A Writing Review for 2023
Overviewing publication output for the past year and some planned work to come.
Précis/TL;DR: a full roundup of articles published this year from me. Go ahead and skim as desired.
A very Happy New Year and start to the Year of Our Lord 2024 for those receiving this newsletter. This iteration of Political Order(s) is not an essay, but simply a collection of all the work that I have written in academic, analytical, and other public venues this past year. A sort of stock-taking exercise, as much for me as for those who may find something here worth reading.
The below list is grouped thematically, rather than chronologically. It is long (although easily skimmable) and may show up in your email in truncated form. Just click the top banner to link to the full post if that happens to you. We can divide the list into three sections: On Russia, Ukraine, Foreign Policy, and the War; on Illiberalism, Ideology, and Modern Discontents; and this year’s Substack Essays. I then conclude with a list of ongoing projects that hopefully all come out this year, which may be of interest.
On Russia, Ukraine, Foreign Policy, and the War
RUSSIAN MILITARY LOGISTICS IN THE UKRAINE WAR: RECENT REFORMS AND WARTIME OPERATIONS
This one is a coauthored CNA report, sponsored by U.S. European Command, on the Russian military logistics system (the “MTO” system), its history, and some preliminary findings about its performance in the first year of the Russo-Ukrainian War. Although it gets technical, it is in fact the most detailed and exhaustive analysis of Russian logistics since the war began - we’re very proud of it, even with inevitable insufficiencies. We find that: “the Russian logistics and combat service support system was in a state of continuous adaptation, dealing with a wide range of organizational, capacity, and technical challenges...[and that] despite highly publicized failures of the system during the initial phases of the war, Russian logistics has proven to be remarkably adaptive. Much of the blame for Russian MTO performance problems during the initial phases of the campaign can be attributed to the sheer complexity and scale of the initial campaign plan, which involved a multi-axis advance across multiple fronts that severely taxed the ability of Russian logistics to keep pace and at times overwhelmed them. As a result, Russian combat units found themselves facing severe shortages of food, fuel, ammunition, and other resources and often had to forage for supplies. Over time, however, Russian MTO commanders made several adjustments to the logistics distribution system, including streamlining supply chains and relocating depots closer to the front. As a result, delivery of resources steadily improved, especially after Russian forces were withdrawn from Kyiv and reconcentrated in the Donbas, which greatly simplified logistics support.”
PUBLIC POLITICS IN THE WARTIME RUSSIAN DICTATORSHIP
This piece of public-facing analysis, published at the national security essay outlet War on the Rocks, was my first article out in January 2023. It has held up quite well, and some of the key points of interest - the important role of the Kremlin-critical but hawkish “war correspondents” and the unique position of Evgeniy Prigozhin as a “political-military baron” were systematically reinforced by events as the year went on. The change from the short period of complete political closure right at the start of the war was very clear: “Wartime Russian politics thus far has been characterized by a surprising degree of criticism from the hawkish flank, the development of political-military barons whose relations to the supreme ruler are qualitatively new, and the resilience of a subservient section of political elites who have continued to work creatively towards the regime’s illiberal goals while navigating what it means to be ‘patriotic’ and loyal.”
PUTIN’S WARTIME DICTATORSHIP ENTERS A NEW YEAR
This is the companion to the “Public Politics” article above, published most recently in the waning days of December 2023 at The National Interest. Here I provide an overall view of how we should think about Russia as a political regime today, and how it has changed (or remained the same), since before the war. I characterize Russia in the following way: “The contemporary wartime Russian regime is a personalist dictatorship in a state of exception under the sole, autocratic rule of President Vladimir Putin. Yet, this political regime retains the formal trappings and internal political institutions of what scholars often term “electoral authoritarianism,” complete with the standard basket of unfree elections, a loyalist parliament, and a compliant but functioning judicial system... Furthermore, the Russian state has undertaken a de jure process of officially crystallizing and instantiating a long-developing ideology of illiberalism. Russian illiberalism can be understood as a legitimating ideational matrix of anti-Westernism, cultural conservatism, social traditionalism, and (state-) civilizationism.”
