# Another “disposition of things”

Lilian Mathieu, Maya Collombon

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Lilian Mathieu, Maya Collombon. Another “disposition of things”. Resisting autocratization in polarized societies, IPSA, Jul 2025, Séoul (Corée), South Korea. hal-05171476

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Lilian Mathieu
Maya Collombon

Another “disposition of things”:
autocratization as subjugation of fields of power

IPSA 2025 Conference, Seoul (South Korea), July 13-16
GL04 - Comparative Politics

Contemporary politics offer many examples of formerly democratic regimes turning authoritarian, the last but not least being the United States of America since the re-election of Donald Trump. Albeit probably the more spectacular and tremendous, as the US has for centuries been considered a democratic hallmark, this authoritarian turn counts many homologs such as Erdoğan's Türkiye, Maduro's Venezuela, Ortega's Nicaragua, El-Sisi's Egypt, Mossi's India and, of course, Putin's Russia—the fact that one can relate each country to the name of its leader appears an indication in itself of a personal exercise of power.

In this paper, we aim to offer new insight into what is usually called authoritarian turns, meaning the evolution of a given political regime from democracy to authoritarianism<fnref n="1" />. This aim relies on the assumption that there is no difference in essence, or clear-cut discrepancy, between democracy and authoritarianism. Instead, we assume that many political regimes evolve, or navigate, between the two in a complex dynamic made of institutional appropriations, political practice, and power relations. We also assume that such moves can be partial or generalized, sudden or progressive, and can experience setbacks. Our approach is inspired chiefly by Montesquieu who, centuries ago, stated that in a democracy, “power should stop power” thanks to a peculiar “disposition of things” that prevents any abuse of power. This invites us to consider authoritarianism as “another disposition of things” where, on the contrary, abuse of power becomes possible. We intend, more empirically and sociologically, to study the changes, within a given political system, in the relations between institutions or fields of power that allow some to exert abusive power over others and, sometimes, over the whole society.

Such an approach has been elaborated in the theoretical introduction of a book we edited a few years ago with the contribution of a dozen colleagues (Collombon & Mathieu 2021) and that is currently mobilized for a study we are conducting with our research team, which compares four cases of autocratization processes that differ in their historical and cultural situation, their paths, their ideologies, and the changes they provoked in the relations between different social fields: Vichy France (1940-1944), the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983), contemporary Russia under Putin's rule and Türkiye since Erdoğan's access to power. The third part of our paper will present some results from our previous and ongoing research. Still, we will first expose how our approach relates to existing theoretical frameworks (§ 1) and how its philosophical inspiration transposes into a sociological perspective (§ 2).

<footnote n="1">¹ The reverse move, from authoritarianism to democracy, falls under the well-known category of democratic transition. One can hypothesize that some normative reasons prevent scholars from using the category of authoritarian transition.</footnote>
# 1. From categories to processes

Our approach does not intend to draw a clear line or frontier between democracy and authoritarianism or to define what we consider as such. There already exist many canonical definitions of both concepts, and it would be useless and presumptuous to add new ones to that corpus. The first and main reason is that our aim is not to compare stable political regimes but rather to identify moments, modes, and mechanisms through which democracies can turn to authoritarianism. Truth is that many regime transformations take the shape of a brutal political change, the paradigm being military coups—like the 1976 Argentine one, which we will discuss below—but one can also think of popular insurrections appropriated and diverted by new leading groups that ensure their position in power with a drastic reduction of liberties—with a good case in point offered by the political domination of a religious cast after the 1979 Iranian revolution (e.g. Arjomand 1988; Khosrokhavar 1993). Without neglecting such tremendous changeovers, one must also acknowledge that many authoritarian turns take slower and more insidious paths, for example that of the progressive takeover or epuration of some institutions or a rampant redefinition of their procedures and prerogatives. How now President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has incrementally expanded his power over major Turkish institutions—such as the army, the media, and the judiciary—and increased his use of repression over his political opposition since his first mandate as Prime Minister in 2003, offers a good example of such gradual and complex processes, that will also be discussed below.

Many concepts have been coined to name and study such ambiguous regimes, such as competitive authoritarianism (Levitsky & Way 2002), liberalized autocracy (Brunberg 2002), semi-authoritarianism (Ottaway 2003), electoral authoritarianism (Schedler 2002), semi-democracy (Mainwaring, Brinks & Perez Liñan 2001), defective democracy (Lauth 2006), and, of course, illiberalism (Zakaria, 1997; Laruelle 2022, 2023). Each concept is certainly built on robust definitions with clear lists of relevant criteria and requirements, but one is left with a proliferation of categories that appear difficult to handle as they frequently overlap while illuminating heterogeneous aspects of empirical cases. There is a frequent temptation, when one observes that the regime she or he is studying does not exactly fit any available category, to create a new one, or to create a sub-category within an existing category, and as such to contribute to the categorical inflation with the sterile outcome to have a distinct category corresponding to each single empirical case.

