This chapter introduces a conception of rule that takes resistance rather than obedience as the constitutive element of rule. Based on an eclectic reading of different theories of rule, we argue that there is no rule without resistance. Even though rule might aim at suppressing resistance or might take such a subtle shape that it hardly encounters resistance, conceptually, rule is bound to resistance. Without a minimum of opposition, a recourse to rule would not be necessary. Even legitimate rule, which Weber calls authority, is legitimate only to a certain degree. As a consequence, not only obedience and the will to comply, but also dissent and the will to resist are part of rule. This chapter therefore sheds light on the relational dimension of rule, by analyzing the dynamic relationship between (forms of) rule and (forms of) resistance at the global level. To this end, we distinguish between two forms of resistance – opposition and dissidence – in order to show how resistance and rule implicate and influence each other. To demonstrate this relationship, we discuss four illustrative case studies on state and non-state forms of resistance and how they indicate and influence different forms of rule.

This chapter is dedicated to the role of the potential opposition in autocracies. It deals with the various forms of repressing dissent and how autocratic incumbents keep the opposition at bay. Like the previous and the subsequent chapters, it condenses in a first step our current knowledge about the topic, carving out the lessons learned for the conceptualization of the over-politicizing and de-politicizing logics. It introduces the broad distinction between soft and hard forms of repression. While the former violates civil liberties and political rights, the latter infringes upon the person’s integrity rights. It is argued that over-politicizing autocracies seek to justify even the usage of hard repression by inflating a friend-foe distinction and declaring an internal foe. In contrast, de-politicizing regimes avoid using this type of repression, as it risks breaking the silent autocratic contract between the passivated people and the regime that is supposed to materially deliver.

Zimbabwe’s 1995 general election was conducted in the context of a ferocious debate on the country’s controversial constitution and a disastrous economic structural adjustment programme (ESAP). Zanu PF had already won a parliamentary majority well before votes were cast. It had the advantage of having thirty presidentially appointed MPs and fifty-five of its sitting MPs stood unopposed. The national voters’ register remained in a complete shambles. A weak and divided political opposition seemed to be a permanent feature in the country. Zanu PF neither accepted nor tolerated political opponents, believing it had entitlement to be in power forever. Zanu PF participation in the anti-colonial liberation war was a major justification for supressing political opposition parties. Zanu PF’s mindset was, by hook or crook, de jure or de facto bent on achieving a one-party state. The hallmarks of the 1995 elections were the controversial constitution, weak opposition, Zanu PF’s manipulation, and bending and breaking of election rules, including its lack of political will to develop a viable voters’ roll. The economic structural adjustment programme had already ruined peoples’ livelihoods by the mid-1990s. The source of violence emanated from Zanu PF’s non-acceptance and intolerance of competitive election contests, including within its own leadership selection processes.

The Unity Accord sealed between Mugabe and Nkomo and their supporters in 1987 not only drastically reduced violence against the Ndebele, but it also ended dissident activity generating a totally different election framework in the 1990 elections. Twenty seats reserved for whites were abolished. In 1989, Edgar Tekere, a former Zanu PF party stalwart disenchanted by Mugabe’s leadership style formed the urban-based Zimbabwe Unity Movement (ZUM). ZUM and independent candidates from within Zanu PF were not evidence of a gradual decline in elite cohesion. Zanu PF’s political stranglehold in the country directed violence at civil society. Pent-up intolerance of political opposition draped in a dictatorship outfit replaced ethnic conflict in driving violence. From the dominant power politics analysis, a social narrative approach shows the resilience of ethnicity, nationalism, loyalty, legitimacy and unity as explanatory factors for violence. However, Zanu PF also used paramilitary organisations to maintain or regain control and the abuse of legislative and judicial powers to stay in power. The 1990 general elections took place from 28 to 30 March, with many unresolved teething problems, including persistent division and weakness in the opposition. Five parties competed in the election; ZUM, the UANC, NDU, Zanu-Ndonga and Zanu PF.

This chapter investigates the political effects and means of royal heirs in constitutional systems. It asks how they contributed politically to the process of monarchical persistence in the Long Nineteenth Century and concentrates in particular on instances where they were opposed to the course championed by their predecessors and on the process of generating ‘soft power’ for their dynasties by committing themselves to visibility, mobility and ‘civic publicness’.

