by Desrosiers, Marie-Eve, and Nic Cheeseman. 2026. The Rise of Authoritarian Middle-Powers and What It Means for World Politics. Cambridge Elements in International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: 10.1017/9781009705264
Marie-Eve Desrosiers and Nic Cheeseman seek to correct a blind spot in international relations by identifying a class of authoritarian and autocratizing states that includes Türkiye, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, and Mexico. These states possess mid-level capabilities and pursue foreign policies guided by authoritarian survival imperatives. Their central claim holds that these authoritarian middle-powers orchestrate distinctive, volatile strategies that erode liberal norms more effectively than great-power accounts acknowledge. Regime survival, they argue, incentivizes a foreign policy that is “more self-serving, short-termist, and volatile” than its democratic counterparts (p. 3). The Element maps this behavior across multilateral forums, power projection, and nation-branding, and closes with a call for fresh research on its cumulative effects.
In advancing this claim the authors deliberately situate themselves against the postwar tradition of middle-power scholarship. Classic accounts portrayed states such as Canada and Norway as liberal internationalists and stabilizers that championed multilateralism, soft power, and niche diplomacy to secure legitimacy and “punch above their weight” (pp. 12, 46). These democratic exemplars were cast as constructive “good global citizens” whose benign behavior reinforced the rules-based order. Desrosiers and Cheeseman argue for a revised theory that treats regime type as the decisive variable, contending that authoritarian variants invert these assumptions and operate according to a survival-driven logic. They thus challenge both the great-power centrism that dominates current debates and the democratic bias embedded in foundational work from Glazebrook onward.
However, while the volume supplies a valuable descriptive taxonomy of authoritarian toolkits, its causal framework encounters notable internal tensions. The short-termism thesis stands at the heart of the argument. Authoritarian leaders, facing existential domestic threats, supposedly prioritize immediate regime security over sustained planning. The very cases the authors marshal call this claim into question. Consider Türkiye’s drone program. What began as industrial investment has matured into a multi-decade enterprise spanning design, export markets, battlefield validation, and diplomatic leverage. Arguably, this is generational statecraft in action. The authors themselves document how drone exports simultaneously enhance border security, national prestige, and regional influence. Similar long horizons appear in the UAE’s cultivation of overlapping alliances and mediation infrastructure. Such patterns recur in hedging and economic outreach, revealing temporal flexibility that the survival logic can readily accommodate. The evidence shows that survival imperatives and strategic patience are not mutually exclusive.
This mismatch indicates a deeper problem in causal specification. The authors tie regime-survival pressures directly to abbreviated time horizons. The cases they examine show that those pressures can sustain patient, multi-year investments when they serve regime endurance. The survival mechanism therefore displays flexibility beyond what the theory allows.
A parallel weakness arises from the authors’ normative baseline. They adopt a liberal-institutionalist lens that treats self-interested statecraft as deviant only when practiced by autocracies. They acknowledge that democracies sometimes curtail aid or tie assistance to migration goals, naming the Netherlands and Denmark as recent examples, while noting that democratic middle-powers have acted self-servingly “though to a lesser extent” (p. 4). The logical result is an inconsistent normative valuation. Identical behavior receives one label when democratic and another when authoritarian. Rational pursuit of security becomes pathological only under certain regime types, undermining the claim to analytical neutrality.
These theoretical shortcomings do not erase the Element’s empirical strengths. Desrosiers and Cheeseman compile a lucid inventory of practices that scholars will find indispensable. They trace the Like-Minded Group’s patient dilution of human-rights language inside United Nations arenas, the United Arab Emirates’ dual role as mediator and proxy sponsor in Sudan, and Türkiye’s blend of hard-power incursions with prestige diplomacy. The synthesis of over 250 academic and gray sources brings scattered case studies into coherent conversation. Readers gain a clear map of how authoritarian middle-powers hedge, coerce, and brand simultaneously, often within the same region.
On balance, the volume serves best as a research catalyst. Its descriptive reach invites deeper engagement, while its causal and normative tensions demand correction. Future work can retain the rich empirical basis and rebuild the theoretical edifice on the basis of cross-regime survival incentives, with regime type understood as a conditioning variable. The analysis also leaves open whether regime type drives these behaviors outright or merely conditions them under conditions of declining hegemonic oversight. The Element will prove essential reading for scholars of authoritarian foreign policy and democratic/autocratic diffusion, as well as for foreign-policy practitioners and analysts working in multipolar regions where mid-level autocracies increasingly set the terms of engagement. Desrosiers and Cheeseman have opened an essential debate; sharpening it remains the task ahead.
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