The first article for a new special collection edited by Priya Chacko and Kanishka Jayasuriya to be titled “Crisis, Populism and Right-wing Politics in Asia” has been published.
Authored by guest co-editor Jayasuriya, “Authoritarian Statism and the New Right in Asia’s Conservative Democracies” (DOI: 10.1080/00472336.2018.1431304) is a theoretically-informed examination of the conservative turn to authoritarianism in two of Asia’s democratic regimes, Japan and South Korea.
The abstract states:
Across Asia there has been a shift to the right in important democratic polities. This article argues that this conservative or authoritarian shift reflects the emergence of a new form of political regime that Nicos Poulantzas characterised as authoritarian statism. This article presents a theoretical framework – with illustrative case studies of Japan and Korea – to understand the emergence of a distinctive brand of Asian authoritarian statism. These new trajectories of political regimes reflect interconnected political and economic crises of conservative capitalist democracies. These crises are the result of the fracturing of modes and mechanisms of political incorporation due to the transnationalisation of capital. It is argued that the inability of current modes of state intervention or political incorporation to manage these economic and political crises or secure political legitimacy for political projects to deepen market reform has led to a “crisis of crisis management” and the further weakening of the Japanese and Korean states.
JCA 