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Assessing authoritarian conflict management in the Middle East and Central Asia

ABSTRACT Authoritarian conflict management (ACM), conceptualised by Lewis et al. (2018), is an analytical framework aimed at understanding how authoritarian regimes respond to violent domestic challenges in ways that reject liberal conflict resolution practices that have emerged since the 1990s. Operationally, the authors define ACM as having three pillars: discursive control, spatial control and authoritarian political economic practices. Quantitative methods have not yet been broadly applied to ACM. This study quantitatively examines violent intrastate conflict in the Middle East and Central Asia to test several assumptions undergirding ACM, namely ACM’s prevalence over time and impact on governments’ ability to garner external support in domestic conflicts. I find that regimes in these regions deployed full ACM in fewer than half of cases, and the prevalence of ACM has not increased over time. Discursive and spatial control practices were employed more frequently than authoritarian political economic interventions. Finally, regimes that deployed full ACM were more likely than regimes that did not to have received external authoritarian support; no such difference was observed vis-à-vis support from external non-authoritarian countries.