The intellectual problem we are left with is our propensity, stressed by French political scientist Michel Dobry (2005), to equate analysis with classification, as if the work of social science was limited to classifying reality into stable categories. According to him, so doing exposes to different perils, the main one being the risk of reification and essentialism, i.e., the temptation to think that an unhistorical common element legitimates gathering different cases in a sole category, which can lead to anachronism (like when one carelessly uses “fascism” to label contemporary regimes)<fnref n="2" />. Another peril lies in the fact that typologies gather and organize cases in classifications that are often deemed stable at the risk of being static. Regime types are of little use to understand how and why some regimes change through time, due to internal or external dynamics such as economic crises, mass protests, or foreign pressure. It is doubtful that the same category (that of populism, for example) would be helpful to study the Venezuelan regime at the time of Hugo Chávez’s first assumption to power and after Nicolás Maduro’s third election. A last one consists of building concepts or categories on overly abstract, tight, and strict definitions, that prevent the addition of new or ambiguous cases under the existing

<footnote n="2">² As this peculiar example shows, another problem with categories is that they frequently use common sense labels with normative connotations: “fascism” is, at the same time, an historically situated reality (that of Italy between the early 1920s and the mid-1940s), a label that gathers heterogeneous but similar political programs and policies, and an insult in contemporary political debates (Dobry 2000).</footnote>
label; the mistake consists here of thinking that political reality should adapt or submit to the theory, and not that the theory should illuminate empirical data<fnref n="3" />.

The frustration, here, is due not so much to the exercise of definition itself as to its status in sociological analysis. If, like Mauss (2003), we consider that definition has a provisional status, in that it aims to delimit a field of exploration from the external contours of the object, it cannot constitute an end to research. The same difficulty arises concerning another methodological tradition, to which specialists in authoritarianism more systematically refer to: that of the Weberian ideal type. The adoption of this model has undoubtedly been encouraged by the fact that Weber appears as a precursor in the study of authoritarianism. His sociology of domination offers a typology of mostly non-democratic forms of exercising power: bureaucratic, patrimonial, feudal, or charismatic domination, with more precise variations—such as caesaropapism, hierocracy, or sultanism (Weber 2013). These are ideal types, i.e., “chimerical” models developed in the laboratory to shed light on a set of empirical phenomena by highlighting contrasts and nuances but not to gather them. Nor does it presuppose their historical or cultural homogeneity, inviting to the contrary to grasp similarities between social facts that appear at first sight “incomparable”.

Juan Linz was acutely aware of this contribution when he appropriated Weber's category of sultanism to study regimes that were far removed from the former Ottoman Empire, such as Cuba under Batista or Haiti under the Duvaliers, while pointing out that his category had more to do with an incompletion or decay of rational-legal authority than with an expression of its traditional form (Linz 1978). Even more decisively, he defined as authoritarian “political systems with limited, not responsible, political pluralism, without elaborate and guiding ideology, but with distinctive mentalities, without extensive nor intensive political mobilization, except at some points in their development, and in which a leader or occasionally a small group exercises power within formally ill-defined limits but actually quite predictable ones” (Linz 1964: 297). Focusing on the organization and modalities of the exercise of power rather than the objectives or orientations of the regimes, the category was thus able to shed light on a wide variety of cases.

Linz's perspective explicitly lays claim to the Weberian tradition, and the various sub-categories he proposed (bureaucratic-military, post-democratic, post-colonial, pre- or post-totalitarian, etc.), also presented as ideal types, are supposed to “correspond to no real case”. It appears unfortunate that many of his followers—and even himself, as stressed by Camau (2018)—neglect this cautious advice, and often confuse ideal type with class: the construction of an ideal type is the first step of a research work that will rely on empirical comparison, while classification is the result of a serialization and organization of various case studies. Many categories used to study authoritarian regimes are not ideal types, i.e., conceptual chimeras, but typologies aimed to classify real cases.

A last difficulty with typologies is that they often postulate that their categories are mutually exclusive: from this point of view, a bureaucratic-military regime would have nothing in common with a sultanism, and the political scientist would have no hesitation in classifying his or her case study as one or the other. The reality of the political world is, of course, quite different—to take just one example, the Dominican Republic under Trujillo (1930-1961) may have had features in common with both categories (Wiarda 1968). Many scholars are aware of this, given that many regimes claim to be democratic but fail or refuse to be so in practice. Renouncing the construction of pure, mutually exclusive categories, they have in recent years insisted on the coexistence, within the same regime, of authoritarian and democratic traits respectively. The notion of “hybridity” has emerged to name such situations, but without

<footnote n="3">³ We can borrow an example of such a mistake to another field of study, that of social movements: Alain Touraine’s definition of a genuine social movement was so demanding that no empirical mobilization could fit it and deserve the status of a social movement as he defined it.</footnote>
escaping the temptation, and perils, of classification, while the idea of a “grey zone” in which
ambiguous political systems navigate between limited restrictions of civil liberties and
generalized coercion allows to a more dynamic understanding of regime change but without
offering much accuracy on what those changes consist of.

To do so and better understand what an autocratization process is made of, we propose to focus on *contextualized political practice*, meaning how individual and collective actors concretely make use of their available resources (especially but not exclusively institutional ones) to strengthen and unfold their power in a way that removes them from democratic principles. Such an approach does not presuppose that such actors are all-powerful or that they owe their possible success to some personal extraordinary qualities. On the contrary, they must comply with institutional constraints, structural patterns, and contextual restrictions, and are always caught in configurations of interdependence that shape, and limit, their strategic capabilities. This means that a sociological understanding of authoritarian upheavals must situate political actors within their fields of action—that determine their practices and perceptions with norms, rules, routines, resources, etc.—and identify what mechanisms mold their eventual access to, or preservation of, political power. One could astutely and rightly notice that such an approach also fits a study of politics in democratic regimes; as we previously stated, our approach presupposes no difference in “nature” or “essence” between democratic and authoritarian political action.

## 2. A reconfiguration of fields of power

The approach adopted here focuses on the gradual or radical changes that bring some regimes closer to authoritarianism or make them fully authoritarian. In other words, the analysis focuses on the dynamics of historical evolution rather than on the stability of clear-cut categorizations. There is no pretense of originality in this approach: the processes of autocratization or de-democratization have already been the subject of substantial studies that take some measure of the dynamics of change, but without always escaping the limitations just mentioned.

