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The past decade has witnessed a transformation in the study of authoritarian governance, with increasing attention paid to how digital technologies reshape strategies of regime survival. While initial research focused on individual digital strategies like censorship, internet shutdowns, or online propaganda, emerging scholarship conceptualizes the broader, meta-level effects of digitalization on authoritarian tactics. Building on these advancements, we introduce the concept of authoritarian informationalism to capture the evolving interplay between analogue and digital strategies of surveillance, manipulation, and information control. This approach emphasizes the centrality of information flows in contemporary political power, highlighting a shift from visible, repressive coercion towards more covert, preventive, and targeted forms of digital repression. Authoritarian informationalism is characterized by (1) an expansion of actors – from states to private entities and individuals; (2) increased precision, moving from reactive to pre-emptive and fine-grained control; and (3) broader scope, extending from local and national to transnational domains and across regime types. Importantly, this transformation blurs traditional boundaries between autocracies and democracies, as well as between domestic and international spheres. Our framework and the contributions to this Special Issue bridge empirical analyses of digital tools and theoretical debates on authoritarian resilience, illustrating both the extension of authoritarian informational power and the emergence of new vulnerabilities and dependencies.
Garbe et al. (Thu,) studied this question.