UBC Political Science hosts Mark Zacher Distinguished Speaker Dr. Kathryn Stoner for a department talk, “Making Autocracy Worse: The End of the Myth of Authoritarian Competence in Putin’s Russia.”
Please note: this is a departmental talk by this year’s Mark Zacher Distinguished Speaker for students and faculty. To RSVP for The Mark Zacher Distinguished Speaker Lecture, which is open to the public, please click here.
If Ukraine has become the beachhead for European democracy and security, then Russia is the vanguard of modern autocracy. Under now almost 23 years of Putin’s rule of Russia, the country’s political system has devolved into a repressive, personalistic and internationally aggressive form of authoritarianism. The implications for Europe and global democracy are decidedly negative, as we are seeing in Ukraine currently. But the implications are increasingly problematic also for Putin’s regime. The deepening of autocracy in Russia (making it worse or more repressive) is a result of more than a decade of declining regime performance. The war in Ukraine has now exploded the already ailing myth of competency that Putin has perpetuated since the early 2000’s and has made his regime vulnerable to elite and social pressure. I will use the Russian case to examine why autocracies sometimes get worse over time, and what this process tells us about regime resilience.
More about Dr. Kathryn Stoner
Kathryn Stoner is the Mosbacher Director at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Professor of Political Science (by courtesy), Stanford University and Senior Fellow (by courtesy) at the Hoover Institution. Prior to coming to Stanford in 2004, she was on the faculty at Princeton University for nine years, jointly appointed to the Department of Politics and the Princeton School for International and Public Affairs (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School).
In addition to many articles and book chapters on contemporary Russia, she is the author or co-editor of six books. Her most recent book is Russia Resurrected: Its Power and Purpose in a New Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2021), which won the Russia and Eurasia Program, Fletcher School award for best book on US-Russian Relations in 2022.
She holds a BA and MA in Political Science from the University of Toronto, and a PhD in Government from Harvard University.
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