Random Dictatorships

Post-Soviet Eurasia continues to puzzle observers, defying expectations of experts. Most Russia watchers failed to predict the full-scale invasion against Ukraine in 2022, and this failure triggered intensive debates and multiple rounds of self-reflection. Random Dictatorships: Unpredictability of Authoritarian Politics in Eurasia argues that the supposedly unexpected turns of Eurasian politics are a manifestation of a deeper phenomenon – researchers' limited ability to predict the policymaking in authoritarian regimes in general. Alexander Libman identifies three main factors making authoritarian politics difficult to predict: mistakes of authoritarian leaders, untransparent competition of elite factions, and omnipresent secrecy cultivated by autocrats. While scholars oscillate between two visions of authoritarian regimes – their presentation as highly rational and capable to adapt and as highly inefficient and doomed to poor performance – Libman suggests that many autocracies alternate between these two extremes in a difficult-to-predict fashion. The book explores three important cases from the post-Soviet Eurasia, when autocracies of this region defied expectations of external observers – Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Bloody January in Kazakhstan in 2022 and Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. It discusses the reasons for the apparent unpredictability of autocracies in each of these cases, and identifies implications for how authoritarian regimes should be studied.

Table of Contents:
List of figures List of tables Introduction 1. The Autocrats' Goals 2. Mistakes 3. Secrecy 4. Informal Coalitions 5. Sovietology and the Collapse of the Soviet Union 6. Annexation of Crimea 7. Bloody January in Kazakhstan 8. Russia's Full-Scale Invasion to Ukraine Conclusion References About the Author

About the Author :
Alexander Libman is professor of Russian and East European politics at the Freie Universität Berlin. Prior to that, he worked as professor of social sciences and East European studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. His research interests focus on comparative authoritarian development in the post-Soviet Eurasia. His work appeared, among others, in the American Political Science Review, World Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies and Perspectives on Politics.

Review :
Unpredictability is encoded in the DNA of autocracy, but its implications are complex and not well understood. Drawing on an impressive synthesis of recent research and deep case studies from the Soviet Union, Russia and Kazakhstan, Alexander Libman demonstrates that unpredictability is not just a feature of autocracy; it is also a tool that leaders use to frustrate citizens and academic observers alike. Random Dictatorships: Unpredictability of Authoritarian Politics in Eurasia overflows with rich insights on autocracy and how we study it. It is required reading for anyone interested in the topic. Alexander Libman, in his new and refreshingly epistemologically honest book, drawing from in-depth studies of several Eurasian dictatorships, underlines not only that the politics and policies in dictatorships are often random but also offers a theoretically grounded explanation for why the murkiness and occasional unpredictability of authoritarian politics is a built-in feature, not a bug. Random Dictatorships is a tour de force that manages to hit the sweet spot between the rigor and generalizability of comparative authoritarianism approach and the area studies' expert knowledge of how dictatorships really work. Time and again, social scientists are left flummoxed by the unpredictable behavior of autocrats. Alexander Libman offers an insightful and provocative explanation for why this is so. Drawing on case studies of surprising decisions by post-Soviet autocrats-most prominently Vladimir Putin's decision to invade Ukraine- Libman argues that the opaqueness and secrecy of autocratic regimes impedes our ability to make accurate predictions about their future behavior. Like few others, this book poses a constructive challenge to all scholars of authoritarian regimes and should be read and debated widely.