A Focus on Asian AutocraciesPatrick Köllner

ASIEN – Nr. 124 (2012) pp. 5–7

Well over a year after what has widely become known as the “Arab Spring,” it seems apt to take another look at Asia’s autocracies. In its 2012 global survey, Freedom House considered 21 percent of the states and territories in Pacific Asia — comprising 41 percent of the region’s population — not to be free. The list starts alphabetically with Brunei and ends with Vietnam. A further 38 percent were deemed “partly free” and thus fall into the gray zone of “hybrid regimes” that are neither full-fledged democracies nor genuine autocracies. Taken together, autocracies and hybrid regimes still account for the majority of political regimes in Pacific Asia. If one wanted to take a more positive stance, one might note that among the these three general types of regime, democracies make up the largest group in the region (41 percent, comprising 44 percent of the population) and also that, in sum, there have been steady improvements in the region over the past five years in terms of political rights and civic freedoms. Yet even those observers who are more positive-minded will have to acknowledge the fact that democracy is not the norm in Pacific Asia. Moreover, the regional picture gets bleaker if one includes all the dictatorships that exist in Central Asia — arguably the world’s most autocratic (sub-)regional cluster. Here, given Central Asia’s dismal democratic record, even an authoritarian leader such as Kazakhstan’s President Nursultan Nazarbayev can pass as a moderate (in an intra-regional comparison, that is)…