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While the number of democratic regimes in the world reached its peak around the turn of the millennium, the last decade of the new century has been marked by a “renaissance of authoritarianism” (Bank 2009). In 2017, according to Freedom House, 61% of the global population lived in countries that are either only “partly free” or “not free” at all, marking the “12th consecutive year of decline in global freedom” (Freedom House 2018). As Journal of Democracy editor Marc Plattner (2017) recently stated, “Today liberal democracy is clearly on the defensive. Authoritarian regimes of various stripes are showing a new boldness, and they appear to be growing stronger as the confidence and vigor of the democracies wane” (ibid. 2017: 6). Current prominent examples include the consolidation of Vladimir Putin’s rule in Russia, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s autocratic course in Turkey, the increased repression of human rights activists in China, the electoral victory of a right-wing government in Poland, and the erosion of democratic values under Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Even more, the authoritarian trend does not stop short of assumed guarantors of democracy but is apparent in the “rise of populist parties and candidates in the long-established democracies of the West” (ibid. 2017: 6). This includes, among others, the new government coalition in Austria including the far-right Freedom Party, the relative strength of Marine Le Pen’s Front National in the past presidential election in France, and the success of the populist political outsider Donald Trump in the US elections.

[8] These worldwide developments have also inspired a paradigm shift in the field of democratization studies (see Carothers 2002). Since the start of the Third Wave democratizations (Huntington 1991) with Portugal’s peaceful Carnation Revolution in 1974, scholars occupied with the study of regime change have heavily focused on democratic transition (see O’Donnell et al. 1986) and, later, consolidation (Croissant and Merkel 2004: 2). Today, however, non-democratic regimes have made their way back to the center of research and academic debate (Diamond 2008; Levitsky and Way 2010; Márquez 2017).

Analyzing the ongoing global democratic recession, Diamond (2015) lists four trends that make up the renaissance of authoritarianism in the new century: The breakdown of formerly democratic regimes (e.g., Turkey, Venezuela, Philippines), the net recession of freedom in emerging-market countries (e.g., South Korea, South Africa, Mexico), the deepening of authoritarianism (e.g., China, Russia), and, last, the “decline of democratic efficacy, energy, and selfconfidence in the West” (Diamond 2015: 251). At the heart of these transformations seems to be a general disaffection with liberal democracy (Plattner 2017: 8) that is also noticeable in populist discourses, electoral outcomes, and public opinion polls worldwide.

The rather unexpected proliferation of non-democratic regimes in the twenty-first century furthermore inspires a shift of attention of scholars away from the focus on institutions and elites and toward the exploration of a broader set of actors, deeper societal structures, and discourses. Especially the increasing number of “hybrid” regimes, which combine formal democratic structures with deficits regarding political and civic liberties or the rule of law (Croissant 2002), is the starting point for this book, which emerged out of our research project on “Gender Relations in Authoritarian and Hybrid Regimes,” which ran from 2013–15 at the Center for European Gender Studies at Münster University (ZEUGS). The book highlights the necessity to look beyond or refine traditional approaches and offers innovative potential to bond gender, authoritarianism, and civil society in an auspicious way leading to insights into the whys and wherefores of the persistence of autocratic structures and gender inequalities worldwide. By focusing on the domains of non-institutional legitimation and power strategies, civil society comes in as a potential but so far [9] understudied actor in the analysis of the transformation but also the persistence of non-democratic regimes.