The concept of autocratization, for example, has been proposed by Andrea Cassani and Luca Tomini (2018) who consider it a process symmetrical to that of democratization. Noting that many countries involved in the “third wave of democratization” are stagnating in the so-called “grey zone”, they insist that autocratization does not only affect genuine democracies but can also mean an even more marked deterioration in regimes that are already illiberal. The perspective succumbs to the typological temptation when it subdivides the notion of autocratization into sub-categories (liberal democracy, defective democracy, electoral democracy, closed autocracy) distinguished according to their degree of political closure. If the perspective can be asserted as processual, it is by presupposing a gradualism that is, in an inverted form, the same teleologism that has been criticized in the study of democratic transitions. The notion of de-democratization, for its part, has been coined by Charles Tilly (2003) to measure the democratic “performance” (and its possible regression) of regimes. Its main interest lies in its focus on inequalities in political participation, distinguishing between sections of the population differently positioned in the social structure. However, because it is essentially concerned with structural variables, it seems difficult to use in the study of the concrete ways in which authoritarian changes are achieved.

From this point of view, a better understanding of temporality allows for counterbalancing the statism of structural or institutional approaches. In this respect, we might point out that the canonical form of authoritarian turns is that of the coup d'État, led by all or part of the military forces and brutally overthrowing a constitutional government. The term
“coup” suggests a rapidity confirmed by the dates that later designate it (December 2, 1851, in France, September 11, 1973, in Chile, March 24, 1976, in Argentina, etc.). The striking contrast between a “before” of public freedoms and progressive measures—the “thousand days” of the Allende government come to mind—and a coercive “after”—military deployment in the streets, a wave of arrests, uniformed officers on TV screens, etc.—is part of this ordinary perception of a clear divide between democracy and authoritarianism.

The two most classic references for the approach to “democratic collapses” envisage temporal sequences of unequal amplitude. Juan Linz’s is the most extensive, beginning with the weakening of a regime unable to cope with major difficulties and subject to the harassment of a disloyal opposition that stands as a last resort. The polarization between the regime and its opposition comes to its end when the former decides to use force against the latter. The loyalty or dissent (or even the declared neutrality) of the armed forces ultimately determines whether the monopoly of legitimate violence is maintained or transferred, i.e., the actual location of state power. Edward Luttwak’s (1996) approach focuses on the short duration of the coup d’État, detailing its many dimensions (cutting off communications, neutralizing opponents, blocking roads, etc.). His main contribution lies in the observation that modern states are characterized by a differentiation between their leadership apparatus and their administrative bureaucracy (including, especially, the army and police). From this point of view, a coup d’État can be summed up as a transfer of allegiance of this bureaucracy from the old political leadership to the new, without requiring any transformation of the state structure: it acts by “infiltrating a small but essential cog in the state’s administrative machine, a cog which is then used to prevent the government from exercising control over the whole”<fnref n="4" />.

What these two approaches have in common is that they focus their attention on the state of relations between distinct political or social bodies—the government, its opposition, the army, the popular masses, intellectual or religious authorities, etc.—and especially on the variations in loyalty accorded to the regime and its representatives. Put another way, this kind of political change proceeds by shifting the allegiances of a significant part of the social world from the current government to its challengers, or by submitting this social world to new contenders to state power. In itself a banal proposition, it is worth clarifying to sketch out a research program: the aim is to identify which components of this social world are withdrawing, or forced to withdraw, their loyalty from the existing regime and transferring it to the new pretenders. These components can vary in size and, as Luttwak puts it, they may be no more than a “small but essential cog in the wheel”, capable of blocking the state’s action and bringing about the rallying—or, at least initially, the wait-and-see attitude—of wider sectors.

The theoretical perspective we adopt stands in line with such sociological achievements, that put the relations between differentiated social sectors or milieus at the fore. Bourdieu’s theory of fields appears helpful here, as it invites us to conceive modern states as configurations of relatively autonomous, but also competitive, fields that obey their own logic and fulfill their own interests. Maintaining its autonomy in front of other fields’ propensity to interfere or intrude within its own prerogatives or stakes is a sociological expression of Montesquieu’s “equilibrium of powers”—just like when the judiciary field must protect from government pressures (for example, in the designation of judges or the respect for judicial decisions) or when the military intends to subtract its activities from parliamentary control. Bourdieu’s concept of field of power (2014) however invites not to restrict such an approach to state institutions, as it expands its apprehension to power relations between all social fields that compose a given society and encourages to study how their mutual relations are defined by gradual and evolutive degrees of autonomy or heteronomy. Our stance is that many

<footnote n="4">⁴ Our translation from the French edition.</footnote>
authoritarian upheavals take the form of a drastic reduction in the autonomy of politically
decisive or sensitive fields, and their subjugation to other more powerful fields.

Invaluable for the study of sudden democratic collapses, this perspective is just as heuristic for the study of slower authoritarian turns: they too proceed by recomposing power relations between influential or sensitive fields. As suggested by Dobry—who instead uses the sector concept to name social differentiation—the legitimization of political systems is not just a matter of belief in the legitimacy of institutions but also of stabilization of “collusive transactions” between a multiplicity of social microcosms. The existence of such “exchanges of service” between sectors, which are often discreet because they have little legitimacy, usually generates mutual recognition and support, and ensures the consolidation of political systems. On the other hand, “it is the crumbling and visible breakdown of the flow of collusive transactions that leads to the most intense processes of delegitimization in our societies” (Dobry 2009: 113) by depriving certain bodies of the support on which their survival depends. It is, for example, such a breakdown in exchanges with some fractions of the business and trade union sectors that condemned the Allende government in the run-up to September 11, 1973, at a time the Chilean economic sector was entering into new relations with the military elites.

