Militarized masculinity and the paradox of restraint: mechanisms of social control under modern authoritarianism

The Edinburgh Centre for Constitutional Law presents

Militarized masculinity and the paradox of restraint: mechanisms of social control under modern authoritarianism

Speaker: Rebecca Tapscott, Ambizione fellow and lecturer at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva

Discussants:

• Professor Christine Bell, Professor of Constitutional Law, Edinburgh Law School
• Dr Philipp Schulz, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute of Intercultural & International Studies, University of Bremen

Abstract: The twenty-first century is marked by the rise of new forms of authoritarianism, many of which are characterized by the ‘paradox of restraint’, in which reforms compliant with the rule of law are used to unshackle the ruler’s arbitrary power. Despite a proliferation of scholarly studies on this topic, we still have limited understanding of how national-level authoritarian power reaches ordinary citizens in these contexts. This article identifies the performance of militarized masculinities as an understudied mechanism that does so. It offers two main contributions: first, it highlights how performances of militarized masculinities enact the paradox of restraint through gendered idioms, thereby magnifying the ambiguities of modern authoritarianism and diffusing them at a local level. Second, it recasts the conceptual utility of militarized masculinities, showing that the concept’s inherent tensions between ordered discipline and unaccountable violence produce and project authoritarian power, giving militarized masculinities special potency as a mode of social discipline in these contexts. The article draws on feminist International Relations, employing grounded ethnographic research to illustrate how national-level power circulates locally. To do so, it first illustrates the relationship between the paradox of restraint and militarized masculinities using the cases of Putin’s Russia and Duterte’s Philippines. It then turns to an in-depth case study of a local dispute between soldiers and civilians in Museveni’s Uganda to trace how gendered local encounters facilitate the transmission of national-level authoritarian power into the lives of ordinary people.

About the Speaker: Rebecca Tapscott is an Ambizione fellow and lecturer at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. She is also a visiting fellow at the Firoz Lalji Centre on Africa at the London School of Economics, as well as at the Department Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh. Her work has appeared in journals including International Affairs, African Affairs, and Development and Change, and has won international recognition, including receiving the 2017 International Studies Association’s Carl Beck Award for new perspectives on emergent international concerns. Her book, Arbitrary States: Social Control and Modern Authoritarianism in Museveni’s Uganda, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press (May 2021).

This event is free and open to all but registration is required (link below).

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Image credit: Photo by Bao Menglong on Unsplash