Research Workshop on “The nature and transformation of contemporary political regimes: Sino-European perspectives”

This research workshop is meant to start a conversation between scholars working from different perspectives on the nature and development of contemporary political regimes. We shall concentrate on two main cases, the European and the Chinese political regimes; which can also be regarded as both emblematic and paradigmatic of the rather simplified dichotomy between authoritarian and democratic regimes that often dominates political analysis and political discourse. This slight Manichean categorization of political regimes has long maintained a stronghold on the political imagination—perhaps with some reason, in terms of the underlying conviction that modern political authority needs to rest on some form of popular legitimacy and unforced acceptance. Arguably, such simplification was at its most popular and pervasive during the last decade of the last century, after the collapse of the Soviet regime, which seemed to signal the unchallenged dominance of the liberal democratic model.