FELLOWS 2018
ŽILVINAS ŠVEDKAUSKAS
University of Tübingen
Bucerius Pre-Doctoral Grant
Dispensing with Political Parties: Emergence of Disorganized Authoritarianism in Egypt and Belarus
ABSTRACT
This project contributes to the debate on authoritarian party-building and sheds a light on the issue of authoritarian regimes without regime parties such as Egypt under Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi and Belarus under Alexander Lukashenko. By confronting available theoretical propositions with Egyptian and Belarusian counter-empirics, it aims to highlight the shortcomings of the literature, theoretical ignorance towards the costs of regime party-building and availability of “alternative authoritarian toolkits.”
BIOGRAPHY
Žilvinas Švedkauskas is a prospective Ph.D. student at the University of Tübingen (Germany) specializing in comparative research on regime types and authoritarianism. His primary research focus lies with party politics and mechanisms of co-optation in the Middle East and the Post-Soviet space. Žilvinas holds a joint M.A. degree in Comparative Politics from the University of Tübingen and the American University in Cairo (Egypt) and received his B.A. in Political Science from Vilnius University (Lithuania). Alongside his studies, Žilvinas does research for a Lithuanian NGO “House of Europe” and writes on Middle East politics for the Lithuanian monthly “Business Class.”
PUBLICATION
2017: "Facilitating Political Stability: Cohabitation of Non-Legalistic Islam and the Moroccan Monarchy" Studia Orientalia Electronica, 2017 (5), https://journal.fi/store/article/view/55591
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