Consequently, the approach advocated here does not consider authoritarian turns as ruptures, more or less gradual or brutal, but as reconfigurations of the mutual relations maintained by a set of political or social sectors. The suspension of inter-sectoral transactions or the rebalancing of their flow and terms has major political effects, placing some sectors in a position to impose their own rules of the game and assert their interests. Hence, our apprehension of authoritarianism as “another disposition of things”—or, more precisely, as another configuration of intersectoral relations—which no longer allows “power to be stopped by power” but, on the contrary, authorizes its immoderate exercise. No doubt, this type of reconfiguration primarily affects the components of the state system, especially the most sensitive and influential, such as the parliamentary, the army, and the judiciary. It also affects other, possibly extra-state, fields, such as the economy (e.g., the integration of military personnel into the management of Argentina’s most dynamic companies), religion (e.g., the Catholic Church’s active support for Franco’s insurrection during the Spanish Civil War) or the media (e.g., the accusations of corruption made against President Dilma Rousseff by Brazil’s major press groups; see Goirand 2021).

While it would be impossible here to draw up an exhaustive list of the political and social recompositions capable of supporting and consolidating authoritarian shifts, it is possible to suggest a few of them. The creation of parastatal bodies (such as the Citizen Power Committees in Ortega’s Nicaragua, studied by Collombon 2021), which play an eminent role in clientelist redistribution, favors the establishment of new allegiances—within the limits of available resources, however, as the uncertain fate of the trade unions’ enlistment in the Chavist project in Venezuela also shows (Posado 2021). More generally, creating new institutions and endowing them with unprecedented political influence appears to be a classic stage in phases of authoritarian consolidation—like the corporatist institutions set up by fascist regimes (Costa Pinto 2017)—whose aim is often to disarm potential opposition by co-opting it. The reconfiguration of inter-sectoral relations can also be due to the emergence of a new social player, forcing others to take up a position about it and overturning previous relationships. Examples include the rise to power in Colombia in the 1980s and 1990s of a powerful criminal underworld based on narcotrafficking, with its corrupting resources but also fought by paramilitary groups (Grajales 2016), or how the dynamism of the new evangelical churches and the Gülen brotherhood contributed, respectively, to the election of Jair Bolsonaro and the rise to power of the Turkish AKP (Goirand 2021; Balçi 2014).

The authoritarian reconfiguration of intersectoral relations does not only affect those within the purview of state power or “elites”. Authoritarianism frequently acts by ideological
takeover, purging or prohibiting the activity of social worlds (such as the academic, cultural, or trade union fields) perceived as potentially threatening. It is from the angle of a radical loss of autonomy in some sectors that many authoritarian upheavals should be viewed. The Vichy government's attempt to purge the educational milieu of Republican and laicist ideas is a good illustration of this (Fontaine 2021), as was, in Poland, the former PiS government's promotion of a national history ideologically in line with its interests, elaborated by a fraction of politically dependent historians (Behr 2021). One of the keys to the consolidation of contemporary Turkish authoritarianism is the subjugation of local government (Pineau 2021) similar to the subjugation of the French parliament following Louis Bonaparte's 18 Brumaire (Tardits 2021). Such strategies of heteronomization, which directly affect the activity of fields deemed "sensitive", are however not without their contradictions and limitations when they are appropriated and hijacked by those on whom they are imposed—as in the case of academics in Putin's Russia, who sometimes proved able to turn the new rules of university competition to their advantage (Sigman 2021).

A reading in terms of the heteronomization or autonomization of sectors specialized in legitimate violence sheds light on the intersectoral alliances and internal reconfigurations that "hold together" sometimes competing sectors such as the army, the police—or even militias or paramilitaries—or the judiciary, and that enable the state to subjugate other sectors. No more than a democratic regime, an authoritarian one does not resemble a unified, coherent center of power but routinely exercises its domination by delegating a substantial part of its monopoly of violence to parastatal or private bodies. The Vichy state adopted such a strategy, with the foundation of paramilitary groups, first aimed to mobilize veterans in its national regeneration project but finally to support the nazis in their fight against the French Resistance. Created in 1943 and headed by a Waffen SS French member, Joseph Darnant, the *Milice* acted as military police and committed many arbitrary arrests, robberies, raids, tortures, and murders. Similarly, the Colombian state managed to remain at the heart of the political game by discreetly delegating to paramilitary groups the task of regaining control of territories under guerrilla command while publicly disqualifying them as criminal enterprises devoid of any political legitimacy (Grajales 2016).

Although they are often the instruments, or even the architects, of these changes, the coercive sectors are not always central to the authoritarian turns, and the initiative does not necessarily lie within them. The case of Uruguay provides an example of processual bifurcation, as the turn towards authoritarianism began on the initiative of a civilian power: it was officially to protect the constitutional order that the elected governments of Jorge Pacheco Areco and then Juan María Bordaberry adopted a series of measures in the early 1970s that undermined the separation of powers and legitimized the violent repression of protest movements. The 1973 military coup suspended parliament but kept Bordaberry in the presidency until 1976, when he was ousted and all references to the defense of democracy were abandoned (Demasi et al. 2013). Here, the authoritarian turn anticipated the militarization of the regime, and the adoption of a broader temporal focus makes it possible to situate the moment of the coup as a step in a process that eluded some of its initiators. Indeed, authoritarian turns are the product of recompositions that involve a degree of randomness, trial and error, and, at times, contradiction.

