Building Democratic Resilience to Authoritarian Influence
In recent years, authoritarian powers have mobilized and emerged as active and purposeful transnational forces who have influenced societies of all types. They are using massive resources and coordinated political efforts to chip away at the rules-based international institutions that have served as the glue for the post-Cold War liberal order. Authoritarian regimes have expanded their influence abroad to undermine democratic norms, subvert institutions, and interfere in national political processes. Their strategies include the deployment of economic coercion, leveraging of repressive technologies, manipulation of the information landscape, and elite capture. Their networked, cross-border operations aim to prevent the emergence of democracy where it does not yet exist and subvert it where it does. To address this rapidly evolving challenge, democratic advocates need to cultivate new forms of collaboration, knowledge-sharing, and innovation.
NED’s support enables partners to undertake three lines of work: develop understanding of foreign authoritarian influence; increase awareness about the impacts of the challenge; and take meaningful action to build the resilience of democratic processes and institutions in the face of the corrosive impact of this influence.
Civil society partners are deepening their analyses of the trends and potential impacts of authoritarian influence across various countries and regions. This is done by analyzing cases of influence and strengthening the capacity of local stakeholders to identify and track the different levers of influence and their effects on democratic institutions.
NED also focuses on supporting partners to raise awareness more broadly about the implications of authoritarian influence. This helps public understanding and engagement with key stakeholders across different sectors to build consensus and commitment.
A critical part of the NED’s work includes supporting partners to convert this knowledge and awareness into policy. Partners are also connecting with peers across borders to develop a comprehensive picture of the problem globally, share strategies for responding, and lay the foundations for collaboration to address the challenge in an equally systemic and holistic manner.
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(Photo courtesy of IRI)
Foreign authoritarian actors such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are taking an increasingly aggressive approach to exerting influence in democracies around the world. Since 2018, IRI’s Countering Foreign Authoritarian Influence (CFAI) programming has equipped democracies to push back through cutting-edge research, global convening, and equipping on-the-ground actors with the resources to creatively demand accountability and transparency from their governments. IRI’s research, training, and networking approach prioritizes connecting the global issue of CCP influence to specific local challenges to democracy and hands-on technical skills training and mentorship.
With this approach, IRI and its partners are raising awareness about foreign authoritarian influence and its impact on democracy and empowering partner researchers, academics, civil society, and journalists with the skills and tools to identify, expose, and counter foreign authoritarian influence in their local contexts. IRI has built a global network of over 500 activists, researchers, and journalists from 68 countries united in their commitment to build democratic resilience; established cross-regional and cross-thematic partnerships to learn from each other and advance shared goals; connected grassroots activists to international advocacy and democratic unity efforts; and supported community-driven solutions to build resilience to the CCP across the globe.
For example, in Colombia, IRI supported the China in Latam Twitter Database, the first and only of its kind, to track China’s social media activities and provide regional and country-specific information on the scope and scale of PRC influence in the information space. And in Nigeria, IRI supported a local CSO that organized two policy dialogues with 2022 presidential election candidates broadcasted live to millions of viewers via television and radio, to discuss policy positions related to PRC investments, loans, and illegal mining. The dialogues sparked widespread debate across numerous platforms, providing even more Nigerians with access to information on the PRC’s influence in Nigeria and their elected representatives’ policy plans to thwart it. These are just two examples of how this global network is empowering and equipping on-the-ground actors to identify and push back on unwanted authoritarian influence in their countries.
International Forum Report: Authoritarian Influence in the Western Balkans
(Photo by Cemile Bingol/Getty Images)An International Forum for Democratic Studies report explores how Montenegro has become an ideal testing ground for authoritarian actors, and how the lessons learned from these experiments can be applied to authoritarian influence globally. The report also highlights civil society’s approaches to foreign authoritarian influences on democratic institutions.
International Forum Report: Exposing Global Authoritarian Narratives
(Photo by erhui1979/Getty Images)A new report from the International Forum for Democratic Studies analyzes how top-order authoritarian narratives serve as a vital tool to amplify autocrats’ influence and reshape the international landscape. Narratives are a potent, asymmetric instrument of power and useful to authoritarians, to reframe events in a way that conforms to and propagates a particular worldview.
