The Rise of Authoritarian Middle Powers

On December 9, 2026, the Clements Center and The LBJ School of Public Affairs will host “The Rise of Authoritarian Middle Powers,” with Nicholas Cheeseman, Professor of democracy at the University of Birmingham, and Marie-Eve Desrosiers, Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. Join us at 12:15 – 1:30 pm in Sid Richardson Hall (SRH), Room 3.122, The LBJ School of Public Affairs.

Political leaders such as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney have urged the world’s “middle powers” to unite in defense of democracy and the liberal rules-based order. While laudable, such appeals rest on an outdated conception of middle powers as largely benign democratic actors committed to providing global public goods. In reality, many middle powers are authoritarian and are more likely to contribute to the erosion of global norms and institutions than to efforts to sustain them. Drawing on evidence from cases in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey, this article presents a new framework for understanding how authoritarian middle powers use alliances with their democratic counterparts to hedge their bets while simultaneously undermining liberal multilateral institutions, promoting autocratic ideals, and engaging in cross-border repression. These practices merit greater attention because they serve to dilute global human-rights commitments, normalize authoritarian governance, and accelerate the unraveling of the international rules-based order.

Garage parking is available for a fee at the Manor Garage and the San Jacinto Garage. Parking will not be validated.

Speaker Biographies

Marie-Eve Desrosiers holds the Research Chair in the International Francophonie on political aspirations and movements in Francophone Africa and is Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA), University of Ottawa. She specializes in security and governance issues. More specifically, she studies political crises and conflicts, authoritarianism, political mobilization, and the relationship between state and society in the Great Lakes and Francophone Africa. She is also interested in foreign policy and international aid. She is the author of The Rise of Authoritarian Middle-Powers and What it Means for the World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2026), and of Trajectories of Authoritarianism in Rwanda: Elusive Control Before the Genocide (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Nicholas Cheeseman is a Professor of Democracy at the University of Birmingham, and the Director of the Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability, and Representation (CEDAR). He was formerly the Director of the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. Dr. Cheeseman mainly works on democracy, elections, and development, including a range of topics such as democratic resilience, electoral manipulation, corruption, and the impact of “fake news.” The articles that he has published based on this research have won several prizes including the GIGA award for the best article in Comparative Area Studies (2013) and the Frank Cass Award for the best article in Democratization (2015). Professor Cheeseman is also the author or editor of more than then books including How to Rig an Election (2018) – selected as one of the books of the year by the Spectator magazine. In recognition of his academic and public contribution, the Political Science Association of the United Kingdom awarded him the prestigious Joni Lovenduski Prize for Outstanding Professional Achievement in 2019. In recent years, he has also won the Josiah Mason Award for Academic Advancement. Professor Cheeseman is a Board Member of the Afrobarometer and the Expert Panel of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, while also serving as a Fellow of the European Democracy Hub and sitting on the Advisory Panel of the Bertelsmann Transformation Index. A frequent commentator on femocracy, elections, and global events, Professor Cheeseman’s analysis has appeared in the Economist, Le Monde, Financial Times, Newsweek, Washington Post, New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the BBC, and the Africa Report. Many of his interviews and insights can be found on the website he founded and co-edits, www.democracyinafrica.org.