Introduction

Authoritarian regionalism – that is, regional organizations created by autocracies – are a particularly understudied species in the universe of international organizations (IOs). Recent literature shows that authoritarian regimes eagerly engage in creating regional integration arrangements (Kaczmarski 2017; Obydenkova and Libman 2019; Cottiero and Haggard 2021; Söderbaum et al 2021). At the same time, the research on this topic is still in its infancy. From the role theory perspective, the question, which so far has hardly been explored, is whether roles taken by authoritarian IOs are different from those of democratic IOs. Individual case studies show that democratization can influence foreign policy roles countries take, and this, in turn, affects these countries’ policies towards IOs (Rüland 2017); no systematic research on this topic exists as of now. Even less is known about roles of authoritarian IOs.

An important feature of modern regionalism is that regional IOs in different parts of the world are in their official goals and governance practices much more homogeneous than one would have expected given the differences in their membership and in the regional environment. The literature theorizes this empirical feature through the concept of a common ‘script’, which has a strong impact on regionalism worldwide (Jupille et al 2013; Lenz 2013; Lenz and Burilkov 2017). A script can be defined as a set of normative expectations towards the organization and the functions of the society in general or of particular institutions. From the point of view of the role theory, it can be defined as a set of institutionalized role expectations. Conformity to this script increases legitimacy of a regional IO (DiMaggio and Powell 1983). With a number of caveats, one could refer to this script as a ‘liberal script of regionalism’ (Zürn and Gerschewski 2021); it is modelled based on the example of the European Union (EU) and views regionalism as a tool enhancing economic and political freedom and increasing the quality of regional public goods provision (Söderbaum et al 2021: 7).

Authoritarian regional IOs seem to follow the global script as well. While there have been cases of authoritarian regionalism, which explicitly declared an agenda opposing the liberal norms or offering an alternative to the democratic regionalism, many modern authoritarian regional IOs seem to be suspiciously similar to the democratic ones in terms of their institutional design and official mandates.