Chapter 1 answers the question of what citizens perceptions of the school closure policy are and how these attitudes vary by race. It reveals that African Americans and Latinx citizens – the majority of those affected by the policy – have highly negative attitudes toward public school closures. Whites express the most supportive attitudes toward closure, despite rare experiences with the policy. To explain these disparities, it highlights how African Americans and Latinx shared experiences with previous education policies and shared status as minorities contribute to the development of a shared target identity. Their identification as shared targets result in similar assessments of the closure policy, regardless of whether they are directly affected by it. Whites, in contrast, adopt a viewpoint akin to the purveyors of the policy. These findings have implications for understanding the challenges associated with working across racial lines, toward improved race relations and thus democratic progress.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this book, the erosion of democracy has become pervasive. Countries in Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa have seen the rise of executives with hegemonic aspirations. The threat of antisystemic populist outsiders has even spread to developed democracies in Europe and North America. In this chapter, I assess the theory outlined in the book in some of these cases. Doing so allows me to evaluate if, when, and how does the argument of this book work outside Colombia and Venezuela.

In this chapter, I develop a theory that focuses on the opposition’s strategic choices to fight the erosion of democracy. I define democratic erosion as a type of regime transition that happens over time, giving the opposition ample opportunity to respond, even after a leader willing to circumvent democracy has attained power. The strategies the opposition chooses and the goals it uses them for, I argue, are critical to understanding why some executives with hegemonic aspirations successfully erode democracy and others do not.

Up until the 1990s, Venezuela was one of the longest-running and most stable uninterrupted liberal democracies in Latin America. Today, it is an authoritarian regime. In nineteen years, Hugo Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, managed to destroy the system of checks and balances, end free and fair elections, and terminate political rights and civil liberties. The government has delayed and canceled elections, circumvented the authority of the elected legislature, imprisoned political opponents without trial, used lethal force against protesters, and banned opposition parties. How is it that Venezuela, historically one of the most robust democracies in the region, turned into the second most authoritarian country in Latin America?

In the previous chapter, I showed how the Venezuelan opposition’s strategic choices helped Hugo Chávez erode democracy. In this chapter, I develop the other part of my argument by highlighting the role of the Colombian opposition in preventing democratic erosion. Between 2002 and 2010, Alvaro Uribe tried to erode democracy in Colombia. Like Hugo Chávez (1999–2013) in Venezuela, he introduced several reforms that sought to reduce the checks on the executive and extend his time in office beyond a second term. He was polarizing, and willing to push as far as he could to increase the powers of the presidency and stay in office beyond a second term. His government harassed opposition members, journalists, and members of the courts and worked in tandem with illegal armed actors to systemically undermine those who criticized the president. Contrary to Chávez, however, Uribe was not able to turn Colombia’s democracy into a competitive authoritarian regime. Despite his attempts to undermine the independence of the courts and the fairness of elections, Colombia’s constitutional order remained fairly strong, and Uribe had to step down after his second term.

In the past two decades, several democracies have slipped into democratic recession. Faced with economic or security crises, democratically elected executives in Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Africa have used their popularity to push for legislation – particularly constitutional amendments – that, over time, destroys systems of checks and balances, hinders free and fair elections, and erodes political rights and civil liberties. Across the world, these heads of government have found ways to subvert democratic norms while simultaneously maintaining a democratic façade. Using and abusing elections and institutional reform, they are turning new and old democracies alike into competitive authoritarian regimes.

When we think about parliaments and the legislature, we often find ourselves casting our minds back to the first ‘parliaments’, such as the fora of Ancient Greece or the Althing of Norse Iceland. Broadly speaking they were similar – a group of people coming together to make laws. Parliaments and legislatures have developed considerably since those times to be complex bodies, but the key idea of a group coming together to make laws remains. At the same time we might also think that this collection of people is also somehow representative of democracy – but we need to be clear that just having a legislature does not itself mean you are democratic. A variety of other conditions need to be met before we would usually say that a country is 'democratic', though in the case of Australia this is generally a given. While other chapters will discuss the way parliaments are elected – the electoral system – and who gets to choose who the candidates are – the parties or individuals – this chapter will discuss the role, purpose and operation of the Australian Parliament, as it is the legislature that citizens, members of parliament (MPs) and parties all aim to attend and control.