ELITE POLITICAL CULTURE AND ILLIBERALISM IN WARTIME RUSSIA
The above piece, as well as this one from the summer of this year, assert that ideological changes have been an important component of modern Russia’s changing wartime politics. This short discussion, published at the more academic Russian Analytical Digest, uses the case of Russia’s elite pundit-expert rhetoric to show how ideology now increasingly permeates much of the country’s domestic public debates. I note that: “recent developments suggest an increasingly deep, pervasive, and comprehensive use of illiberal rhetoric and framings by Russian elites. Policy discussions, which could once be held in a neutral or technocratic register, are increasingly suffused with illiberal legitimating and justifying language, which suggests the further integration of illiberal ideology into the worldviews of a broader cohort of Russian public figures, intellectuals, and loyalist professionals.”
REVIEW: THE PUTIN PREDICAMENT. PROBLEMS OF LEGITIMACY AND SUCCESSION IN RUSSIA
This is a short book review for Europe-Asia Studies on Bo Petersson’s new book about legitimacy, personality, charisma, and succession politics in Russia. If you are a specialist in the field, I highly recommend picking it up! Among other points, Petersson quite intriguingly argues: “…that the problem of a perpetually absent succession plan in Russia is tightly wrapped up in the very strategies of regime legitimation that have been pursued across the years, which have ‘almost exclusively focused on [Putin’s] person’ and still largely hinge on Putin’s ‘personal popularity and charisma.’ Petersson provides a positive—and refreshingly open—assessment of Putin’s ability to retain control of the political system, by substantively convincing both Russian elites and the broader population that there are no other genuine options to his position at the apex of the political structure, almost seeming to favour a tongue-in-cheek ‘Highlander theory’ of Russian succession: there can be only one.”
INTELLIGENCE FAILURES AND POLITICAL MISJUDGMENT IN AN AGE OF IDEOLOGICAL CHANGE
This article, published at The Strategy Bridge in the early summer, takes on the Russo-Ukrainian War from a foreign policy perspective and looks closer at why there was such a mismatch between Russian planning expectations at the top and the domestic political realities in Ukraine on the ground. I try to draw out some lessons for US policymaking as well. To summarize: “The key error in Russian analysis of the Ukrainian polity was a belief that the political conditions of 2014 still held in 2022, and moreover that the same political geography and split elite orientation towards Russia remained as it had been a decade before. Put bluntly, in 2014, large segments of the Ukrainian population were substantively pro-Russian and mobilizable for political purposes. Many influential political and military-security elites at both the national and regional levels were actively interested in geopolitical rapprochement, and pro-Western Ukrainian nationalism was considerably weaker across society. Over the span of less than ten years, each of these assumptive elements were no longer true.”
PUTIN’S AGENCY AND THE DECISION FOR WAR
Around the same time, I also published my major statement on the causes of the war at RIDDLE Russia. I argue that structural theories are insufficient and underspecified, and that we need to think hard about the unique agency of Vladimir Putin, even if it means our answers become more complex and multicausal: “…over the course of the very late 2010s and into the 2020s, Vladimir Putin had become ever more obsessed with revising the status quo ante-maidan; he had developed a personal ideological fixation on Ukraine in historical, ethnic, and civilizational terms, and was uniquely isolated from wider elite preferences due to strict pandemic isolation protocols, highly-developed presidential centralization, and bureaucratic privileges in information access given to sycophantic subordinates. Yet only in 2021 — and counter to macro-level factors that apply across a far wider band of time — would this panoply of shifting inputs operationalize as readiness and willingness to go to war in 2022.”
GUARDIANSHIP AND RESENTMENT IN PRECARIOUS CIVIL-MILITARY RELATIONS
Finally, also at The Strategy Bridge, I recently partnered up with a Swedish colleague, Naman Karl-Thomas Habtom at the University of Cambridge, to write about civil-military relations in sub-Saharan Africa in this new era of coups, Russian mercenary support, and high resentment against both French influence and local regime incapacity. We argue that: “Self-perceptions of a guardianship role for the armed forces mixed with decades of resentment has crystalized specifically within the officer corps of a range of Francophone African states. And this combination has been, perhaps surprisingly, supported by important elements within the urban poor and middle-classes. Yet this sharply and specifically motivated discontent has only been activated recently, and has been operationalized into critical, regime-defying political expression due to a rapidly shifting geopolitical context. Indeed, broader uncertainty surrounding the international state system and the flagging relative primacy of Western states and institutions has opened a new, political opportunity structure in which non-French alternatives to security have become at least symbolically available.”
