The End of Adaptive Authoritarianism in Belarus?

Abstract

In the 2000s the Belarusian regime appeared adept at developing appropriate methods for countering external democratisation efforts and was even a model for other post-Soviet autocracies. To cope with ever-changing internal and external environments, the regime honed the methods of adaptive authoritarianism. However, this article shows that the Belarusian system is fragile and failing by using a framework that analyses various aspects of adaptive authoritarianism, including performance legitimacy, personalist rule, neopatrimonialism, managed pluralism and coercive capacity.