Authoritarian states’ traditional approach to conflict outside their borders is to choose sides—supplying political-diplomatic support and military muscle to their allies—or to freeze the conflict while keeping a hand in to stir the pot and shape possible outcomes. Russia has done both: the first by backing Syria’s Bashar al Assad against various rebel movements, and the second by trying to dominate the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
Authoritarians are not known for expending resources on peacemaking ventures with uncertain outcomes. Nor do they focus on good governance norms after a settlement. They are often content to consolidate the power and standing of local authoritarians.
Yet that pattern seems to be shifting. Today, we are witnessing a number of authoritarian or semi-authoritarian states engage in mediation, and conflict management. China has mediated between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Qatar has led talks between Israel and Hamas, and Turkey has done the same between Russia and Ukraine leading to the Black Sea Grain deal that lapsed last year.
In an attempt at heavy-handed conflict management, Russia tried to freeze the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and sent in peacekeepers in 2020 but stood aside when the Azerbaijani forces took decisive action to seize the disputed territory three years later. Such activities are pursued by a wide range of nominal and quasi-democracies, military governments, presidential one-party states, and monarchies.
The
impact of this surge in authoritarian peacemaking gets less attention
than it deserves. Authoritarian states are buffeting the peacemaking
diplomacy of Western states, blocking or undercutting Western
initiatives and challenging Western leadership of the global peacemaking
agenda. The most obvious impact has been the global polarization that
creates gridlock in the U.N. Security Council, undercuts support for
U.N. peace operations and saps coherence around critical norms such as
human rights and individual freedoms.
This
pattern constrains what the U.N. can do in conflict management,
mediation and peacebuilding. It also directly challenges the ability of
NGOs to work for dialogue and reconciliation in fragile and war-torn
places such as Georgia where pro-Russian parties are imposing
Russian-style controls on the activity of NGOs that receive external
support. Such action undermines the unofficial playbook for peacemaking
and good governance.
By pushing back against Western conceptions about managing conflict, authoritarian peacemaking is part-and-parcel of a more general global backlash against intrusive and interventionist western policies that may undercut the perceived authority and legitimacy of incumbent regimes.
This backlash privileges state sovereignty against notions about “global” norms relating to rights and governance. Sadly, the U.S. government has made the undermining of international norms easier by adopting double standards on civilian protection and human rights law in Ukraine and Gaza. Such conduct actually helps China attack American soft power in Africa and undercuts U.S. diplomatic efforts at the U.N.
But
the authoritarian surge is not necessarily either effective or
coherent. Consider, for example, the difficulty experienced by Egypt’s
military regime and Qatar’s monarchy in bringing Hamas and Israel to a
deal, even with strong backing from the U.S. and other Western and Arab
states. Regional authoritarians have not been notably successful in
bringing about peace and stability in Libya and have aggravated rather
than alleviated its internal clan and tribal factionalism.
They
have failed to cohere effectively for peace in Yemen. Regional
authoritarians made Syria’s tragic civil war divisions worse before
ceding the field to the Russians. In all these cases, the authoritarians
ran into the hard realities of intractable conflicts where the local
parties have plenty of weapons and have not yet exhausted their
unilateral options. In some cases, they made the problem worse.
AT FIRST GLANCE, it
might appear that authoritarian states bring certain advantages to the
table. One attribute is internal unity of command and policy coherence
at the level of the individual state. Unlike liberal states, they can
potentially bring not only a whole of government approach but also a
whole of society focus in their strategy for dealing with conflicts.
Messy internal policy debates do not bother them. Authoritarians
generally place top priority on achieving stability and creating a
favorable context for advancing regime interests, and their policies are
best understood as transactional.