Description
Existing studies on the international politics of authoritarianism often focus on vertical processes of autocratization — how powerful states spread authoritarianism through passive diffusion and active promotion to smaller states. In Southeast Asia, this literature remains largely shaped by analyses framed around China’s authoritarian presence. Yet vertical frameworks alone cannot explain how democratic backsliding persists across the region; the horizontal dimension — how authoritarian regimes reinforce one another through peer-to-peer cooperation — demands closer attention. This paper examines one such case: how the authoritarian regimes of Myanmar and Thailand have reinforced one another. While recent scholarship has examined Thailand’s response to Myanmar’s 2021 coup, it has treated the relationship as unidirectional, neglecting the ways in which both regimes have actively sustained one another. This paper instead asks: why do Myanmar and Thailand engage in reciprocal authoritarian cooperation? It argues that two conditions explain this cooperation: first, as post-coup regimes, both seek mutual support to manage shared legitimacy crises; and second, their shared, porous border produces sustained cross-border pressures that make cooperation mutually necessary.