The commodities boom of the 2000s saw the prices of oil, rubber, tin, lead, copper and other industrial minerals rise steadily. This model of economic growth helped support leftist pink-tide governments in Latin America as well as governments all over Southeast Asia. However, with the slowdown in Chinese economic growth and the drop in commodity prices in 2014, the model began to unravel. This coincided with popular challenges to reigning governments, from Malaysia to Brazil. In some cases, protests and social movements were met with increasing repression and a relinquishing of previous democratic gains. What do changing global and regional political economies tell us about resurgent authoritarianism in these two seemingly unconnected regions?

Dan Slater is Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, specializing in the politics and history of enduring dictatorships and emerging democracies, with a regional focus on Southeast Asia. His book examining how divergent historical patterns of contentious politics have shaped variation in state power and authoritarian durability in seven Southeast Asian countries, entitled Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia, was published in the Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics series in 2010. He is also a co-editor of Southeast Asia in Political Science: Theory, Region, and Qualitative Analysis (Stanford University Press, 2008), which assesses the contributions of Southeast Asian political studies to theoretical knowledge in comparative politics.

Julia Buxton is British Academy Global Professor at the University of Manchester. Her research, teaching and supervision interests focus on illicit drug markets and the impact of counter narcotics policies on development, gender equality and security. She has experience of applied and practice focused research in intersecting areas of policy design and evaluation, including conflict, rights based and gender sensitive processes. She has geographical expertise on Latin America and is a specialist on Venezuela. Her book, The Failure of Political Reform in Venezuela, offers a fresh perspective on the nature of democratic development in Venezuela. She has published in Third World Quarterly, New Left Review, NACLA, and The Journal of Diplomacy and International Relations, among others.

Alfredo Saad-Filho is Professor of Political Economy and International Development in the Department of International Development at King’s College London. His academic publications include nine authored or edited books, 70 journal articles and 50 book chapters, as well as 30 reports and other contributions for the United Nations and other international agencies (UNCTAD, UNDP, UN-ESCWA, and UN-DESA). His work has been published in 15 languages and presented over 200 academic events in 30 countries. He is currently researching the political economy of Brazil, especially the transitions from import-substituting industrialization to neoliberalism, and from military dictatorship to democracy. He is also investigating the recent trajectory of Brazil, and the achievements and limitations of the administrations led by the PT and by President Jair Bolsonaro.

Barbara Geddes is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Political Science at UCLA. She works on democratization, authoritarian transitions, and political development with a focus on Latin American politics. Her early work investigated bureaucratic reform and corruption in Brazil, the politics of economic policy making in Latin America, and political bargaining over institutional choice. Her most recent book is How Dictatorships Work: Power, Personalization, and Collapse (with Joseph Wright and Erica Frantz), 2018.

Register here: https://ucla.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUlfuuppj0oHdVWCOmbQEQAL6LBbI1sGINM

This is our fourth panel in the series on “The Political Economy of Rising Authoritarianism”. The panels provide analytical rigor and historical context rooted in the tradition of political economy to understand contemporary problems of rising authoritarianism and democratic backsliding in a global context.