DISSERTATION PROJECT

Legitimation and the Resilience of Authoritarian Rule: A Comparative Study of Russia and North Korea

This dissertation examines how authoritarian regimes construct narratives to legitimate political authority and stabilise their rule. Building on the literature on authoritarian resilience and stability and on Gerschewski’s three-pillars model, the study conceptualises legitimation as a discursive process structured by temporal ordering. It argues that legitimation narratives are not merely a background dimension of political resilience but a central resource of authoritarian power.

Theoretically, the project advances the claim that authoritarian regimes stabilise their rule by embedding political authority in teleological narratives that fuse past, present, and future into a single, morally charged trajectory of historical necessity. Through such narratives, the future is no longer framed as an open horizon of political alternatives but as a predetermined continuation of a sanctioned past, thereby narrowing the space of imaginable change. Methodologically, the study employs critical discourse analysis of state-controlled media and official political communication, including leader speeches, news broadcasts, and governmental statements from 2011 to 2024. A comparative design is used to analyse North Korea and Russia. These two regimes differ markedly in ideology, institutional structure, and international positioning, yet display striking similarities in their strategies of legitimation. The analysis focuses on how narratives are mobilised to construct a circular logic in which past sacrifices legitimise present hardship, while promised futures retrospectively justify both past and present.

The central finding is that both regimes organise political time as a narrative loop. The past is invoked to naturalise the present, and the future is portrayed as the inevitable fulfilment of an already determined historical mission. Through this temporal closure, authoritarian discourse effectively “colonises” the future, depriving it of contingency and political openness. By framing political development as preordained, alternative trajectories are rendered inconceivable. By foregrounding narratives of legitimation, this dissertation contributes to research on authoritarian resilience, discursive legitimation, and the politics of time. It demonstrates that beyond repression and co-optation, the organisation of historical meaning and future expectation constitutes a crucial, yet underexplored, mechanism through which contemporary autocracies secure compliance and manage crises.