On Illiberalism, Ideology, and Modern Discontents
Beyond the Russia case, my work on the academic concept and empirical phenomenon of illiberalism (that is, 21st century Reaction) continues. This piece, published at the Illiberalism Studies Program, is a partial summary of a larger paper on comparing illiberalism in Eastern Europe - think Hungary and Poland - with growing intellectual currents in the Anglo-American world sometimes termed ‘postliberalism.’ That working paper only just now received a revise-and-resubmit (academic publishing timelines are absurdly long), so I’m glad I got out a shorter version when the research and initial drafting was finished. Overall, I find that: “Illiberalism in Eastern Europe is politically substantive, institutionally pragmatic, and action-oriented while postliberalism (and its other labels) is still largely critique-generating, institutionally marginal, and discourse-oriented.”
DISTINCTIONS WITH A DIFFERENCE: ILLIBERALISM AND AUTHORITARIANISM IN SCHOLARLY STUDY
The majority of my peer-reviewed scholarship published this year was focused on the ‘illiberalism’ concept and how to distinguish it from other important dimensions of politics. Which means that all these papers were drafted the year before - or more - and were only finally getting out into the open in 2023. This one, at Political Studies Review, differentiates between illiberalism and authoritarianism, asserting that: “Illiberalism can most fruitfully be conceptualized positively and ideationally, capturing a distinct form of ideological reaction against hegemonic liberalism, experienced largely over the last several decades, with a variety of case-specific elements. This definition sits in partial contradistinction with other, sometimes-associated concepts such as anti-liberalism, populism, or conservatism and is not associated with regime-type definitionally. Authoritarianism, meanwhile, is most parsimoniously treated as a residual categorization of political regime vis-a-vis the concept of electoral democracy, which accords with the goals for which most scholars deploy it.”
DISENTANGLING AUTHORITARIANISM AND ILLIBERALISM IN THE CONTEXT OF THE GLOBAL STATES SYSTEM
The “Distinctions” article above has a brother-piece, largely making the same argument but applying it to the International Relations/Foreign Policy space at the Journal of International Affairs. The conceptual assertions are the same, but the difference lies in how we think about key points of interest in the respective field. Here focus on the common trope that unitary “waves” or “internationals” can be identified and quickly characterized using these concepts. Instead, I argue that “we must be particularly cautious of assuming the existence of “authoritarian internationals” or “illiberal waves” as anything more than useful heuristic, descriptive accounts, rather than evocations of genuine, coherent groupings besetting an abstracted liberal international order. There are certainly authoritarian regimes or illiberal ideological pressures that act on the world system, sometimes in patterned ways. But whether they do so with intentional-agential purpose, in concert, or in tandem is not always clear...Furthermore, we must be wary of connecting these two concepts without clear theoretical frameworks and nuanced comparative empirical research. Domestic-level concepts of political order (authoritarianism) and ideational/ideological motivations or orientations (illiberalism) should not be taken to act as ontological units at the state-level without considerable caveats and reasoned consideration— and should certainly not be conflated.”
BOOK REVIEW: ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK OF ILLIBERALISM
With two other colleagues, I take up the task of reviewing a major (and expensive) academic “handbook,” i.e., a huge collection of edited papers, published by Routledge on the concept and its application. You probably shouldn’t buy the handbook, but if you teach or research in these areas some of the chapters inside are really good. And others are not! One thing that struck me was how reliant we are on Poland and Hungary to anchor this concept - a very inductive way to theorize the world in a comparative sense: “a great deal of work concerns the country-cases of Hungary and Poland, with many other chapters that focus elsewhere seeming to still derive fundamental understandings about or patterns of illiberalism from those specific experiences. This may indeed be accurate, and there is considerable merit to understanding illiberalism as an inductively-produced concept taken from specific Eastern European political experiences. Many thematic chapters in Section V, especially those focusing on constitutionalism and the rule of law, especially rely on these cases (Landau; Uitz; Wyrzykowski and Ziolkowski; Krygier) or extrapolate to uncertain events in the Trump-era United States. Yet this does not accord particularly well with the conceptual foregrounding of the field at present, which claims far broader and more generally applicable conceptual roots.”
