Beyond Democracy

Democracy faces a global recession. Across the world, citizens and governments have shown less concern for the health and continuation of liberal-democratic institutions and are more open to experiment with alternative forms of rule. That said, in the international community, open regression carries stigma, such that many of these regimes have cloaked their backsliding in the language and rituals of transitional justice. These hardening states borrow the vocabulary of transitional justice to build and claim legitimacy while hollowing out commitments to liberal democracy. This chapter examines two examples in Hungary and India, both of which have selectively deployed the toolbox of transitional justice to justify their backslides and entrenchment, probing the narratives the states offer, their identification of violation, their excision of adversaries, and what sanctions may be deployed. It concludes by identifying where such alternative transitions are likely to occur and by outlining a generic framework for understanding them.