For authoritarian regimes, the construction and performance, as well as the control, of repressive apparatuses are therefore crucial, as they determine both their longevity and how they leave power. Dictators must be wary of their coercive apparatuses and manage the internal disputes that make them fragmented, potentially competing institutions capable of acquiring a level of autonomy that threatens their power. Put another way, their survival depends on their ability to establish lasting collusive transactions (e.g., in the form of access to economic or political resources) with their armed sectors. It is when these transactions are threatened or broken off—for example, when military forces feel that the definition they intend to give to
their role and activity is being called into question by civilian sectors—that golpist temptations arise. The case of Türkiye provides an interesting illustration since the AKP government has endeavored to reduce the military’s long-standing hold on national political life (including, on several occasions, placing itself at the helm of the State). This gradual but drastic reduction in the army’s autonomy certainly aroused resistance—exacerbated in July 2016 by the classic but flawed form of a coup—but it has not been accompanied by a democratization of the regime. On the contrary, it was part of the same authoritarian turn that saw the judiciary and academia purged and placed under tutelage in parallel—e.g., by locking up opponents under the label of “terrorists” (Kaya 2021). As the Turkish case shows, autonomy and heteronomy do not have unambiguous effects or meanings in this respect, and their respective variations are no a priori guarantee of democratic gains.

### 3. Three empirical cases

The analytical approach pictured above has been implemented in a research program—the “Calot” project<fnref n="5" />—that compares four distinct cases: Vichy France (1940-1944), the last Argentine dictatorship (1976-1983), and contemporary Russia and Türkiye. The research mostly focuses on how those authoritarian upheavals have affected or affect ordinary activity, and even individual daily lives, within various social fields considered “sensitive” and potentially challenging by authoritarian regimes, that intend to reduce their autonomy while interfering in their ordinary course. We present here three such situations: music under Vichy France, the academy under the last Argentine dictatorship, and the judiciary in contemporary Türkiye.

#### 3.1. Music under Vichy France

France’s brutal defeat by Nazi Germany in June 1940 provoked the collapse of the Third Republic as members of the parliament, who had sought refuge in Vichy, a small thermal town, granted by their vote full power to Marshall Philippe Pétain on July 10. Considered a hero for his victories during WW1, but for long a critic of democratic values, Pétain immediately launched a global reform of French institutions to “regenerate” national pride and vigor, and to fight all those alleged responsible for the military disaster, among them Jews, Communists, freemasons and all those who, as he said in a famous speech, had given priority to “the spirit of enjoyment over the spirit of sacrifice”. No longer a republic, the so-called “French state” headed by its old “chief” renounced many democratic principles but also affirmed its will to reform French peoples’ hearts and minds. A remarkable feature of Vichy France is the importance the regime gave to ideological issues: convinced that demoralization was responsible for the defeat, it undertook the task of purifying the whole French cultural and intellectual life by eliminating all ferments of disheartenment and immorality. This took the form of growing intervention, through new regulations, on academic, intellectual, literary, and artistic activity (Riding 2010). The case of music offers a good example of the political heteronomization of artistic life.

The cultural policies first took the form of epuration, as the new French state intended to prevent all “agents of demoralization” from continuing their alleged undermining work. Jews were the main targets, as shown by the rapid adoption of a series of laws prohibiting them from practicing some professions, among them many related to entertainment and culture. The October 3, 1940, and then the June 2, 1941, laws on the status of Jews excluded all artists who were unable to prove they were Aryans from performing on stage or running a theater or concert

<footnote n="5">⁵ The CALOT Project « The Consequence of forced loyalty » is subsidized by the French National Agency for Research (ANR): https://anr.fr/Project-ANR-19-CE41-0012</footnote>
hall. Jewish musicians were dismissed from orchestras despite some entrepreneurs complaining that, as many alternates were held prisoners in Germany, they would be difficult to replace. However, the specific institution in charge of the antisemitic policy, the *Commissariat general aux questions juives*, would answer those complains that “The Jewish working in the arts will thus be able to present to the public personal conceptions that are foreign to the French spirit” (quoted in Le Bail 2016, 133-134) and therefore were to be excluded from stage performance. Lacking musicians, Parisian orchestras were forced to merge temporarily, while in Lyon the Opéra was forced to recruit amateur singers to fill a sparse choir.

Epuration did not only affect performing musicians, but also musical works written by Jewish authors, past or present, which were prohibited in concert halls, on airwaves, and as movie music. Living Jewish musicians faced difficulties in receiving their (now reduced) royalties as the institution in charge of distributing them was “Aryanized”. The use of artistic names was prohibited so that the cultural institutions could identify Jewish patronyms. Thus, deprived of professional opportunities, Jewish musicians turned to private lessons or clandestine practice while the most famous of them—such as classic composer Danius Milhaud or jazzman Ray Ventura—took the road to exile. Epuration also affected teaching institutions—such as the Paris Conservatoire, from which Jewish teachers were quickly dismissed, soon to be followed by Jewish students (who had first been banned from receiving prizes)—and musicology, as books devoted to musicians such as Offenbach or Meyerbeer were withdrawn from sale. Not all musical *genres* were affected the same way, and jazz was particularly ostracized, with a blacklisting of American composers after the US entered the war. Collaborationist amateurs—such as Lucien Rebatet—however claimed that Black American jazz players were only interpreters of musical themes of European (white) origin and that jazz had little to do with African roots.

