Political geography III: Authoritarian geographies

Introduction

For over a decade, countries around the world have lurched to the right, opting for nationalist and authoritarian leaders in an apparent turn against the rules-based international order, globalization, and democracy. In 2025, the V-Dem institute at the University of Gothenburg found that the proportion of the world’s population living in a liberal democracy was at the lowest point in the past 50 years. While some countries never made the transition to democracy, others turned to candidates with authoritarian platforms in democratic elections. The list of countries experiencing democratic backsliding is long, with a few recent examples including Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Javier Milei in Argentina, José Antonio Kast in Chile, Narendra Modi in India, Sanae Takaichi in Japan, and Giorgia Meloni in Italy. In many other countries, far right parties did not win elections but surged to their largest vote shares ever, suggesting future authoritarian takeovers could occur.

Natalie Koch (2022a, 2022b, 2025a, 2025b; 2025c) has been at the forefront of geographic research on authoritarianism, emphasizing its spatiality. Koch (2022b, 2) argued that “authoritarianism is many things: it is a worldview, a mind-set, a mode of governing, a means of control, a logic, a language, an ethic. Foremost it is a set of practices that revolve around control, discipline, and univocal authority.” However, despite the projection of total control, authoritarianism is never as all-encompassing as it claims to be. Instead, it consists of a set of practices that appear in particular moments and contexts, often affecting specific people in different ways, rather than operating uniformly across an entire society. Koch (2022a) pointed out that mapping a simplistic good-bad or left-right binary onto democracy-authoritarianism does not account for the full diversity in which it exists.

The inward orientation and nationalist politics of authoritarian leaders suggest that an idiographic approach might be warranted to understand the specifics of each case. However, in a review such as this, the objective is necessarily nomothetic, seeking to identify patterns and connections across different contexts and moments. There are several general propositions that unite today’s authoritarian regimes. First, many of these movements are driven by a populist sense of grievance that the chosen people of a particular place have been displaced or replaced by others who are perceived as outsiders. This othering takes many forms but often includes a skepticism of the arrival of new cultural norms, new economic relations, and progressive ideas. The details are often vague and rely on imprecise threats such as “wokism,” “cultural Marxism,” “immigrants,” “criminals,” or “antifa,” but the effect is to generate a sense of grievance for an in-group and the need to protect the often-unspecified values of the group from these external threats. Second, authoritarian movements are frequently based on an anti-immigrant, anti-women, and anti-gender diversity politics. When aspiring authoritarian leaders say they want to make their country great again, they do not mean for everyone. Instead, they are talking about a particular racial, gender, language, or religious group by discursively establishing and then physically casting out those who do not belong. Finally, these authoritarian movements express skepticism of globalization and international institutions. The idea of equal rights for all of humanity is anathema to an authoritarian approach, which instead venerates the exceptionality of the national group above all others. Consequently, any international rules that might place the national group on equal footing with others are a threat to the authoritarian’s absolute control of their people, territory, and resources.

The global authoritarian turn has been the subject of extensive research in the field of political geography and is the topic of this third and final progress report. The review focuses on publications in the last 3 years in the primary political geography journals (Environment and Planning C: Space and Politics, Geopolitics, Political Geography, and Territory, Politics, Governance) along with a few research handbooks (Koch 2022a; Lindstaedt and Van Den Bosch 2024). The next section considers articles that have documented the authoritarian turn against globalization in a series of countries around the world. Although most of these articles zoom in on the particular of the individual case, several themes are evident across the diverse examples. The third section turns to the surprising authoritarian fixation on digital spaces and crypto-currencies, despite the rhetorical reverence for tradition. The fourth section considers authoritarian infrastructure, the focus on aesthetics, and the importance of nature in emergent ecofascists worldviews. The conclusion points towards future research agendas in the field, while recognizing the precarious moment authoritarian geographies present.

The globalization of anti-global authoritarianism

The largest body of literature on authoritarian geographies consists of papers documenting the authoritarian turn in particular countries. Although the locations are diverse, several themes emerge as key grievances for authoritarian politics. These include a sense of abandonment of the original people or places that used to matter in a particular country, a replacement of national sovereignty by global institutions, and an imposition of values that are seen as incompatible with the traditions of the people.