MIMICKING THE MAD PRINTER: LEGISLATING ILLIBERALISM IN POST-SOVIET EURASIA
This article at Problems of Post-Communism is relatively old - written in the late 2010s and published online in 2021 - but only given an actual publication number this past year. So it technically counts. Here I take the case of the “homosexual propaganda” law passed in Russia and review how it spread in a “copycat” manner across the wider post-Soviet Eurasia region. I note that the legislative development of the bill in Russia was thoroughly domestic, and very much so not simply directed by the Kremlin but rather had important civil society lobbying and actual parliamentary deliberation inputs as well. But outside of Russia, variation in attempts at adoption in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Georgia was considerably more complicated: “Although Russian illiberal innovation can be understood through domestic drivers of policy development, attempts to pass illiberal laws elsewhere are better explained by the interaction of domestic political incentives and international factors.”
Finally, and in line with my work on ‘postliberal’ thought in the Anglo-American world, I was asked by the small Catholic journal The Lamp to review the new book by postliberal philosopher Patrick Deneen, Regime Change. Although I read the book sympathetically, I found it interesting, but mostly frustrating, and not capable of the ambitious task it sought to undertake: “While Deneen’s case for discontent is quite strong, his marriage of the conceptually abstract to the politically practical is simultaneously too specific and not nearly fleshed out enough. We are faced with a vision in which a dominating “party of progress” must be defeated by an as-yet-unformed “party of conservatism,” in a no-holds barred contest for political supremacy, while leaving our institutions largely intact (just re-populated and re-oriented) and our form of government the same, yet somehow better. There is both a theory of the problem and a hopeful vista of the future settlement, but the theory of victory—the getting from point A to point B part—is left largely to the reader to divine.”
Substack Essays
Next, a reminder of the essays published here on this Substack in 2023. Do take a look if you missed one! They are listed below, this time in chronological order. The fantasy/sci-fi essay was certainly the most fun, but I think both “On Caesarism” and “On Democracy’s Advantage” have been important for crystallizing my own thoughts on these subjects. And if you want the easy statement on what this ‘illiberalism’ concept I work on means, that essay is the key. Finally, the piece on the Russian regime was the original impetus for my article this December in The National Interest.
Future Items
The list above is everything that has actually seen the light of day this past year. There is much more to come - some already well along in the publishing pipeline, and others not yet written - including:
Multiple public CNA reports on Russian political-military affairs and the war
A variety of Substack essays on all our favorite topics
More short and medium-sized analytical articles on Russian and Ukrainian domestic politics and foreign policy questions
A book chapter on authoritarianism for the Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism
A book chapter on integralism and postliberalism in an upcoming edited volume on ‘Social Catholicism’
A book chapter on modern Russia and fascism for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics
A journal article on Eastern European illiberalism and Anglo-American postliberalism
A journal article on Hungarian and Polish illiberal influences in the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds
A journal article on the diverse structures of Interwar-era authoritarian regimes
A journal article on contemporary authoritarian theorists in America
A journal article on plausible authoritarian governance patterns… in space
A coauthored journal article on the Patriarchs of the Russian Orthodox Church and their political agendas since the fall of the Soviet Union
A coauthored journal article on the development of Russia’s new official ideology in its higher education system
And a coauthored book on the autonomy of state institutions in authoritarian regimes, published at the University of Michigan Press
Do let me know if any of these are of interest, as some are already in working paper formats that can be shared. And of course, readers are always welcome to email me! Otherwise, you’ll hear about them as they come out in future iterations of this newsletter. And in the meantime, I hope you all have a great start to 2024!
- Julian