Vichy musical policy was not only obstructive. It also intended to re-organize musical life with new principles. A famous pianist and a fervent Pétainist, Alfred Cortot was missioned to reform musical institutions while musicologist Joseph Canteloube was praised for his preservation of rural traditional musical heritages, that perfectly fitted Pétain's ruralist and conservative ideology—confirming that consecrated artists are structurally inclined to both aesthetic and political conservatism (Sapiro 2014). Arthur Honegger was delighted to see his oratorio on Joan of Arc staged with the support of French state and, with other famous European musicians, accepted an invitation to Vienna offered by the Nazis to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Mozart's death. Like all professional sectors, the world of music was submitted to a corporatist pattern under the form of an “Organizational Committee” intended to favor the cooperation of employers and employees, but its overlaps with other close committees (those of music edition, music teaching, and music composition) quickly produced bureaucratic blockades.

Vichy also adopted a positive policy while supporting some works appreciated not so much for the esthetical value but rather for their alleged ideological influence, such as the musical show *Portique pour une jeune fille de France* that celebrated the figure of Joan of Arc and mobilized 250 musicians, 200 chorists, and 100 comedians. Compared to other cultural fields, music appeared less able to resist political heteronomization, as suggested by Simon who states that “in a context of reinforced interventionism and the absence of a private market (unlike the plastic arts, literature, and cinema), the music finds itself in a situation of dependence on the State that it has never experienced. (...) The behavior of composers is the result of a difficult balance between ideology, market share in the musical field, and immediate pecuniary necessities” (2009, 367).

One of the key features of Vichy France was that it was an authoritarian regime placed under the tutelage of another authoritarian regime, Nazi Germany. Between July 1940 and November 1942, French territory was divided into two zones: the Northern one was under
German rule whereas the Southern one was governed by Vichy. In the Northern zone, where Paris is situated, all French musical institutions and facilities were under the control of the nazis, such as the main radio station, Radio Paris. As the Nazis had more resources than the French state, it was difficult for many musicians and singers to neglect job and promotion opportunities. This applied not only to instrumentalists and support staff but also to stars of the chanson scene or of classical music who found it hard to resist the Germans' tempting offers, at the risk of compromission. The fact that Radio-Paris claimed to give priority to entertainment did not prevent it from being an instrument of propaganda and cultural domination at the service of the occupying forces, who tightly controlled its programs. Similarly, while the Nazis, anxious to avoid "propagandist excesses", had initially promoted "reconciliation through music", with a majority of French works broadcast over the radio, a study of Radio-Paris programming showed that this was not the case, as Germanic works remained predominant (Le Bail 2016, 87).

Pro-nazi propaganda was not absent from the Southern zone and Vichy actively collaborated in the promotion of German culture to ease the pain of defeat. An example is given by the concert of German music (Haydn, Schubert, Wagner, and Strauss) the Berlin Philharmonic performed in Lyon on May 18, 1942, for which police monitoring and institutional facilities were complacently displayed by French authorities (Mathieu 2022). This exemplary case demonstrates Vichy's authoritarian hold over the world of music. Simple enjoyment of music was somehow impossible in a context where the nationality and status of composers, as well as those of performers, were imbued with connotations that had little to do with aesthetics. It was equally impossible with many of the seats occupied by police officers watching the audience to prevent any expression of dissent, and forces of order deployed outside the concert hall to arrest protesters. Lastly, it was impossible since the concert was not only a social event to showcase the collaboration of those who had been enemies until recently, but also an act in which the vanquished were forced to submit to the domination of the victor.

## 3.2. Argentine Academy during the last dictatorship

In Argentina, the 1976 coup d'état marked a drastic turning point in a long-standing pattern of increasing authoritarianism, characterized by alternating periods of military hardening and brief phases of democratization. The 1960s in Argentina are symptomatic in this regard: they were years of cultural boom, liberalization of social norms, and multiple artistic avant-gardes, marked by strong leftist politicization (with various tendencies, including political groups calling for the return of former leader Perón), as well as intense union and student activity. At the same time, the self-proclaimed "Argentine Revolution" launched by General Juan Carlos Onganía in 1966 marked a tightening of repression and the defense of a conservative and ultra-Catholic model of the Argentine "new man." While universities were being transformed under the influence of Marxist ideas and strong student mobilization, the Argentine Revolution aimed to restore order in schools and universities through repression, as seen in the brutal persecution of professors and students during the *Night of the Long Batons (La Noche de los Bastones Largos)* in 1966. The clash between these two opposing political models, the increasing repression of Onganía's military regime, and the support for social causes in an internationally turbulent context (the 1959 Cuban Revolution, the U.S. civil rights movement, May '68 in France, etc.) were some of the triggers of the *Córdobazo*, a massive worker and student mobilization that took place in the city of Córdoba on May 29 and 30, 1969 (Brennan, Gordillo, 2008). The *Córdobazo* notably marked a turning point in the relationship between the government and the universities, further deepening distrust and discord. The repression of the workers' and student movement in 1969 was particularly intense, followed by a government attempt to regain control over the country's major universities—these were years of direct intervention in the faculties by the regime. In response, the student movement
organized and expanded. Between 1969 and 1973, the occupation of public colleges, high schools, and universities became a common form of mobilization within the education and academic sector. This was notably the case at the School of Fine Arts, where Martin studied. Previously located in a beautiful building in Recoleta, a wealthy neighborhood in the heart of the capital, the school was relocated to the working-class district of La Boca. Students occupied the new premises and organized large demonstrations both inside and outside the school. It was there that Martin encountered the *Peronist University Youth* (JUP) and became an active militant throughout his years at the school. Like him, many Argentines experienced their university years—especially in some faculties of the University of Buenos Aires—through the lens of political engagement, joining leftist organizations (both Peronist and non-Peronist). Some of these groups became increasingly radicalized during the early 1970s, with certain factions opting for armed struggle. Organizations such as the *Montoneros* or the *ERP* (People's Revolutionary Army) had strong militant bases in the universities. Helen, who would later become an academic, joined the ERP through these local student engagements before she even turned 20. By the time of the 1976 coup d'état, she was a full member of the organization and fully committed to the path of armed struggle it had chosen.