Many of the articles on authoritarian geographies focused on regional geographies within countries that shaped perceptions of being left behind or of being the location where the authentic and legitimate members of the nation lived. Kovacs (2025) studied the idea of the heartland as a key geopolitical imaginary of the radical right. He looked at representations of the heartland in Central Europe by Viktor Orbán and Middle America by Donald Trump to analyze how these imaginaries were used to counter the liberal, global order. Devadoss (2025) considered the other side of heartland nationalism by investigating the impact of “rural as white” narratives on people of color living in these communities as an example of Pain’s (2020) concept of “geotrauma,” an analysis of how trauma is linked to places. In India, digital spaces like WhatsApp group chats became key locations for the production and distribution of right-wing memes, videos, and ideas (Oza et al., 2024). As a result, people who identified as religious and ethnic minorities felt like outcasts in a moment of global right-wing exclusionary politics.

Biancalana et al. (2025) analyzed the language of right-wing parties in Europe’s borderlands. While much political rhetoric focused on national distinctions between in and out groups, these right-wing parties also discussed subnational and cross-border scales. Adamiak et al. (2026) traced the geography of Polish elections from 2011 to 2023, a period marked by anti-elite and anti-EU PiS party victory and a left-wing coalition win in 2023. They found that the two coalitions were tied to regional geographies in what they describe as a “revenge of the places that do not matter” followed by “a counter-revenge of places that matter” (Adamiak et al., 2026, 1).

Wojciuk and Pawłuszko (2026) argued that as mainstream sources of information declined in Poland, grassroots organizing became a key site of right-wing populist mobilization. Similarly, Veenhof et al. (2025) wrote that support for right-wing protest parties in the Netherlands drew on distinct sources of discontent, but all focused on local issues to build an anti-establishment movement. Bram Van Vulpen (2025) conducted research in rural Fryslân, the Netherlands, and found that right-wing discontent was grounded in a sense of neglect combined with a powerful self-perceived status of place. In Portugal, Magalhães and Cancela (2025) described a similar dynamic behind the rapid rise of the radical-right party Chega, whose supporters were motivated by a feeling of neglect. However, the rural far right voters felt political neglect, not just the economic or cultural reasons that are often assumed. Miessner et al. (2025) pointed to emotion as a key factor in the turn to authoritarian parties. They argued that there are neoliberal roots to the regional feeling of being left behind that contributed to right-wing political swings.

A second theme that runs through authoritarian politics is debate over immigration, refugees, and immigrants. Rone and Fielitz (2025) described the impact of far-right campaigns against the Global Compact for Migration, which framed the agreement as a liberal and international threat to the sovereignty of the nation-state. In Canada, “Guardian Angels,” a special immigration program for immigrant frontline workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, was seized on by nationalist political leaders to argue for more provincial control of immigration regulations, which resulted in “bordering through status” (Stein and Henaway 2025). Stutz and Trauner (2025) considered whether the state of democracy in other countries affected decisions by EU countries to return migrants there. They found that some autocratic regimes had high rates of forced returns and the extent of democracy in a country only had a small impact on EU decision making. Carvalho (2025) described the impact of the far-right French Les Identitaires movement on French foreign policy, which included inaction at the EU level and a reversal of a decision to accept refugees.

Centner and Nogueira (2024) introduced the concept of “revanchist populism” based on entitled anger as a mechanism to understand the rise of the far right in Brazil. They argued that expulsion created a powerful imaginative geography that worked to define the legitimate and deserving people in the worldview of the far right. Dias et al. (2024) described how Jair Bolsonaro, under the guise of the COVID-19 pandemic, endorsed US Border Patrol tactics against Brazilian migrants while reducing services for Brazilians abroad, leaving thousands of people stranded on the way to the United States.

Finally, research on China provided a counterpoint and an alternative approach to other authoritarian regimes. Woon and Sidaway (2025) contrasted media discussions of “deglobalization” with China’s “New Development Thinking.” While right-wing populism in other countries has led to a reduction in foreign aid and a skepticism of the economic integration of globalization, China continued to pursue a foreign policy focused on building international economic networks. Li and Whitworth (2025) reminded us that geopolitics is never as simple as it might seem by detailing the incongruent positions of pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong who championed Donald Trump for his anti-China rhetoric in spite of his efforts to roll back democracy in the United States.

The overall picture is a global turn to authoritarian politics. Political geographers examined country and region-specific dynamics, while also contributing to a broad account of an anti-global turn against economic integration, immigration, and international political cooperation. The result is a move toward a more narrowly focused national conception of politics that privileges a select in-group.

