In a rapidly changing global system, regime outcomes – democratization, autocratization, hybrid stabilization – increasingly appear as products, and not merely reflections, of the international environment. Great power competition, the crisis of multilateralism and the emergence of new international actors do not simply condition the foreign policies of states, they shape their domestic political orders. The “second image reversed” thus ceases to be a search hypothesis and becomes the ordinary condition under which democracies – consolidated, emerging, uncertain – find themselves operating. This condition places the analytical categories of the discipline under strain. Concepts inherited from transitology prove inadequate to describe regimes that are not “in transit” toward any destination: equilibria produced and sustained by international configurations, rather than residues of incomplete transitions. Understanding these arrangements requires shifting the focus from the internal trajectories of individual states to the mechanisms – economic, security-related, normative – through which the international environment selects, sustains or destabilizes political regimes.
Yet the same condition also bears on normative categories. Contestation offers, in this respect, a category capable of bridging the two agendas: a constitutive dimension of polyarchy, a foundation of democratic legitimacy understood as non-domination, and a practice through which international
norms and orders are called into question. The panel addresses this twofold tension and asks who produces political regimes, through which
mechanisms, and by what right. It invites empirical contributions on the international sources of regime change and regime stability, from the strategies of external patrons to the resilience of hybrid equilibria; theoretical and normative contributions on democratic legitimacy under external influence and on non-domination as a criterion applicable to relations among peoples; and conceptual contributions on contestation as a bridge between Comparative Politics, International Relations and Political Theory.
The panel is open to both theoretical and applied contributions, drawing on varied frameworks as well as on analytically eclectic or empirically driven approaches, and employing qualitative, quantitative or mixed methods. Single case studies and comparative designs are equally encouraged, whether addressing contemporary or historical contexts. In foregrounding a plurality of disciplinary and regional perspectives, the panel proceeds from the recognition that understanding the international production of political regimes requires multiple conceptual, empirical and methodological lenses.