The death of Perón and the rise to power of Isabel Perón changed the political landscape: the creation of the *Triple A* (Argentine Anticommunist Alliance) by far right Peronist José López Rega in 1974 marked the beginning of years of persecution targeting armed political organizations. The ERP and *Montoneros* were the first to be targeted in this wave of political violence, which included mass imprisonments and disappearances. Among the victims, students and university members were particularly numerous. Rosario, for instance, was imprisoned for being a Peronist militant at the university during Isabel Perón's government and was only released—fortunately safe—after the end of the dictatorship.

While the effort to bring universities into line continued throughout the years of the Argentine Revolution and persisted during Isabel Perón's government—with the violent repression carried out by the *Triple A*—it reached its full magnitude after the coup d'état of March 24, 1976, during the years of the self-proclaimed *Proceso de Reorganización Nacional* (National Reorganization Process). The dictatorship, aiming to control the cultural and educational sectors—seen as "major tools of ideological infiltration" (Avellaneda, 2006, p. 39)—implemented a series of repressive measures accompanied by legal innovations. These were often based on the legal vacuum created by the *Actas del Proceso*, decisions that lacked any legal foundation other than the invocation of the state of siege established on March 24, 1976. These measures enabled the regime to regulate intellectual life in order to ensure it aligned with its ideological agenda. In an effort to end leftist politicization in universities, the military quickly tightened their grip by installing loyal figures inside the faculties. Military personnel were appointed as university rectors, professors, and curricula were thoroughly overhauled to reflect the regime's ideological expectations (Risler, 2018; Casareto, Daleo, 2020). Professors deemed "subversive"—a vague label for the regime's so-called "internal enemies"—were dismissed, imprisoned, or in many cases, disappeared. Some academic programs were radically altered, while others were stripped of content entirely. One notable example was the sociology program, which had developed over the previous decades and had experienced the golden years of the development of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), its curriculum being altered in its content, before eventually disappearing as a career option.

Students were silenced, and university political groups were persecuted. Students were among the first to suffer the persecutions and disappearances carried out by various police forces and intelligence services involved in the repression—most notably the *Dirección de Inteligencia de la Policía de la Provincia de Buenos Aires* (DIPBA), the State Intelligence Secretariat (SIDE), and the task forces (*grupos de tarea*) of the ESMA. Academics went into exile in large numbers
(Yankelevich, 2010), went underground, or, when they could stay, kept a low profile. Some organized private classes in their own home where they could teach issues prohibited in class (Villalonga 2022). Entrance to university buildings was controlled, and in classrooms, the fear of being spied on by policemen posing as students hampered sociability. The testimonies gathered during our research evoke a sluggish and intellectually discouraging atmosphere, in stark contrast to the effervescence of the pre-coup years. That is the case for Rachel, who was pursuing a degree in education within the Faculty of Social Sciences at UBA. She recalls how drastically the atmosphere changed after the coup: students felt constantly watched, the faculty lost many of its best professors, and the following years were marked by both a gutted curriculum and student life reduced to its bare minimum.

The heteronomization of the academic field was fully accomplished by the end of the 1970s, even though the *Proceso* military regime had only been in power for a few years. This was due to the extreme violence of the 1976–1979 period, during which university staff and students were persecuted, disappeared in significant numbers, or fled into exile. Thus, part of the regime's success in ideologically subjugating the academic world in these years of the last military regime stemmed from the continuity of control policies implemented by successive military governments throughout the 1960s and 1970s, all of which pursued the same goal: placing the academic sphere under strict supervision. Ultimately, the regime managed to bring universities—and especially the University of Buenos Aires—into submission, silencing much of the dissenting voices that once characterized the diversity of Argentine political expression at the time, through the excessive use of political violence.

### 3.3. *Turkish judicial field under AKP influence*

Contrary to the two former ones, Türkiye is a contemporary case that does not fit the canonical image of a brutal change in government. First elected mayor of the country's main town, Istanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's first access to state power appeared in 2003 when he was appointed prime minister after his party, the AKP (Party for Justice and Development), won the parliamentary elections the previous year. It was after a few years in power that Erdoğan's ruling progressively appeared more and more authoritarian, especially after the harsh coercion of the 2013 Gezi mobilization, which protested the destruction of a public park in Istanbul and, above all, after the July 2016 failed military coup attempt which led to many trials and army epuration. Erdoğan's exercise of power is marked by repeated allegations of corruption, betrayal of his former allies such as the Gülen brotherhood, attacks against secular republican principles, a hard-hand policy against Kurdish independence claims and struggles, control over the media, a constitutional reform that grants him extended powers as president, an epuration of dissenting voices within the academy and, recently, the arrest and incarceration of his main political challenger. It is also marked by a drastic reduction in the independence of the judiciary that has been studied within our research group by Sümbül Kaya, whose chapter (Kaya 2021) is the main source here.

