Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on November 12, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a lecture by Yoram Gorlizki. Moderated by Timothy Frye.
After the end of the Cold War, it was widely assumed that democracy and the rule of law always moved in unison, with the one automatically reinforcing the other. This built on a legacy from the Cold War which linked Western states with the rule of law and authoritarian states, most notably Marxist-Leninist ones, with its absence. This project will provide the first in-depth analysis of a major policy in a key period of Soviet history to ask whether it might be possible to have a particular form of the rule of law in an authoritarian state. In doing so it builds on and extends a growing body of work on the “authoritarian rule of law” and poses questions— such as “How does a rule of law emerge?” and “What is the role of constitutions in dictatorship?”—which can shed new light on how authoritarian regimes function.
