The World of Authoritarian Rule at the Beginning of the XXI century (Part 2)

This article explores the world of authoritarian rule in the institutional paradigm. It structures the world of authoritarian rule on the basis of religion highlighting clusters of Muslim, Christian and Buddhist states, as well as a cluster of states in which followers of any religion do not constitute an absolute majority and a communist cluster, in which states are ruled by parties professing communist ideology in its various interpretations. The article shows that the states of the world under authoritarian rule are unevenly distributed across the geographical regions: 90% of these are located in Asia and Africa, while America, Europe, and Oceania are home to only 10% of such states. At the same time, dominant position in the world of authoritarian rule is held by China, which claims to be the pole of power opposing the United States and NATO. The Greater Middle East can be considered the territorial core of the world of authoritarian rule with Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey claiming leading positions and Qatar holding a special position. Extreme isolationist positions are taken, on the one side, by Afghanistan as an uncompromising defender of true Islam and, on the other, by DPRK as an “unassailable fortress” based on the state ideology of Juche. At the beginning of the 21st century, which can be described as the “autumn of the patriarchs,” twenty-four rulers of authoritarian states with a republican form of government, who had begun to rule in the 20th century, left the political scene. Eleven more political centenarians retain power till the present day. This article analyzes the phenomenon of political instability, which is typical exclusively of the world of authoritarian rule and the key factor of which is the participation in the political field of armed groups in the form of a military coup, civil war and terrorist activity of radical Islamic organizations. It is pointed out that internationalized civil wars, local civil wars with a cross-border component and cross-border terrorist activities of radical Islamic organizations pose significant threats to stability and security at the global level, in the global political realm as a whole.