Open Networks, Closed Regimes: The Impact of the Internet on Authoritarian Rule

By Shanthi Kalathil, Taylor C. Boas. First Monday, 2003

394 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As the Internet diffuses across the globe, many have come to believe that the technology poses an insurmountable threat to authoritarian rule. Grounded in the Internet's early libertarian culture and predicated on anecdotes pulled from diverse political climates, this conventional wisdom has informed the views of policymakers, business leaders, and media pundits alike. Yet few studies have sought to systematically analyze the exact ways in which Internet use may lay the basis for political change. In Open Networks, Closed Regimes , the authors take a comprehensive look at how a broad range of societal and political actors in eight authoritarian and semi-authoritarian countries employ the Internet. Based on methodical assessment of evidence from these cases --China, Cuba, Singapore, Vietnam, Burma, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt --the study contends that the Internet is not necessarily a threat to authoritarian regimes.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/de9395b69b903f2546c8e088664292a3eb71c7ff

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Citations in the corpus

• Telecommunications Reform, Internet Use and Mobile Phone Adoption in the Developing World (2009, background): “Similarly, Kalathil and Boas (2003) find that authoritarian regimes may significantly develop their digital communication infrastructure specifically as a means of extending the reach of the state (Chase & Mulvenon, 2002; Diebert, 2008).”
• Information Manipulation, Coordination and Regime Change (2013, background): “As in Morris and Shin (1998) and similar models, the ability of the regime to prevail is determined by a single parameter.”