A fundamental dimension of democracy, the independence of the judiciary, is also a stake in the permanent struggles that shape all complex political systems. The independence and impartiality of judges and courts were already partial before the AKP came to power in 2002. Since the foundation of the Republic, Kemalist elites have been very active in judicial institutions and have dominated the Constitutional Court. Access to the legal professions remained for a long time under the control of the Kemalist establishment, above all through the disciplinary power of the High Council of Judges and Public Prosecutors (HSYK). This High Council, a key institution in the judicial system, is responsible for the appointment of judges and prosecutors, career development, disciplinary procedures, and dismissals. Its independence,
however, has always been doubtful, with the Minister of Justice being its chairman and its
investigators being directly answerable to the Ministry.

A higher degree of autonomy was nevertheless granted to the HSYK after a
constitutional amendment was adopted, under pressure from European institutions, in 2010 by
the AKP majority in parliament and approved with a 58% vote in a referendum, which gave the
HSYK a more pluralist structure and, above all, increased its independence vis-à-vis the
government. The HSYK was since supposed to represent the entire judiciary, whereas
previously, only the Court of Cassation and the Council of State were represented. Almost half
of its full members (10 out of 22) were to be elected by all judges and prosecutors in the general
and administrative courts, without interference from the executive. Judicial control was open
over HSYK decisions and, while remaining Chairman of the Council, the role of the Minister
of Justice was reduced to a symbolic one, while the inspectors responsible for monitoring the
work of judges were attached to the HSYK rather than to the Ministry.

These advances proved fragile, however: the December 2013 crisis triggered by
corruption cases involving relatives of several AKP ministers led the government, which used
the influence of the Gülen brotherhood within the judiciary as a pretext to regain control of the
HSYK. On February 15, 2014, a new law once again modified the structure of the HSYK,
limiting decisions to the plenary committee and strengthening the role of the Minister of Justice.
The latter was given extended control over investigations against magistrates, power to appoint
staff in charge of them, and ability to supervise the work of inspection committees. The AKP
now dominates the HSYK, since the Minister of Justice and his first advisor sit on it, four of its
members are appointed by the President of the Republic, and seven others are elected by the
parliament, where the AKP has a majority. As a result, judges and prosecutors have lost all
power over the selection of HSYK members.

Alongside the HSYK's political influence, control over the recruitment of judges seems
essential to understanding how the AKP strengthened its grip on the judiciary. The presidential
party resorted to numerous punitive administrative transfers of magistrates accused of
belonging to the Gülen movement. After the 2016 coup attempt, for which the Gülen
brotherhood was considered the instigator, purges led to the dismissal of 4,238 judges and
prosecutors, mechanically triggering the need to recruit new magistrates, among them many
lawyers with AKP sympathies. A reform of the recruitment procedure, with simpler and shorter
exams, enabled AKP cadres to be transferred to the posts of judges and public prosecutors. This
change in recruitment has reinforced the ideological homogenization of magistrates in charge
of political affairs, inclining them to privilege not only the state institution but also the
presidency.

On the other side, pressure and intimidation are used against judges who try to preserve
their autonomy. Pro-government politicians and media frequently criticize judicial decisions
when they do not support AKP positions or interests. An investigation was opened, for example,
against the president of the 20th Ankara Criminal Court and his three assessors after they
acquitted and released a former army officer who was prosecuted for his involvement in the
failed coup. When they are not enough to intimidate and domesticate them, such investigations
into recalcitrant judges lead to forced transfers or dismissals.

Regarded as a dangerous institution that needs to be domesticated, the Turkish judiciary
is no longer able to act according to its “own law”—in the etymological sense of the word
autonomy—and tends to transpose the injunctions of those in power in the political arena into
its operations and decisions. Albeit this did not take the form of a brutal and violent
transformation of the Turkish institutional system, but of a few insidious changes in apparently
technical issues (the way HSYK members are appointed and judges are selected), the
independence of the judiciary has been seriously undermined. Turkish judicial field is no longer
placed in a “disposition of things” that enables it to stop executive power but, on the contrary,
constitutes one of the instruments through which the abuse of power that Montesquieu warned about is made possible.

*

Some decisions handed down by Turkish criminal courts and the Constitutional Court, however, suggest that some judges resist political pressure and dare to render verdicts contrary to the expectations of the executive. This was the case in 2019 when the Constitutional Court canceled, as a violation of the freedom of expression, the dismissal of thousands of academics who had firmed a petition denouncing army crimes in the South-East. Such resistance shows that field autonomy or heteronomy is not a stable feature that allows the establishment of fixed categories but a stake in the unstable struggle between insiders and outsiders who attempt to subjugate it. It is this resistance—however weak, frequently defeated, or even annihilated—that our approach allows us to consider. Authoritarian turns may well be decided and accomplished by autocrats, they must comply with contextual circumstances, institutional routines, social structuration, normative perceptions, available supports, reluctant challengers, etc., that influence their strategies and determine their outcomes. All are factors that shape the dynamics of authoritarian turns and mold their historical form.

Our approach also allows us to escape normative and never-ending definition debates about genuine democracy or authoritarianism, as it shows that no clear nor stable frontier exists between them. Instead, it helps to identify authoritarian logic within democracies, locate hotbeds of democratic resistance within authoritarian regimes, and measure how various social fields differently experience subjugation attempts. Considering wider temporalities of regime change, the approach also enables identifying a set of steps and mechanisms through which, insidiously or brutally, autocrats intend to undermine counter-powers (such as the judiciary) and domesticate potential challengers (such as the academy or the art world). Identifying those steps and understanding how they participate in autocratization dynamics appears important both for scientific knowledge and for democratic life.

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