Authoritarian Leaders Are Watching, Learning From One Another

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.

Autocracy is on the move worldwide and becoming more resilient.

One of the driving forces behind this phenomenon is something scholars call “authoritarian learning,” a process by which autocratic leaders study each other and adapt tactics based on what appears to work, and how to proceed when they encounter resistance.

Take Georgia. The ruling Georgian Dream party has steered the Caucasus nation from a path toward democracy back to autocracy — and it has done so by learning from Russia. In particular, it adopted a “foreign agent” law in May 2024 — legislation that came straight from Vladimir Putin’s playbook.

Sold to the public as increasing transparency, the legislation has been utilized to persecute Georgia’s opposition and arrest dissidents with impunity.

As researchers examining the structure and effects of autocratic regimes, we view Georgia’s first year of its foreign agent law as an example of how politicians are not only learning the tactics of Russian authoritarianism but improving on them in a shorter time frame.

Bouncing from Europe to Russia

Georgia’s current ruling party came to power after then-President Mikheil Saakashvili enacted a major series of reforms in the 2000s. Saakashvili, who was jailed in 2021 under highly contested charges, inherited a Georgia seen as a failing and corrupt state tethered to Russia.

The reform-minded politicians of Saakashvili’s government set the country on a pro-Western path. But after Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, a socially conservative coalition under the banner Georgian Dream won the parliamentary elections in 2012.

Georgian Dream was buoyed by the fortune of billionaire Bidzina Ivanishvili, a Russian citizen until 2011. The party capitalized on the public’s fatigue after a decade of Saakashvili’s necessary but intense reforms. The new coalition married a promise for continuing the pro-Western reforms, but with a more traditional, conservative approach to social issues.

This appeal to traditional Georgian values won support in rural communities and carried the coalition to an absolute majority in Parliament in 2016. Since then, Georgian Dream has adopted pro-Russian rhetoric, accusing a “global war party” of running the West. Increasing attacks on the European Union, in particular, have been a part of a broader strategy to bring Georgia back into Russia’s orbit.

The Georgian Dream progression in power has mirrored that of Putin in Russia. In 2012, Putin signed a “foreign agents” law that originally targeted NGOs receiving foreign funding and alleged to be engaged in political activity.

The Kremlin equated this law to the 1938 Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, in the United States, and justified it as a means to increase transparency around foreign involvement in Russia’s internal affairs.

Unlike FARA, however, Russia’s version of the law neither required establishing a connection between foreign funding and political activity nor provided a clear definition of political activity.

This vagueness allowed for a wide range of NGOs deemed undesirable by the Kremlin to be labeled as “foreign agents.” The result was the suppression of NGO activities through financial, administrative and legal burdens that led to their liquidation or departure from the country.

Over the years, this law has reduced Russian civil society’s ability to independently voice and address issues that its population faces.

Yearlong slide into autocracy

Georgian Dream passed a very similar foreign agent law on May 28, 2024, after overcoming a presidential veto. It forced NGOs receiving more than 20% of their funding from abroad to register with the Ministry of Justice as “serving the interests of a foreign power.”

Activists opposing the law have been physically assaulted, and the law has been utilized against what the ruling party has described as “LGBT propaganda.”

The law fits a wider political landscape in which the ruling party has moved to restrict freedom of the press, prosecuted political opponents and postponed Georgia’s European Union candidate status despite the overwhelming majority of Georgians being pro-EU.

Improving on Russian authoritarians

Three critical factors played a role in allowing for the foreign agent law in Russia to expand its reach: the power imbalance between the Russian government and NGOs, limited action by international authorities, and delayed media attention to the issue.

At the time the law was passed, civil society inside Russia itself was split. Some foresaw the dangers of the law and engaged in collective action to oppose it, while others chose to wait and see.

As it happened, the law and the accompanying repressive apparatus spread to a broader range of targets. In 2015, Putin signed a law that designated an “undesirable” status to foreign organizations “on national security grounds”; in 2017, an amendment expanded the targets of the law from NGOs to mass media outlets; and at the end of 2019, the law allowed the classification of individuals and unregistered public associations — that is, groups of individuals — as mass media acting as foreign agents. By July 2022, the foreign funding criterion was excluded and a status of a foreign agent could be designated to anyone whom the Russian authorities deemed to be “under foreign influence.”

Russia’s experience highlights the process of early stages of authoritarian consolidation, when state power quashes independent sources of power, and political groups and citizens either rally around the government or go silent. The foreign agent law in Russia was passed only after the protests that accompanied the 2012 elections, which returned Putin to the presidency for the third term.

In Georgia, the ruling government borrowed from Russia’s lead — after backing down from its first attempt to pass a foreign agent law in the face of massive protests, it pushed it through before the elections.

The law was then used to raid NGOs sympathetic to the opposition days before the October 2024 parliamentary election. Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze said before the elections that in the event of Georgian Dream’s victory, it would look to outlaw the pro-Western opposition, naming them “criminal political forces.”

In the wake of President Donald Trump’s suspension of USAID assistance in February 2025, Georgian Dream has seized the opportunity to expand its war on civil society, echoing Russian, Chinese and American far-right conspiracy rhetoric that foreign-funded NGOs were fomenting revolution. To combat such phantoms, Georgian Dream has passed new legislation that criminalizes assembly and protest.

A springboard for repression

The foreign agent law has been a springboard for repressive activities in both Russia and Georgia, but while it took Russia a decade to effectively use the law to crush any opposition, Georgian Dream is working on an expedited timetable.

Although the EU has suspended direct assistance and closed off visa-free travel for Georgian officials as a result of the law, Trump’s turn toward pro-Russian policies has made it more difficult to obtain Western consensus in dislodging the Georgian government from its authoritarian drift.

Georgia’s experience, following the Russian playbook, illustrates how authoritarians are learning from each other, utilizing the rule of law itself against democracy.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.