Autocracy is on the transfer worldwide and turning into extra resilient.
One of many driving forces behind this phenomenon is one thing students name “authoritarian learning,” a course of by which autocratic leaders examine one another and adapt ways primarily based on what seems to work, and how you can proceed once they encounter resistance.
Take Georgia. The ruling Georgian Dream get together has steered the Caucasus nation from a path towards democracy again to autocracy – and it has performed so by studying from Russia. Particularly, it adopted a “foreign agent” regulation in Could 2024 – laws that got here straight from Vladimir Putin’s playbook.
Bought to the general public as rising transparency, the laws has been utilized to persecute Georgia’s opposition and arrest dissidents with impunity.
As researchers analyzing the construction and results of autocratic regimes, we view Georgia’s first yr of its international agent regulation for instance of how politicians should not solely studying the ways of Russian authoritarianism however enhancing on them in a shorter time-frame.
Bouncing from Europe to Russia
Georgia’s present ruling get together got here to energy after then-President Mikheil Saakashvili enacted a serious collection of reforms within the 2000s. Saakashvili, who was jailed in 2021 below extremely contested prices, inherited a Georgia seen as a failing and corrupt state tethered to Russia.
The reform-minded politicians of Saakashvili’s authorities set the nation on a pro-Western path. However after Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, a socially conservative coalition below the banner Georgian Dream gained the parliamentary elections in 2012.
Georgian Dream was buoyed by the fortune of billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, a Russian citizen till 2011. The get together capitalized on the general public’s fatigue after a decade of Saakashvili’s needed however intense reforms. The brand new coalition married a promise for persevering with the pro-Western reforms, however with a extra conventional, conservative strategy to social points.
This attraction to conventional Georgian values gained help in rural communities and carried the coalition to an absolute majority in Parliament in 2016. Since then, Georgian Dream has adopted pro-Russian rhetoric, accusing a “global war party” of operating the West. Rising assaults on the European Union, particularly, have been part of a broader technique to deliver Georgia again into Russia’s orbit.
The Georgian Dream development in energy has mirrored that of Putin in Russia. In 2012, Putin signed a “foreign agents” regulation that initially focused NGOs receiving international funding and alleged to be engaged in political exercise.
The Kremlin equated this regulation to the 1938 Overseas Brokers Registration Act, or FARA, in america, and justified it as a way to extend transparency round international involvement in Russia’s inner affairs.
In contrast to FARA, nonetheless, Russia’s model of the regulation neither required establishing a connection between international funding and political exercise nor offered a transparent definition of political exercise.
This vagueness allowed for a variety of NGOs deemed undesirable by the Kremlin to be labeled as “foreign agents.” The outcome was the suppression of NGO actions by monetary, administrative and authorized burdens that led to their liquidation or departure from the nation.
Through the years, this regulation has lowered Russian civil society’s potential to independently voice and deal with points that its inhabitants faces.
Yearlong slide into autocracy
Georgian Dream handed a really comparable international agent regulation on Could 28, 2024, after overcoming a presidential veto. It compelled NGOs receiving greater than 20% of their funding from overseas to register with the Ministry of Justice as “serving the interests of a foreign power.”
Activists opposing the regulation have been bodily assaulted, and the regulation has been utilized in opposition to what the ruling get together has described as “LGBT propaganda.”
The regulation matches a wider political panorama through which the ruling get together has moved to limit freedom of the press, prosecuted political opponents and postponed Georgia’s European Union candidate standing regardless of the overwhelming majority of Georgians being pro-EU.
Protestors participate in a pro-European rally in Warsaw, Poland, on April 30, 2024.
Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto through Getty Photographs
Enhancing on Russian authoritarians
Three important components performed a job in permitting for the international agent regulation in Russia to increase its attain: the facility imbalance between the Russian authorities and NGOs, restricted motion by worldwide authorities, and delayed media consideration to the difficulty.
On the time the regulation was handed, civil society inside Russia itself was cut up. Some foresaw the risks of the regulation and engaged in collective motion to oppose it, whereas others selected to attend and see.
Because it occurred, the regulation and the accompanying repressive equipment unfold to a broader vary of targets. In 2015, Putin signed a regulation that designated an “undesirable” standing to international organizations “on national security grounds”; in 2017, an modification expanded the targets of the regulation from NGOs to mass media shops; and on the finish of 2019, the regulation allowed the classification of people and unregistered public associations – that’s, teams of people – as mass media performing as international brokers. By July 2022, the international funding criterion was excluded and a standing of a international agent may very well be designated to anybody whom the Russian authorities deemed to be “under foreign influence.”
Russia’s expertise highlights the method of early levels of authoritarian consolidation, when state energy quashes impartial sources of energy, and political teams and residents both rally across the authorities or go silent. The international agent regulation in Russia was handed solely after the protests that accompanied the 2012 elections, which returned Putin to the presidency for the third time period.
In Georgia, the ruling authorities borrowed from Russia’s lead – after backing down from its first try to move a international agent regulation within the face of huge protests, it pushed it by earlier than the elections.
The regulation was then used to raid NGOs sympathetic to the opposition days earlier than the October 2024 parliamentary election. Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze stated earlier than the elections that within the occasion of Georgian Dream’s victory, it will look to outlaw the pro-Western opposition, naming them “criminal political forces.”
Within the wake of President Donald Trump’s suspension of USAID help in February 2025, Georgian Dream has seized the chance to increase its battle on civil society, echoing Russian, Chinese language and American far-right conspiracy rhetoric that foreign-funded NGOs had been fomenting revolution. To fight such phantoms, Georgian Dream has handed new laws that criminalizes meeting and protest.
A springboard for repression
The international agent regulation has been a springboard for repressive actions in each Russia and Georgia, however whereas it took Russia a decade to successfully use the regulation to crush any opposition, Georgian Dream is engaged on an expedited timetable.
Though the EU has suspended direct help and closed off visa-free journey for Georgian officers because of the regulation, Trump’s flip towards pro-Russian insurance policies has made it harder to acquire Western consensus in dislodging the Georgian authorities from its authoritarian drift.
Georgia’s expertise, following the Russian playbook, illustrates how authoritarians are studying from one another, using the rule of regulation itself in opposition to democracy.