Digital and crypto authoritarianism

Despite a reverence for tradition and a belief that a great past has been lost, authoritarian politicians, parties, and their supporters have demonstrated an openness to new digital and crypto technologies. In the United States, the Secretary of Defense (or War, as it has been rebranded) Pete Hegseth announced that the US military would integrate the controversial Grok AI into military systems (Betts 2026). Other leaders like Nayib Bukele in El Salvador and Javier Milei have made crypto currencies a key part of their agendas.

Dekeyser et al. (2025) described the right-wing fascination with AI as “AI Authoritarianism” and identified three ways that AI extends authoritarianism through scaling, inhumanization, and the cult of intelligence. They concluded that the relational nature of AI also created space to imagine non-authoritarian or anti-authoritarian AI. Santaniello (2025) provided a conceptual framework for “digital sovereignty” as a contested realm of geopolitical ambitions and challenges. Lucenti and Saari (2025) documented Russia’s efforts to establish nationalist cyber norms through international organizations like the United Nations and the Collective Security Treaty.

Jeremy Crampton (2025) argued that the attraction of digital spaces for the right is that it offers an “exit geography” from mainstream systems of government, democracy, and economics. Crampton suggested that digital currencies have become a mechanism for the right to accumulate wealth and political power that can then be enacted in the physical world without the constraints of the rules-based system. Jason Lugar (2024) theorized how far-right worldviews from digital spaces are materialized in the built environment. Lugar investigated a private residential housing development in the Southern United States called “1776 Gastonia” that targets older Americans looking for a place steeped in nationalism and American iconography. Lugar concluded that as the far-right digital footprint has grown it has resulted in a growth in far-right place-making in the real world.

Wakefield et al. (2023) used the term “crypto-urban statecraft” to describe how Miami and other cities turned to blockchain currencies as a new form of urban governance in a time of tech investment and real estate speculation. Koch (2025a) highlighted the urban-digital interaction in authoritarian developmentalism by studying Neom and Dubai, where post-oil projects in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates signaled the interaction between innovation economies and digital technologies. Koch (2025c) described the recent techno-optimism surrounding AI and related technologies as “digital developmentalism,” arguing that it bears striking similarities to authoritarian approaches to power and progress.

Simpson and Sheller (2022) analyzed how islands are often at the center of “cryptosecessionist exit” fantasies. The idea of detaching from mainstream society is popular in libertarian and anarcho-capitalist visions of the future, where new technologies like crypto-currencies can facilitate an exit from the rules-based order of the contemporary world through creating new cities, ocean-based communities, or simply by being sovereign citizens within the existing milieu. Peter Howson et al. (2024, 1) described the extractive geographies of blockchains as well as the emergence of what they describe as “anarcho-capitalist crypto-utopian ‘Exit zones.’” Piper Blotter Biery (2025) examined the Sovereign Citizen Movement through virtual ethnography of the narratives and beliefs that sustain the idea that people can unilaterally decide to exit the system of state sovereignty.

The result is a right-wing authoritarian “return to tradition” that would be created through digital and crypto spaces that never previously existed. At their core, digital and crypto fantasies are driven by a desire for an escape from the liberal, rules-based international order that has marginalized and vilified right-wing sensibilities and practices. By turning to authoritarianism, it allows a reclamation of space in the political discourse that right-wing supporters feel has been lost.

Authoritarian infrastructures and natures

Beyond the digital world, many authoritarian regimes focus on infrastructure and building styles as a key marker of the return of the national ideal. Donald Trump’s second term epitomized this through the gilded aesthetic of the White House, an executive order mandating architecture that invokes Ancient Greek and Roman styles, and the destruction of the East Wing of the White House to be replaced with an as yet un-designed ballroom. Beveridge et al. (2024) called this “infrastructure populism” and reviewed recent scholarly work that investigates how right-wing and authoritarian ideologies are enacted in urban areas.

Koch (2022a) argued that controlling space and time is a central ambition of authoritarianism. This often involves collapsing difference into a singular, totalizing imaginary presented as the only legitimate vision. Koch (2022a) noted that authoritarians “can draw their discursive strength from nostalgic longing for a lost past or instead play on the theater of the future.” However, despite these claims of a singular authority, authoritarianism is uneven in both space and time, creating openings through which its reach can be contested.

The authoritarian focus on infrastructure has extended to how the state interacts with the natural world. Some right-wing parties have maintained their suspicions of environmental governance as a threat to local political and economic control. Malm et al. (2025) showed the impact of right-wing political success in Sweden where the Sweden Democrats have reversed many of the country’s climate change mitigation projects and instead pursued obstructionist policies. In Spain, the far-right party Vox focused attention on ecology to posit a deterioration of Spain that requires a masculine, nationalist “reconquest” of the land (Ungureanu and Popartan 2024). Varco (2024) traced ethno-nationalist settlements in Germany, which were framed as refuges from the coming disruptions of environmental change. In France, Benoist (2024) described far-Right localism that promoted green environmental concerns under a banner of protecting local people against global threats.

