growing economic power and leverage.
- [47:47]
Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
Yeah, that's a pretty clear example of really making it very clear that the government isn't happy necessarily about what's happening. Alex C. Was there anything you wanted to add?
- [47:57]
Dr. Alexander Cooley
No. No.
- [47:59]
Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
All right, let's move then on to higher education. When we mentioned it earlier, some of the examples given, or at least mentioned that there were a bunch in China, some in Singapore, some in the Arabian Gulf, also ones like Central European universities. So can we talk maybe about those sorts of places as sites of authoritarian snapback?
- [48:18]
Dr. Alexander Cooley
Yeah, absolutely. And you know, CEU I think, offers a lot of illustrations and also lessons for how authoritarian snapback tactics and the playbook can also be used in other countries in the last. So just in brief for your listeners, Central European University was established, was founded in Hungary in the immediate post Cold war era in 1992, funded primarily by George Soros, the entrepreneur and philanthropist. With the explicit mission of establishing a Western style university that would be focused on the social sciences, the promotion of market economics and civil society and democratic values. In Hungary, Soros and open societies invested hundreds of millions of dollars. The university within just a few years rocketed into elite status. It created a network of graduates not only from Hungary, but students from all of the post communist countries coming to study there, a significant alumni network and by all metrics, a success story of placing students in all sorts of fields and setting them on the road to professional development. Following the financial crisis of 2008, Prime Minister Viktor Orban is elect re elected in 2010. Orban's an interesting figure because we know him now as this kind of standard bearer of the liberal playbook. But Orban himself had been affiliated with open society, so he understood the kind of liberal values playbook. The migration crisis of the 2000 and tens gives Orban an opening not only as an actor in the European Union, but also to domestically consolidate his power against Central European Union. This is when Orban comes out very publicly, says that Hungary will not accept migrants, will not be part of an EU agreement, it will not settle, you know, Syrian and other refugees. And this gets him a lot of domestic support. But it also offers the initial cudgel to start putting restrictions on ceu. So this is part of the stigmatization phase, right? So Orban draws attention that somehow CEU is aiding migrants through clinics and courses of study. He also stigmatizes the gender studies program at ceu. And so these two kinds of vulnerable communities, he basically bans their study and their curricular engagement. Then the official state apparatus starts to also target professors. There are kind of expose about the research and political interest of individual CU faculty that are supposedly anti family, pro globalist. And then you also see the use of accreditation means as a way to stop its activities. So the Hungarian parliament passes a law because the CE was accredited in New York State, saying only Hungarian accredited institutions can issue degrees. The point of all this is that in 2018, CEU is forced out of Hungary. And it's forced out of Hungary. It goes into exile in Vienna. And never mind that this was just economically, right, a source of, you know, jobs, development, intellectual activity, a real presence in the heart of Budapest. All of this goes out the window. It's expelled. European Court of Justice finding that had been unlawfully expelled is a few years late to really save the ceu. And instructively the American ambassador at the time, who was an ally of then sort of President Trump, doesn't really put up much opposition. He doesn't bring the full force of the United States to sort of prevent this from happening. So now what you see is that the CEU expulsion now serves for some as a model of how to go about bringing higher education institutions to heel, especially those that are perceived as too liberal, anti the agenda of certain right wing parties and values. And that this is really the playbook that has now been disseminated from Orban into some other areas of the world, including being part of a model for the Project 2025 plan to remake American political life and society. So you see this diffusion of the kind of snapback model across the post communist sphere, but now into what would normally regard it as the liberal west as well.
- [54:36]
Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
And we are getting back to these questions of kind of who's changing who and what's happening there. And of course we started all of this by looking at sport with the Olympics. But is there anything further we want to discuss if we think about global sport in terms of organizations like the NBA or FIFA?
- [54:53]
Dr. Alexandra Dukalski
Yeah. So this chapter was somewhat discouraging to write because we're both sports fans and so we're taking something that's supposed to be entertaining and fun and it still is. But we're also seeing a lot of authoritarian investments and influence over many of the world's professional associations and leagues. So listeners will probably be familiar with the concept of sports washing. This is basically the idea that an authoritarian state will hold a mega event like the Olympics or the World cup in order, yes, to showcase itself as a however it wants, but also to distract from or hide human rights abuses or corruption or other types of repression. And that certainly happens, that is part of the motivation for hosting these kinds of big events. But what we found as we dug deeper and thought about it more is that that's kind of like the first wave of sports washing and we're now in something else. And that is an ecosystem in which sports leagues, sports federations, sports leagues, sports teams and clubs, and indeed individual athletes, agents and their sponsors are all enmeshed in a financial ecosystem that is increasingly being funded by authoritarian funding sources. Most prominently in, in recent years has been the Saudi Public Investment Fund. But also major investments from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar have seen the economics of major sports leagues, including football or soccer leagues in Europe and the United Kingdom, transformed. So the authoritarian involvement in these kinds of leagues and clubs is now effectively normalized. You sit down to watch A Manchester City vs Newcastle United Football game on a Sunday afternoon and you're watching a one team owned by the Saudi Public Investment Fund and another team owned by Abu Dhabi play each other. And you know, with all the sponsorships and tie up financial tie ups that that entails. And activists initially objected to these kinds of arrangements and still sometimes do. But the authoritarian sponsors have the finances and the wherewithal to basically wait out the activists. And so what we see now is that authoritarian financing of these leagues and clubs is normalized. It's taken as a given in the sporting landscape. Now why