Contextualising conflict provides further testimony of children’s legitimacy as rulers between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. This chapter turns to narrative accounts of dynastic challenge, opportunistic conflict and kidnap to address the problematic association between child kingship and magnate violence. Evidence for the appearance and escalation of conflict while a boy was king has often been accepted without sufficient critical scrutiny. The chapter shows that attempts to remove children from their royal positions were rare, and that conflict often upheld their legitimacy to rule rather than undermining it. Applying the arbitrary label of violent opportunism to all instances of conflict when a child was king oversimplifies the complex range of reasons for magnate disputes. Instead, conflict could be, among other things, a legitimate response to royal succession, a habitual aspect of the negotiation of disputed property and rights, or a product of recurring quarrels over hierarchy and prominence. The child king’s presence and active participation could, once again, convey a significant and authoritative weight.

Authoritarian regimes vary with respect to regime–opposition relations, along a continuum of more open to more closed, focusing on the degree of competition the regime permits during elections. The particular political opportunity structure facing any individual opposition group varies according to the strategies that the regime uses in dealing with that particular group: inclusion, co-optation, or exclusion. The microfoundations of both party formation and political mobilization do not operate in isolation or in the same way as they do in established democracies, but in fact interact with the effects of the political opportunity structure that existed during the prior authoritarian era. An examination of the common competing explanations for party formation and political mobilization show that, while each explanation arguably does play a role in shaping these outcomes, they are limited in their comparative utility and frequently fail to explain the actual variation observed in these cases. Instead, mechanisms link the structure of state–opposition relations and the political opportunity structure facing different groups to their relative decisions around party formation as well as to the tactics and effectiveness of political mobilization in founding elections. Finally, the common causes of opposition group dissolution interact with the opportunity structure of the authoritarian era.

Chapter 5, “Information Wars,” is the opening case study of four intelligentsia-built resistance systems, which consider how the intelligentsia responded to Nazi persecution with projects bent on maintaining national traditions and rebuilding a Polish state. It examines the one that undergirds the rest: underground information creation and trafficking that kept the elite connected and funneled news into and out of the city. In response to the closure of Polish-language press, radio bookstores, and libraries, a number of educated Poles created an underground world of secret newsletters and journals to keep the city informed about occupier behavior and the circumstances of the wider war. This project involved entangled networks of individuals who were brutally punished if caught, and the work of writing, editing, couriering, and reading underground press initiated many Varsovians into anti-Nazi “conspiracies.” Information sourced in the occupied city was not merely for local consumption but was painstakingly smuggled out by a sprawling network of Polish and international couriers toting encrypted information to the states of the Grand Alliance. This chapter argues that the ability of Poles in Warsaw to counter Nazi propaganda narratives with their own information was essential to all later successful opposition.

Chapter 2, “The Killing Years,” explains the two-wave Nazi police genocide against the intelligentsia in 1939–1940, its fallout, and how these initial killing campaigns shaped the Nazi German occupation administration for Poland. German anti-intelligentsia campaigning was bloody but ultimately drove the resistance it attempted to thwart. The first campaign, codenamed Operation Tannenberg, was coordinated with the military campaign in 1939 but delayed in Warsaw because of the siege. Tannenberg went awry and was complicated by the circumstances of the invasion and incoming occupation. After Nazi Germany established a civilian occupation under general governor Hans Frank, Frank revived anti-intelligentsia killing with his new campaign, the Extraordinary Pacification Action (AB-Aktion). This campaign’s violence shocked Poles and provoked the resistance it was intended to achieve. This chapter argues that the two Nazi genocidal campaigns failed but shaped the nature of Nazi occupation administration, and encouraged the first violent Polish resistance in response.

Chapter 8, “Spoiling for A Fight: Armed Opposition,” begins a two-part examination of violent resistance and how, when, and why Poles embraced or rejected it. This discussion is deliberately postponed in the story, as much of the existing literature focuses on military resistance as a shorthand for resistance as a whole, which it was not. Polish military resistance efforts, initially launched by officers and soldiers of the Polish Army in hiding under occupation, remained fractured and hamstrung by vicious Nazi reprisals until 1942. Despite its danger, myriad groups organized around plans for insurrection, spanning the political spectrum from orthodox communists to the fascist far right, and including Polish-Jewish participation. After the destruction of many such initiatives and the merging and reformation of others, one increasingly grew in size and strength: the Home Army (Armia Krajowa) eventually dominated a chaotic resistance landscape through the support of the Western Allies. This chapter argues that violent resistance was initially a disorganized catastrophe, and only late in the occupation did a few surviving underground militaries achieve the ability to influence the Polish population or threaten the German occupiers.