Xiang and Lo (2024) introduced the concept of “Authoritarian Environmentalism 2.0” by analyzing how the discourse of green transformation included both centralizing and decentralizing themes. In China, this has meant that non-state actors and seemingly grassroots activity are mobilized for state driven recentralization of control of environmental projects. Mukherjee (2024) examined how the impact of digital urban planning and geospatial technologies have affected local governance in India. They found that as technologies have been standardized, the approach of urban localities has been to align their practices with the national political strategies of Narendra Modi’s government. In Kazakhstan, “authoritarian decentralization” meant that relationships between national and subnational elites allowed some governing functions to be shifted down to a local or regional level while still maintaining the autocratic control of the government (Yesdauletov 2025).

In other cases, authoritarians can also evolve their approach and messaging to account for new realities, such as the adoption of green nationalism in oil economies like the United Arab Emirates (Koch 2025b). These changes of heart were less about global environmental sustainability and more about the persistence of the power of the regime. Ranganathan et al. (2023) pointed to the corruption that is often behind authoritarian infrastructure and development projects while Allen et al. (2024) focused on how the rise of the far right can be interpreted through the lens of political ecology. They identified the same set of grievances of many authoritarian supporters, but they emphasized the Malthusian aspects of right-wing ideology, which frame ecological scarcity through the lens of “over” population.

For the far right, the solution is not necessarily environmental protection but rather the reduction of out groups through immigration restrictions designed to prevent them from accessing the homeland (Jones 2021). This combination of environmental concerns couched in fascist population control ideologies is frequently referred to as “ecofascism” (Ahmann and Oguz 2025; Pietiläinen and Kellokumpu 2024; Varco 2024). In contemporary authoritarianism, infrastructure and the environment are subsumed within the totalizing narrative of power and control that characterizes their movements and regimes.

Conclusion

A decade from now, there are at least three possible ways this progress report on authoritarian geographies could read: alarmist, prescient, or muddled. The first possible future is that the topic of this report was alarmist and the threat to the stability of the global order was overblown. Some leaders on the global stage are already mobilizing against rising authoritarianism. In early 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney (2026) said the world was experiencing a “rupture” rather than a “transition” and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the old world order “no longer exists.” It is possible that the rise of authoritarian regimes will be defeated by sustained, unified resistance by liberal democratic states. This outcome seems the least likely because of the structure of the current global order. The rule-based order of the United Nations era enshrines the primacy of state sovereignty for internal affairs. Consequently, the authoritarian desire for stronger nation-states is aligned with how power already works in the sovereign state system. Moreover, borders and sovereignty make it difficult to organize and act in a united way across the diverse polities around the world.

The second possible future is Carney’s concern about a rupture, where authoritarian regimes dominate the world stage and have scrapped the rules-based order, replacing it with something else. What this new system would look like is difficult to predict, but the era of unbridled capitalism and imperialism of the late nineteenth century could provide a clue. During Donald Trump’s first presidency, many observers assumed that Make America Great Again was a desire to revert to the America of Trump’s childhood in the 1950s, before the civil rights and women’s liberation movements. However, during Trump’s second presidency, he has been clear that his true aspiration is to return to the Gilded Age, arguing “We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913” (Weissert 2025). The Gilded Age is the era of robber barons, concentrated wealth in the hands of the elite, no international agreements, no worker or environmental laws to limit rapacious capitalism, and only tariffs to raise funds for a much smaller American government. It was also an era of imperial territorial expansion. While Europeans were in the midst of their scramble for Africa, the United States acquired Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and Hawai‘i all in the single year of 1898. If authoritarians get their way, the next decade could be one of nationalist retrenchment and territorial reordering to fit a new version of global power (Jones 2025).

A third scenario is that the world continues to muddle along, while slowly sinking deeper into a system of authoritarian states. In this future, the trappings of the rules-based international order would still be in place but increasingly ineffectual. Global agreements would remain, but the powerful states would flout them with even greater impunity. Countries with a history of democracy would continue to have elections, but they would be less and less fair, leaving the authoritarian regimes to further consolidate their power. Regardless of the direction of travel, authoritarian geographies remain a critical, urgent, and perhaps risky, topic for political geographers to theorize now and in the future.