is this important? It's important because sports has often been used and athletes have often used their platforms to advance their political causes. And very often these are causes around equality, often racial equality, but also human rights as it pertains to the hosts or the sponsors of those kinds of leagues or competitions. And what we're seeing is that there's an increasingly obvious tension between authoritarian financing of these sporting realms and political speech and activism surrounding the politics and policies of the host states or of the sponsors. An example of this, of course, a very famous example occurred in 2022 at the Qatar World cup in which some European football teams were going to wear an armband to signal their support for LGBTQ rights, particularly as the host state, Qatar, represses those quite, quite strictly. And eventually, what you saw after a long process is on the eve of the tournament, FIFA, the organizing entity of the World cup, notified the clubs involved, the countries involved, that if they wore the armband that they would be penalized with yellow cards on, on the, on the actual pitch. So there would be a penalty in the actual sporting competition for this kind of actors. Not just a financial, nominal financial penalty that the clubs could, could pay and be fine with, but an actual competitive penalty. And so most of the clubs backed out, you know, of wearing the armband because they didn't want to be penalized. And so here you saw a sporting federation basically take the side of its authoritarian sponsor in regulating, regulating free, free speech and, and regulating political activism bolstered by the platform of sports. It's not just soccer or football that we see this. We see increasingly speech restrictions in, across a number of domains. Formula one racing, golf in the United States has been a major issue. We saw a major free speech controversy with the National Basketball association in the United States and China after an episode in which an executive for an NBA team tweeted his support for the pro democracy movement in Hong Kong, China. Returning to our previous conversation, facilitated or, or cheerlead a boycott of the National Basketball association in China, which is a huge market for, for this particular sport that cost the NBA an estimated US$400 million. And so we're seeing that authoritarian financing across a range of sporting domains, including ones you don't think about too much or many listeners may not think about too much, like esports, is having impacts on speech and activism that we're only now coming to sort of appreciate and understand.
- [61:00]
Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
So aside then from highlighting these aspects of the global domain that maybe aren't as talked about, are there any other kind of key things that you're hoping that readers take away from this book or anything we haven't mentioned yet you want to make sure we throw in? As a final question, I mean, I.
- [61:14]
Dr. Alexander Cooley
Think the, the takeaway as we reflect on what's happening in the world is that politics across all aspects of social and international life and globe, global governance is becoming contested, right? There is no natural refuge, there is no single technology that's going to promote democracy and decentralization. Not the Internet in the year 2000, not artificial intelligence. And so part of this is a kind of sober assessment that if you want to promote and sustain values like freedom of expression, autonomy and independence, that, you know, empirically based decision making, that these are all areas and issue areas that need to be messaged, they need to be campaigned for, they need to be fought for, frankly. And there is no kind of going back to when kind of liberal values in all these domains was just the background condition, right, where this was all sort of naturally happened. And in some ways this makes politics a lot more interesting and it makes politics a lot more transnationally integrated that the kinds of issues that you see at the local level, the substate level, the national level, the regional level, the global level, you start seeing the connections now amongst a lot of different actors on both sides or other sides of a lot of these issues and domains. So I think, you know, for us, one takeaway is politics is contested across the board. And rather than look at sort of shortcuts, we really need to reflect upon if there's things that we believe in, how do we more effectively message those and politically maneuver for those.
- [63:23]
Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
I think that's a very good place to conclude our discussion about the book, leaving me to just ask more for my own curiosity what each of you might be working on next, whether or not it's something together or anything related to what we've discussed. Do either of you have anything on the horizon you want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [63:40]
Dr. Alexandra Dukalski
Well, we have a couple spin off and follow up projects together on these dynamics of transnational authoritarianism and in particular applying some of the insights that we generate to, to understand how political changes in the United States might be accelerating some of the dynamics that we describe. So our book went to press in November of 2024 and of course that was the, the month that Trump was elected to his second term. And the Trump approach to foreign affairs has been one which it's been quite different from its predecessor in many respects, but it foregrounds illiberal, in many ways, foregrounds illiberal engagement in the world. And we're trying to unpack in a follow up paper how some of those measures that you've seen in the headlines in the US Exacerbate some of the dynamics we identify in the book.
- [64:51]
Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
Well, that certainly sounds interesting. I can imagine, obviously, with a project of this scale and sort of ambition, that there's all sorts of spin off things that kind of didn't quite make it into the book, but it sounds like they're going to be coming out in other ways. Alex, see anything else you want to mention?
- [65:06]
Dr. Alexander Cooley
No. I feel like every day we kind of message each other with, oh, this is happening, and this is happening. Oh, the World cup draw is at the Kennedy center next week in Washington. So we're really engaged in these issues. And Alex is right. In terms of Trump 2.0, I think, is initiating some fundamental rethinking of a lot of the assumptions we had about global governance and international relations. So these kinds of reconfigurations of these transnational networks is something I think that we're both jointly and individually looking at.
- [65:48]
Podcast Host (Miranda Melcher)
Well, if any listeners want to get into more of this sort of discussion, they can, of course, read the book we've been talking about titled Dictating the Agenda, the Authoritarian Resurgence in World Politics, published by Oxford University Press in 2025. Alex. Alex, thank you both so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [66:06]
Dr. Alexandra Dukalski
Thank you so much, Miranda. We appreciate it.
- [66:08]
Dr. Alexander Cooley
Yeah, thanks very much, Miranda.