Description
International Relations scholarship on norms has long assumed a liberal core, treating authoritarian practices as anomalies or as defensive reactions to external pressures. Building on recent work on authoritarian and illiberal practices, this paper advances the concept of the illiberal-authoritarian formation: a dynamic constellation of justifications, discourses, practices, and institutions that simultaneously erode democratic processes and human rights protections while consolidating into prescriptive normative orders. Rather than seeing these developments as isolated or reactive, we conceptualize them as coherent formations with their own internal logics, diffusion pathways, and mechanisms of reproduction. Focusing on the Americas—a region often portrayed as undergoing democratic “backsliding”—we argue instead that it constitutes a crucial laboratory for illiberal-authoritarian norm-making. Our analysis shows how illiberal-authoritarian formations take shape and travel across borders through four key mechanisms: normative reframing, legal-bureaucratic engineering, socialization and diffusion networks, and performance-legitimation feedback. Our analysis advances IR scholarship in three ways. Conceptually, it reframes illiberal and authoritarian practices not as deviations from liberal order but as formations—emergent normative orders with prescriptive force. Empirically, it demonstrates how leaders in the Americas actively generate, diffuse, and legitimate these formations, thereby positioning the region as a central site of global illiberal norm production. Theoretically, it challenges the liberal bias of norm studies by showing that illiberal-authoritarian formations are not marginal or transient but central to the making of contemporary global order. Taken together, these insights compel a fundamental rethinking of how scholars conceptualize norms, contestation, and the contested futures of democracy and human rights.
