Introducing Political Order(s)

Or, 'how to try to newsletter'

We Begin With Words of Welcome

And very happy ones they are! This newsletter is something less than ‘public-facing scholarship’ and something more than an earnest tweet-thread lost to the aether all too quickly. Although the format, content, and generally every aspect of this project will surely change as time goes on, the idea is simple. I want to treat this newsletter as a place for news (say, alerting my kind readers to a new article published somewhere and sundry comments on it) and a location for letters (that is, short essays, discussions, and, presumably, diatribes) on subjects of interest.

And what are those subjects of interest? Political order, in all of its democratic and non-democratic varieties.

So, What Is ‘Political Order’ About?

The name for this newsletter is a reference to Samuel P. Huntington’s famous Political Order in Changing Societies, one of the greatest works of political science from the 1960s - perhaps paired with Barrington Moore’s classic Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy. Both studies focused on key questions of political regime: their structuring, evolution, and stability over time. The Huntingtonian provocation, found on the very first page of the book, states simply: “[t]he differences between democracy and dictatorship are less than the differences between those countries whose politics embodies consensus, community, legitimacy, organization, effectiveness, stability, and those countries whose politics is deficient in these qualities.” That is, binary regime-type itself is less important than the various ways we can think about and understand a successful (or unsuccessful) political order.

Should we buy this? Your mileage may vary, but a huge segment of the biggest questions in political science, political economy, and even applied political theory boil down to variations on this theme. Huntington himself argues that the concept of institutionalization (i.e. “the process by which organizations and procedures acquire value and stability, its level determined by its adaptability, complexity, autonomy, and coherence”) is the key to unlocking differences across political regimes and the fate of political order in any given country. Whether this is true or not, much of what we talk about today is a reflection of overriding and quite natural human concerns about the nature of the polity, its governance, and where individuals, communities, classes, and sociopolitical groups sit within it.

I take my cues from this claim. We live in an age where democracy is no longer the only game in town, and internal political legitimacy crises are hardly relegated to unstable hybrid regimes or authoritarian states in far-off (former) ‘third-’ or ‘second-world’ countries. They are now a part of our life in longstanding Western democracies as well. What are we afraid of? Authoritarianism, they say. But what is authoritarianism? What does it look like? What do our own democracies look like in reference to the diversity of non-democracy across the globe and across the span of human history? And in what ways does this all matter - or not matter - for the uninterested average citizen and the interested observer alike?

Ok, But What Are We Actually Going to Talk About?

Frankly, I’m not sure I’ll actually get around to answering these big questions here. But they certainly form the backdrop for my own interests on the matter. I am a very junior academic and a scholar of authoritarian politics proper, based here in the United States. My own empirical research focuses primarily on the politics of the post-Soviet space (Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, etc), although I also have research interests related to the concept of ‘illiberalism’ and to illiberal ideational ecosystems found in both in Eurasia and much closer to home. As you will see, I happen hold a deep interest in conceptual and (middle-range) theoretical issues, alongside the case-details of the empirical world.

We shall see how this newsletter turns out, but expect something of a smorgasbord of thematic interests, from high-level explorations of the nature, structure, and variety of authoritarian rule, the substantive politics of Russian and other Eurasian states, the rise of illiberal and authoritarian ideologies in the collective West, and many other issues that may hold only a tangential relationship to these.

It seems to me that narrowly-defined Substack newsletters tend to end up exploring far more issue-areas than they originally intend, and I certainly expect this for mine as well. We will end up in strange places, no doubt, as I personally am always interested in the unusual and controversial - although with any luck no unnecessary enemies will be made due to the unedited, free-form nature of the platform. In all things, we shall see how things turn out.

So What’s Next?

The next offering, which I will send out in the near future, should be a short retrospective of some recent published work by me. For those who have not followed my modest research and commentary output with bated breath, this will serve as a standard introduction. Feel free to ignore.

There are no shortages of topics to explore. The ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War is of course one, as well as the domestic uncertainties of wartime Russia (and Ukraine, for that matter). Then there is the question of looming authoritarianism (!!!) in America, which will be on everyone’s op-ed list once more as the midterm elections approach. And there are a number of unfinished projects that I will use this platform to explore - from the nature of authoritarian rule in the Interwar period and 19th century Europe to the dangers of thinking about political institutions in authoritarian regimes primarily in terms of ‘role’ or ‘function,’ and even as far-flung as questioning how political order might be constructed in beyond-Earth settlements (a little sci-fi never hurts to tantalize some of the weirder possible trajectories of this newsletter).

In any case, I do not believe there will be a dearth of content, so long as I’m not too lazy to write it up.

Until Next Time…

…thanks for reading, and do look forward to the next dispatch!

- Dr. Julian G. Waller

P.S. - as always (and perhaps I will figure out a way to make this sort of statement less clunky) everything I write here represents my views alone, and explicitly does not represent any professional or academic affiliations or employers. Obviously.