Karlstad 24-26 August
2026 Symposium: State of Neoliberal Authoritarianism
Unravelings, entanglements and emergent regimes of rule
The 2026 Karlstad Symposium is open for invited scholars and will take place August 24-26. More details on the format and content will be posted later this spring.
abstract
This symposium places the state at the center of analyses of contemporary neoliberal authoritarianism. It departs from the premise that the present conjuncture calls for a renewed engagement with some of the most fundamental questions concerning neoliberalism as mode of rule, as state project, and as political rationality. While earlier critical interventions sought to diagnose neoliberalism as a hegemonic formation of liberal democracy, the transformations of recent years – marked by liberal democratic erosion, crisis governance, and authoritarian resurgence – demand an analytical and theoretical return to questions of how dimensions of neoliberalism is reworked through the state.
Across diverse contexts, neoliberalism has not entailed a retreat of the state but its active reconfiguration as a site for disciplining labor, constitutionalizing austerity, insulating economic policy from democratic contestation, and managing recurrent crises. Authoritarian and far-right politics should therefore be understood not as soley external threats to neoliberalism, but as state-mediated responses to its crisis tendencies (Ian Bruff 2014; Bob Jessop 2016).
The symposium approaches the neoliberal–authoritarian nexus through three analytically distinct but interconnected intensities of interaction, each foregrounding transformations of state power.
First, unravelings refer to erosions of state capacity to organize consent and stability through democratic institutions. As neoliberal rationalities hollow out political equality, popular sovereignty, and democratic mediation, the state increasingly governs through exception, moralization, and coercion – creating momentum and openings for authoritarian and far-right projects to claim state power in the name of order, nation, or security (Wendy Brown 2015; 2019; William Davies 2014).
Second, entanglements capture how neoliberal state projects are actively recombined with authoritarian populism, nationalism, racialized governing, and social conservatism. Here, the state operates as a key site of hybridization, where market-oriented economic governing is stabilized through punitive welfare regimes, moral regulation, securitization, and exclusionary constructions of citizenship (Ian Bruff 2014; Cooper 2017).
Third, emergent regimes of rule examine how these dynamics sediment into relatively durable state forms. These include authoritarian neoliberal statism, permanent austerity states, and constitutionalized regimes of discipline that normalize exceptional powers while narrowing democratic accountability. In this perspective, authoritarianism appears not as a temporary deviation but as an increasingly normalized mode of statecraft under neoliberal conditions (Bob Jessop2016; Ian Bruff 2014).
By foregrounding the state as both object and instrument of neoliberal authoritarian transformation, the symposium aims to advance critical analyses of contemporary regimes of rule and their implications for democracy, resistance, and alternative forms of political organization. Beyond individual case studies, it seeks to foster collective reflection on how these transformations invite a rethinking of neoliberalism itself, while also providing a forum for articulating shared research questions, exploring collaborative trajectories, and identifying opportunities for joint publications and future research initiatives.