A fear dictator who is spinning? Conceptualizing authoritarian responses to digital uptake through the case study of information control in Belarus

Contemporary authoritarian regimes increasingly rely on digital technologies in their information control strategies, such as censorship, surveillance, and propaganda. However, the digital transformation of the bureaucratic apparatus responsible for these strategies in authoritarian regimes often remains a black box. This article aims to partly open this box by conceptualizing and operationalizing how authoritarian regimes may respond to the digital uptake in different ways at the level of bureaucracy – by proposing proactive, plug-and-play, and reactive response types. This differentiation allows for a better accounting of the different effects on the productivity and coordination of the repression apparatus in authoritarian regimes. To illustrate these response types empirically, the article presents the evolution of the information control strategies under the regime of Alyaksandar Lukashenka in Belarus (1994–2024). By leveraging triangulated primary and secondary qualitative data, including interviews with NGOs, former security officials, and repression victims, the article shows how different response types may have different effects on the information control strategies due to variance in their effects on bureaucratic productivity and coordination. This parsimonious framework offers researchers a simple but sufficiently nuanced tool to distinguish between the qualitatively different strategies of tech integration by authoritarian bureaucracies for the purpose of information control.