As we gather here to celebrate freedom and to recommit ourselves to the democratic cause, we face a powerful authoritarian tide. The remarkable third wave of global democratization ran out of steam two decades ago. Since then, many countries have fallen under the spell of illiberal and even authoritarian populism. Anti-establishment parties have swept into power promising to elevate “the people” over corrupt ruling elites and decrepit institutions, only to betray them more deeply through corruption and abuse of power. These include not just emerging-market democracies like Venezuela and Turkey but wealthier democracies in Europe and the United States, whose stability as liberal democracies we took for granted. 

In this global trend away from freedom, authoritarian populists have implemented a common playbook to polarize politics, punish independent media and civil society, undermine judicial independence, purge neutral watchdog institutions, politicize the civil service and security apparatus, and weaponize the state to persecute critics and opponents.

Once this authoritarian project settles into power, truth decays, the rule of law crumbles, fear sets in, and submission becomes the norm. Moreover, authoritarian populists draw from one another — and from powerful autocracies like Russia and China — the narrative arguments, political techniques, resource flows, and technological tools to accelerate their bids for hegemony.
 

In a CDDRL research seminar held on October 30, 2025, Einstein-Moos Postdoctoral Fellow Oren Samet presented his research on how opposition parties engage internationally to challenge authoritarian regimes, focusing on the costs and benefits of a phenomenon he terms “opposition diplomacy.” This CDDRL research seminar highlighted Samet’s book project, which explores how opposition actors shape international politics and what their strategies reveal about the global landscape of democracy. 

Samet defines opposition diplomacy as the explicit efforts by political actors in the opposition to engage with international policymakers, promote their own priorities, and influence the foreign policies of external states. His research focuses on opposition diplomacy directed at Western governments in the post-Cold War era, undertaken by parties and politicians seeking to gain power through elections. 

As Samet highlighted, opposition diplomacy can take several forms, including direct lobbying, international networking, diaspora mobilization, and public relations. These efforts can shape foreign policy decisions by building coalitions of international allies with overlapping goals and with influence within foreign policy establishments, as well as by persuading policymakers that opposition parties are credible partners. This, in turn, can be beneficial, as it draws attention to repression, strengthens advocacy for democratic reform, and helps motivate external pressure, including through public statements of solidarity and specific policies such as sanctions. 

To study how these relationships operate, Samet analyzes data from party internationals – formal networks that connect political parties across countries – and their links with ideological groups represented within the European Parliament. He shows that when an opposition party from a country belonged to a party international with such links, members of the associated group in the European Parliament were more likely to raise issues about that country’s democratic deficits, indicating that these ties can increase visibility and solidarity abroad.

Samet further highlights this dynamic through the case of Cambodia, where opposition leaders have long appealed to Western governments and mobilized diaspora networks to pressure the prevailing autocratic regime. Their outreach helped bring international attention to Cambodia’s democratic backsliding and contributed to the imposition of European Union sanctions by increasing the visibility of regime abuses and helping to legitimize calls for stronger international action. 

However, Samet emphasized that the costs of opposition diplomacy can often outweigh its benefits. International engagement can expose politicians to repression or legal risks, divert financial and human resources from domestic mobilization, and enable ruling regimes to portray opposition parties as agents of foreign influence. In Cambodia, for example, opposition figures who engaged in international outreach faced arrests, restrictions, and bans on political participation, showing how consequential such engagement can be. Additionally, as Samet discussed, opposition diplomacy can sometimes produce unintended effects by giving regimes further justification to tighten control or discredit opposition leaders in the eyes of the public. Ultimately, due to these risks, opposition diplomacy is most common when domestic opportunities are scarce, leaving opposition parties with few alternatives. 

Samet closed by noting that these tradeoffs reveal the complex nature of opposition diplomacy. While opposition politicians can be influential global actors, their impact depends on how they weigh the risks and rewards of engaging abroad. Hence, the international environment for democratization is shaped not only by governments but also by the strategic choices of opposition actors themselves.

On October 16, 2025, UC Davis political scientist Lauren Young delivered a talk on the politics of electoral repression in post–Cold War autocracies. Her talk examined why authoritarian incumbents use electoral repression in some elections and not others, why they often outsource it, and why it is often not targeted at the most strategically valuable districts. She argued that cohesion in the ruling coalition shapes its organization, targeting, and effectiveness. Electoral repression refers to the use of coercive violence by ruling elites to weaken opposition forces and tilt electoral competition in their favor while still holding elections. It is a common tool of authoritarian control, with opposition harassment present in roughly one in five elections since 1990. Yet incumbents do not always rely on repression, and when they do, they frequently delegate it to paramilitary groups rather than state security forces.

Young argued that repression is both valuable and politically risky, which explains why it is sometimes but not always used. Authoritarian elites face two key problems. First, there is a control problem: the effects of repression on political behavior are unpredictable. While violence may intimidate some citizens, it can also backfire, provoking outrage or mobilization. Second, there is a power-sharing problem: delegating repression to coercive actors — police, military, or militias — can empower these groups and threaten regime stability. These risks push rulers toward patronage, propaganda, and performance, turning to repression only when these strategies fail.

