Paper short abstract:

Examining the cases of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, we develop the concept of liminal hybrid regimes to explain regimes suspended (potentially indefinitely) in a hybrid status “betwixt and between” authoritarianism and democracy.

Paper long abstract:

The lack of convergence towards liberal democracy and the continued prevalence of hybrid regimes in African countries reflects neither a permanent state of political aberration, nor necessarily a prolonged transitional phase through which countries pass once the "right" conditions are met. We develop the concept of liminal hybrid regimes to explain regimes suspended (potentially indefinitely) in a hybrid status "betwixt and between" authoritarianism and democracy. We examine the cases of two ruling parties: the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa. On the one hand, their societies appear caught in a liminal status wherein a transition to democracy and socio economic "revolution" remains forestalled; on the other hand, this liminality is productively used to justify the party's extraordinary mandate characterized by: (a) an idea of an incomplete project of liberation that the party alone is mandated to fulfil through an authoritarian social contract, and (b) the claim that this unfulfilled revolution is continuously under threat by a coterie of malevolent forces (both internal and external), which the party alone is mandated to identify and appropriately sanction. We thus examine the strategies employed by these regimes to maintain their power and we assess the extent to which these parties exhibit similarities with the "responsive" and "adaptive" authoritarianism found in East Asian single-party regimes. (this paper was developed in co-operation with Laura Mann and Alexander Beresford)