ABSTRACT
Studies of illiberalism have made an important contribution to critical thinking and action against regressive political forces in Eastern Europe, Eurasia, and in the political mainstream of Western societies. In order to probe and possibly further develop the illiberal framing debated in this volume, this chapter offers an alternative, post-liberal approach to studying political and social ordering. Post-liberalism conceives of political, economic, and societal processes in non-Western peripheries as necessarily evolving on a trajectory beyond the routinely assumed transition from autocratic to liberal-democratic order. Thus, advocates of post-liberalism would argue that countries emerging from state socialist or dictatorial rule are not, or not only, less liberal, free, and compliant to standards of Western liberal democracy, but that the liberal-democratic features of their political orders also play out and are perceived in qualitatively different ways. Drawing on political philosophy and theory literatures as well as empirical perspectives from Central Asia, the chapter sketches out the epistemological, methodological, and practical differences between the post-liberal and illiberal approach. It thus shows how the former provides a valuable complement, if not corrective, to the established illiberal framing in the study of transition processes in non-Western countries and political and social theory generally.
