Summary
Florian Bieber: The Rise of Authoritarianism in the Western Balkans
This book is an attempt to explore the problem of Balkan "princes" and stabilocracy in an academic and systematic way in the context of the global rise of competitive authoritarianism. The introductory chapter discusses how democracy declined and stagnated in the Western Balkans. It is a crisis that follows wider global trends, but also has certain regional specificities. In the second chapter, the author investigates the causes of the emergence of semi-authoritarian regimes and why, even after the nineties, the construction of consolidated democratic structures did not occur in the Western Balkans. In the third chapter, an overview of the problems of democratic development in each country of the region is given, and in the fourth, the author explores the mechanisms of competitive authoritarianism in the Western Balkans, including the use of political crises and nationalism, media control, weak opposition and civil society. In the final chapter, the author investigates in more detail the course of the crisis that led to the fall of Nikola Gruevski's government in Macedonia, in order to point out the circumstances under which it is possible to challenge and overthrow the regime of competitive authoritarianism in the Western Balkans.
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