The problem of authoritarian control is shaped by the fact that citizen reactions to repression are driven by psychological factors that are hard for elites to observe. These include self-efficacy — the belief in one’s ability to overcome obstacles — and risk aversion, or preference for certainty. Individuals with high self-efficacy and lower risk aversion are less likely to be deterred, increasing the uncertainty of repression’s effects. 

The talk’s focus was on elite cohesion and how it structures electoral repression. When ruling coalitions are cohesive, regimes rely on state security forces, making violence more organized and strategically targeted at competitive “swing” districts. When coalitions are fragmented, elites are more threatened by the risk that politicized state security forces will turn on them and instead outsource violence to militias, including violent interest groups, criminal organizations, and loosely organized bands of party supporters. This produces poorly targeted repression, often concentrated in strongholds, less lethal, and more prone to backfire. Internal power dynamics thus shape how electoral repression unfolds.

To illustrate this, Young drew on more than 5,000 incidents of electoral violence in Zimbabwe between 2000 and 2023. Periods of high elite cohesion, such as the 2002 presidential election, saw repression directed by state security forces in competitive districts. Periods of low cohesion, such as the 2000 legislative election and the 2008 runoff, saw militia-led violence concentrated in party strongholds, where it was less strategic and more likely to generate backlash.

By linking elite politics with these dynamics, Young’s work shows why electoral repression remains widespread but unevenly effective, and why even carefully planned repression can backfire.

On a busy Thursday afternoon at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL), I sat down with Professor Michael McFaul, Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies in the Department of Political Science, for a wide-ranging conversation on great power competition, U.S.–China relations, Cold War legacies, and the role of ideology in shaping global politics.

A former U.S. Ambassador to Russia and one of the most prominent voices on American foreign policy, Professor McFaul’s new book Autocrats vs. Democrats: China, Russia, America, and the New Global Disorder examines the stakes of the current geopolitical moment. Over the course of nearly an hour, we spoke about the elasticity of the term “great power competition,” the dangers of isolationism, the importance of middle powers, and the enduring influence of ideas in world politics. He also shared advice for young people interested in foreign policy, as well as the two books that shaped his early intellectual journey.

The term “great power competition” has become such a potent buzzword in Washington. Everyone uses it all the time, and it feels like it can mean many different things depending on who’s talking. How do you define great power competition? And do you think there’s a way for Washington to stop treating it as a catch-all phrase and instead turn it into a strategy with clear ends, means, and metrics?

The original motivation for writing my book came in 2017 when the Trump administration came into power. They wrote a National Security Strategy that very explicitly stated that we were in a new era of great power competition. And that document, in my view, became one of the most famous national security strategies of recent decades because it was so clear about that shift. The Pentagon even came up with an acronym — GPC (great power competition) — and when they create an acronym, it usually means it’s here to stay.

Around that time, there was also a big debate about whether we had entered a new Cold War. It began first with Russia — books were being written about a “new Cold War” as early as 2009 — and then the conversation shifted to China. So my first motivation for writing the book was to ask: Is this actually true? Is the Cold War analogy useful or not? My answer is complicated. Some things are similar, some things are different. Some of what’s similar is dangerous; some isn’t. Some of what’s different makes things less dangerous, and some of what’s different is scarier than the Cold War. If we don’t get the diagnosis right, then we won’t have smart policies to sustain American national interests.

You’ve written and spoken about how the Cold War analogy can be misleading. What are the main lessons from that period that we should remember, both the mistakes and the successes?

Because we “won” the Cold War, a lot of the mistakes made during it are forgotten. I use the analogy of when I used to coach third-grade basketball. If we won the game, nobody remembered the mistakes made in the first quarter. But if we lost, they remembered every single one. Because the U.S. “won,” people forget the mistakes.

There were major errors: McCarthyism, the Vietnam War, and allying with autocratic regimes like apartheid South Africa when we didn’t have to. So, in the book, I dedicate one chapter to the mistakes we should avoid, one to the successes we should replicate, and one to the new issues the Cold War analogy doesn’t answer at all. It’s not about glorifying the past; it’s about learning from it in a clear-eyed way.

President Trump and former President Biden have had very different approaches to great power competition. President Biden’s vision is closer to a liberal international order, whereas President Trump talks about a concert of great powers — almost a 19th-century idea. How do you evaluate that model? Do you think it can work today?

The short answer is no. I don’t believe in the concert model or in spheres of influence. That’s the 19th century, and this is the 21st. Trump’s team itself was internally confused on China. Trump personally thinks in terms of great powers carving up the world into spheres, but the national security strategy he signed was written by his advisors, not necessarily by him.

In thinking about Trump, I find it useful to remember that U.S. foreign policy debates don’t fall neatly between Democrats and Republicans. They run along three axes: isolationism versus internationalism, unilateralism versus multilateralism, and realism versus liberalism. Trump is radical on all three fronts — he’s an isolationist, he prefers unilateralism, and he doesn’t care about regime type. I think that combination is dangerous for America’s long-term interests.